Tag Archives: dropbox

My windows XP laptop at work started giving me all sort of headaches and so decided to shift  to Linux despite my IT telling me that they dont provide any support for linux based laptops (ofcourse I’m glad that they allowed me to install another OS) . I have been using linux since RHEL 6.0 and I was confident that I will be able to manage . So while I’m cruising through , there are 4 things that  hit me real hard and is making me run windows XP as virtual machine via virtualbox.

1. IMAP Calendar Plugin : There was no good solution to pull microsoft exchange calendar and do a 2-way synchronization.  Evolution was too slow and Thunderbird with lightning extension doesnt solve. After googling around, found davmail which acts as intermediate gateway between your IMAP mail client and microsoft exchange gateway and does 2 way sync etc. But its still not stable/usable in the production/corp environment.

If Canonical/Ubuntu   instead of   working to shift window indicators like min/max/close to left (in lucid lynx 10.04 ), if they spend few more hours and developed a robust calendar plugin, it would have served 90% of the corp users like me  .  I hope they will consider this in their next releases atleast . BTW, I tried Zimbra desktop and its painfully slow. I dont know if its slow because of the Ajax client or someother reason. It does more than what I need It pulls my calendar and also our corporate and IT calendars which I dont care and it really floods my calendar with unnecessary stuff. Other clients/extensions dont do this, so it must be zimbra specific.

2. File synchronization : I’m a big fan of  Microsoft Live Mesh (which runs on azure clouds I guess) and they dont have a linux client.  I have done lot of research/googled around looking for a file synchronization sw which is free , gives more storage space/unlimited folders and is truly cross platform, the closest I found is dropbox, but it doesnt serve my purpose (unlimited folders, same storage space as live mesh etc & is FREE).I  have  different folders which I share between my work/home laptops,my parents  & cousins etc and I want to do the same in linux , but it doesnt have one. Crossover/wine neither works with live mesh.

Ubuntu one seemed promising , but they dont have any intentions of developing a windows client ( probably for the same reason microsoft doesnt develop linux client) .

3. Photo editing software :  I have Nikon D90 and I shoot in RAW (NEF). I use ViewNX/CaptureNX2/ColorFx/NoiseNinja and couple of other SW for slideshow etc.  I have a whole workflow setup using these SW. Sadly, none of these have linux version. I wish Nikon recognizes there is decent size of linux users for them to develop linux versions. The closest program is dcraw/GIMP , but there are lotof reason why I cannot shift to them yet (probably will explain in another post). Again, tried Crossover/wine neither works.

4. Office apps :  I prepare powerpoints/Xls all the time and with lot of customers shifting to 2007/2010 version of Microsoft Office, I received and send files with pptx/xlsx extension. There are 2 alternatives I found for handling this in linux. One is openoffice 3.x from Oracle and another  is Softmaker 2010 . While  both can handle docx , only openoffice can handle pptx/xlsx extensions. I wish if Softmaker had this already and its worth every penny to buy their solution. Keep in mind, we never know when Oracle will stop releasing openoffice as free alternative and this makes SoftMaker as the only solution available in linux. I installed their linux2010 beta version and it worked out fine and never had any single issue with the docx or doc/ppt/xls  extensions. My beta expired, but when they make pptx/xlsx, I will revisit their soln, but for now, I have to live with slow,not so attractive looking openoffice (It works though!! so, cant really complain hard)

My friends say this is reason why I have to shift to mac, but sorry!! I dont have budget for buying those pricey macs and later I have to buy all the apps and no free/opensource versions.