Personal notes on my Transition form Windows to Linux - Part 2 : Prepation

So...
You wanna ditch windows and use Linux all the time? You have properly gone through all the steps in deciding that as desciribed (or may be differently) in the first part. What's next? 

The first step is preparation, both mental, physical. 

By Physical, I meant in your PC or Laptop obviously.

 

First Things First

First of all the transition form one OS to another is never smooth. So, I followed the dual boot path. But that was also a painful work. And it started even before the stage 1.

Let’s go with a background story.

I have a laptop with UEFI support. It has Windows. Usually after 5-6 months of continuous use, the it feels like Windows has become very sluggish and riddled with bugs, subject to regular crashes.

The solution, I have found is reformatting and re-installing the windows. But this time, I got a new laptop. While installing/setting up the new one, I did a few things. First, I managed a spare hard-drive (from the old laptop), and used it as a full backup.

Then removed my New laptop's hard-disk and attached a USB converter. Plugged it to another computer with EaseUs Partition Manager trial software. Converted my disk to GPT. I had to do some re-partitioning due to some requirements form Microsoft for GPT Disk. I deleted C drive, and created 3 partitions. First I deleted the partition with graphical tool, then used Diskpart tool from windows.
 

• 1st one: 512MB formatted as FAT32, marked it a EFI Partition (Diskpart command: create partition efi size=512; and then: format quick fs=fat32 label="efi")
• 2nd One: 128 MB formatted as FAT32, marked as MSR (Diskpar command: create partition msr size=128)
• 3rd One: Rest of the space as NTFS and marked as Windows (I created it from graphical tool again)

Then I reinserted my disk in my laptop and installed windows as usual in the 3rd partition.

This it where the background story finishes. Now on with the tasks ahead. 

 

Practice preparation

I started to replace the small software with the open-source alternatives form within windows. For instance, I removed WinRAR with “7-Zip”.

Photoshop with GIMP. Not everyone uses Photoshop, so I’m not going to detail that, at least not now. Sometimes for my work, I also need to make small edits in audio files. I started to use “Audacity” for that from the beginning when I was faced with this task. Once I needed to work on some vector images (In here everyone knows this as "AI" files, created by Illustrator), that’s when I came across “Inkscape” and have been using that since.

These are the specialized tasks, except for the 7-Zip one. But the real challenge comes when I try to replace the email software. In truth, I have not found a good alternative for Outlook yet. Some say, the Evolution in Gnome is a very good replacement, but I don’t like it. Two reasons, Firstly, the Gnome development is not well structured/organized. The various software don’t give a unified feel (I’m more of a KDE guy), and finally, its not available in Windows and porting form Outlook to Evolution is too much pain. So I choose Thunderbird for my E-mail needs. 

Emails 

The next problem is, how to transfer the existing emails from Outlook to Thunderbird, its almost 3 years of communication and is not available in server. The PST can not be imported directly in Thunderbird. I found that the EML format is a common standard for mails, which provides portability. After long and tedious hours spent on googleing, I came across with this website, www.outlookfreeware.com here I found a small tool which can export emails as “eml” file. I used that to create complete backup of my mail-boxes. For  each mail-box (inbox, sent, outbox, archieve, etc.), I made a directory with the same name and exported mail-box to corresponding directory. For example, mails form Inbox in outlook exported to inbox folder as “eml”. This way I did export all emails. Then I installed another tool form www.outlookfreeware.com which allowed me to export my contacts as “vCard”. vCard is also an open standard for contacts which provides very good portability, even my phone supports it.

After these exporting tasks are done, I installed Thunderbird, added my office email account. Then  I installed the “Provider for Google Calendar”,  “gContactSync”, “Import/Export Tools” and “Thunderbird Conversations” extensions after that. Then I started to import. By creating the required folders and sub-folder (mail-boxes) in the account. Then right click on mailbox and select "Import/Export Tools" → "Import All messages from a Directory" → "Just From the directory"

Contacts

After importing the mails, I imported the contacts. By Opening Address Book, Going to "Tools" → "Import..." 

Then I configured the “gContacSync” to sync the contacts with my Google account. 

Signature 

We have a standard signature for official emails, I copide that signeture from outlook to Word, saved as html. Converted the images in the signature as base64 encoded string. Edited the HTML and replaced the Image Files with that base64 string, for better compatibility. Copied the whole HTML Code and pasted it in Thunderbird signature section. This the signature import was also done. 

Tweaks

After that there ware some tweaks I had to make in Thunderbird to make it behave more like outlook, like configure the reply email style like outlook by going to “Account Settings → Composition & Addressing” and selecting Start my reply above the quote and putting my signature below the reply (above the quote).

After that I started using the Thunderbird for few days to get used to it.

You gotta do it to. Until you feel comfortable with the Free and Open-Source software. And then you can move on to the Next step, Using Linux for real...