Hello again!

The last week has been interesting. A few things happening in the work world – for example, on Sunday I’ll be wearing a bunny suit. Won’t that be interesting. (!)

But I didn’t log in to blog about that – actually I felt like having a bit of a rant about some of the issues I’m having with linux.

As of the weekend I’ve gone completely Windows free (other than on my laptop, which will stay with XP for a bit longer, methinks.) I’ve dropped an install of Fedora Core 1 onto this machine, and everything is working quite nicely. I managed to import all of my 2500+ emails from the old Windows installation (used a second *nix box here as an IMAP server, transferred them all across, then downloaded them again onto the new install) as well as just about everything else. All my NTFS drives are mounted read-only so I haven’t lost any content and it’s all there for me to use.

However – gripe number one – how the HELL can I get TNEF to work! For those who don’t know I’m referring to the tendency of Microsoft email clients to send attachments within a wrapper of the mime type MS-TNEF – which is not something the email client (Ximian Evolution) I’m using seems to cope with.

Now there’s a couple of applications like ktnef and tnef that should handle opening these attachments but do you think I can get either of them to work/install properly? Nooooooooo!

It’s something you’d think would have been integrated into email clients by now – but I’m no software developer so I can’t comment knowledgeably on all the intricacies involved.

Gripe number 2 – do you think I can get my Canon USB scanner to work? (It’s a 1250U) – noooooo! The sane backend finds it and recognises it correctly, but XSANE has no idea it’s even there. I don’t really know where to start with it, and lots and lots of googling hasn’t enlightened me either.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll think of some other things to rant about later. Isn’t this fun?

I’ve been sitting at this computer for 8 hours, on and off, trying to resolve these issues (mainly the tnef problem) without success. Basically I can’t seem to get a ktnef package in .rpm format anywhere. It’s supposed to come with kdepim but I’ve apt-getted that and can’t seem to see it. I’ve downloaded the source but it won’t install because it doesn’t think I have Qt installed (I do) – and I’ve tried reinstalling Qt (from source, instead of .rpm) but that failed with an error as well.

Installed TNEF from sourceforge download page, not much happening there – doesn’t seem to work properly. Tried (and succeeded in) downloading fentun – but it won’t extract – linux doesn’t think it’s in gzip format. WTF?

It’s enough to turn you to drink, fair dinkum…