Recently in Family Category

I’m almost a text-based e-mail purist. I used to use Mutt as my primary e-mail client application, but decided to go with a graphical client such as Mozilla Thunderbird or KMail so that I could at least effectively read HTML-formatted messages.

I’ve been happy with KMail. I’ve had it configured to prefer text-based e-mail and aside from the fact I don’t use my preferred text editor (vim) inside it, it’s been a good e-mail client. Now, my dad is a more typical e-mail user. While he probably doesn’t care that much about composing original HTML messages, he does receive a lot of them that he wants to forward onto other people that he feels may be interested. He’s on lots of political and family mailing lists that swap HTML messages complete with embedded images, etc.

He has been using Thunderbird at his home and KMail (an old version running on a Fedora Core 6 desktop) at his office. He mentioned to me that KMail runs noticeably faster on his work system than Thunderbird does on his home system. I suggested that we could standardize him on KMail and upgrade his office desktop to a more recent version of Fedora Linux.

Things got more interesting when Thunderbird recently got updated on his home system in a package update to version 3.0b4. The Smart Folders “feature” threw both of us for a loop. It combines multiple Inbox, Sent, and other IMAP folders into single virtual folders containing an aggregate of messages from each corresponding folder. I really have no idea who would want this feature. My parents each have their own e-mail accounts and I had Thunderbird configured so they could check mail for both accounts. The new version of Thunderbird combines both inboxes into one virtual “Smart” folder and subsequently confused the heck out of my father.

I figured out how to disable the “smart folder” behavior (View->Folders->All), but Thunderbird was still hiding other IMAP folders like Sent and Trash that my parents often need to access messages in.

So, KMail. KMail works great for almost all things, but my father noticed right away when he tried to forward an HTML message with embedded images that KMail wasn’t letting do what he was used to doing: Editing the forwarded message to remove the annoying gazillions of e-mail addresses the original message(s) were addressed to.

KMail has two methods of forwarding a message: First, you can forward a message as an attachment. This preserves everything about the original message, but KMail doesn’t let you edit anything within the attached message. Alternatively, you may forward a message “inline”. This lets you edit the message, but it only gives you the text portion of the message to edit and completely omits the HTML attachment altogether.

I did some research online to see if there was a way to get the desired functionality out of KMail, but it doesn’t look like it’s possible. If it does ever happen, it’s a couple versions out at least. It may never happen because it seems there are voices within the KMail community that feel KMail should never take on these types of features because it risks KMail becoming “another Outlook/Thundebird clone.”

Has anyone found other solutions to this problem for a Linux user?

A couple weeks ago, my Dad’s home computer had a familiar problem. Every once in a while, his computer — which runs Windows 2000 — would not boot. It would go a few seconds through the boot process and then stop with a blue screen and a message about the boot device not working.

This annoying problem has always been solved by booting off the Windows 2000 install CD, going to the Repair console, typing chkdsk /p, and rebooting. Works every time... or did.

This time, after going through that process, his computer went into a reboot loop, getting to a point in the boot process and then starting over with the computer POST.

I had told my dad before the next time I had to reinstall the operating system on his computer, it would not be Windows I’d be putting on it, unless he wanted to shell out the $100 or so for Windows XP.

Knowing how frugal my dad is, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

So, it was time to migrate my Dad’s home computer to Linux. Fedora 7, to be exact. I already moved his office computer to Linux a couple years ago and he’s been fairly successful at getting work done on it. Part of the reason for that is that he really only does a few things on his computers:

• Composes documents (OpenOffice)
• Reads e-mail (Mozilla Thunderbird)
• Browses web pages (Mozilla Firefox)
• Plays Freecell... a lot (kpat)

On his home computer, he also does a few more things:

• Scans of photos and documents
• Downloads digital photos from his camera
• Prints digital photos
• Genealogy

Another problem I had to deal with is, running Windows, he’s been using WordPerfect Office as his office suite and has a large collection of files created in WordPerfect and QuatroPro.

In the past, OpenOffice did not handle WordPerfect files at all, but KOffice’s word process (kword) did a decent job of reading .WPD files. Since then, OpenOffice 2.2.x now has the ability to import WordPerfect documents, but not perfectly. For example, embedded graphics seem to be ignored completely. Since my dad doesn’t use very many embedded graphics, this is only a minor issue.

For scanning, I set him up with kooka which aims to be a fairly easy to use and is pretty intuitive. The OCR support is there, but I haven’t played with it very much yet.

For dealing with digital photos, digikam is very nice. When we tried to print digital photos to his HP photo printer, we could not get them to come out right. One frustration was that digikam uses the KIPI printwizard plugin which only offers a couple page sizes to choose from, none of which matched what we were looking for (4x6 photo paper).

I borrowed some 4x6 paper and told my dad I’d experiment and find a program he could use to print photos.

After experimenting with a bunch of programs (ksquirrel, gwenview, showimg, to name a few), I ended up going back to digikam. I discovered along the way that one of the page sizes digikam offered (10cm x 15cm) was actually what we wanted. That’s roughly 4-inches x 6-inches! Works great.

PAF 5, the program my dad used under Windows to do geneaology, is said to work fine under Wine. It installed fine, but I haven’t played with it to see how well it actually works. If the installation experience is any indication, it may work splendidly.