Organizing Ebooks

If you're like me, your hard drive contains all sorts of ebooks spread all over the place, with varying degrees of organization. It can be a real challenge to locate a particular text when I want it, simply because the ebooks are sitting in a deep hierarchy of directories. Luckily there is a nice solution to help get this mess organized and make it easy to find a particular ebook when I want it - a program that handles all sorts of digital texts - designed for Linux.

Calibre can not only import your ebooks in a wide variety of formats to a central directory, it allows you to modify information about the text and add tags to make it easy  to categorize your collection.

In this view, you can see a portion of my partially loaded collection, with some tags added. By default the program will bring up the listing of everything in the collection. On the left side of the program are some of the criteria selections that can be used to find texts within the collection. Since the system supports using multiple tags for each book, the system can act like a huge index of your collection, making it easy to find a book no matter how you have it tagged. When you add a book to the collection, the program actually makes a copy of it in the main directory and creates a separate directory structure based on author.

The tagging feature is what this system so useful to me, as I have a large number of texts that could easily be categorized in numerous ways. Most of the books I can catalogued so far are actually PDF format, but the system can also handle many other formats as well, such as Word files or OpenOffice files.

This screenshot shows a tagged selection of the collection, pulling up only those books with one particular tag. By selecting any work shown, I can easily open the book using the View button at the top, or modify the listing further with the Edit Meta Information button.

Though the program also has the capability of converting ebooks to other formats, I'm mostly interested in using it to get my unwieldy collection under control, and for that, it does a great job!

Desire-Driven Computing Choices

Sometimes, we make choices based on needs, such as the use of a particular program needed for our work, but sometimes we can pick a system or a particular piece of software based on our wants instead. The vast majority of home PC users probably falls into this category. My daughter, for example, had migrated over to Linux last year after becoming increasingly with Windows, but a year earlier she had no interest at all in looking at her options. When she saw the Red Notebook application running on my system, she realized that it would be a very helpful program for her. Unfortunately, it's not available in the repositories for her current distribution, so this weekend, we'll change it over to Linux Mint, so she can run the the program too.

Choosing a new system based solely on a package that she wants to use, rather than because of a need, has been a rather eye-opening experience as she has begun to look at some of the other capabilities of the open source arena. It doesn't hurt a bit either that she will have access to a wealth of programs that won't cost her a dime - always a plus these days. Just for the times that she actually needs to use Windows, her machine will be set up to be dual boot, but I'm willing to bet that the Windows side won't be getting much action in her case. Especially since she saw Frostwire on my system and it looks like it might be possible to get her Sansa Clip to work as well....

What about...

Invariably, when talking about changing to a different operating system, the questions arise about various types of software that might be used, so first, let me say that there are still a few times when I have need of a Windows-cased machine. Those times, however, are few and far between these days - tax time each year and about once a month to do my business billing. Occasionally, I'll fire it up to check how a website looks in IE, but even that is a pretty rare occurrence as more folks seem to have migrated to Firefox from IE. I don't totally hate the Windows environment, but I really do like saving money, so I prefer finding alternatives.

If we all had as much money as we need these days, some of the benefits I talk wouldn't really matter, as we could all go out and buy all the toys we want, but, for many of us, right now, money is tight. There are, no doubt, some folks who have particular computing needs that can only be met through the Windows environment, but for many of us, there are lots of alternatives that could work out just as well, if not better.

One of the things to decide first is how you will be using the machine - what the application types that you absolutely need to have on it? Your answer to that question will help you decide if you really need Windows or if a Linux alternative would work instead.

Migration Questions

One of the more common questions that comes up when considering Linux for the desktop is the question of finding alternatives to the common Windows applications. How this question should be answered depends largely on how you use your PC now.

If your primary use is to browse the net, use email and occasionally use documents and spreadsheets, then this is a no-brainer. Virtually any Linux distro will easily support your needs. The OpenOffice suite can handle almost any Micro$oft format file with no problem and it works both on Linux and Windows. Numerous email packages are available on Linux as are lots of options for browsing the web. For the average home user, a setup like this is all that is necessary. We'll talk about higher-end users shortly.

Tackling newer machines

Yesterday, I was talking about setting up Linux on a old laptop - today I'm using that laptop to write this, while updating the machine I was using yesterday. That probably says something about how much I like this new Linux distro. I also set up a newer laptop with Linux Mint yesterday, setting it up as a dual boot machine, since there was an existing older version of Mint on that machine that I wanted to keep.

Deciding how to make use of some of the various machines that I have here is always a bit entertaining. It becomes very easy to lose track of the various machines, since there are quite a few of them in the house - one of the side effects of working in the IT world for many years. Most of them are older Pentium class machines, none of which have much memory or a lot of disk space (at least in today's terms), so most of them are ideal candidates for being repurposed as Linux boxes (or boxen as some of us prefer).

Right now the machine that is being updated is grinding through the most challenging part of the installation - repartitioning the hard drive to make room for the new system. This one is a bit trickier than the others because, unlike the newer laptop I did yesterday, this machine has no free space in the partition table and so the install process has to actually resize the existing partition. So far, so good. The partitioning process has completed and now the the installer is copying files from the installation CD.

Ironically, sometimes the older machines are easier to deal with than the newer ones. That was certainly true in the case of the laptops yesterday. Two of them. this one and its virtual twin, were both 10 year old machines with  P3 processors and less than 500Mb of RAM. The newer laptop is an AMD64 dual core machine with a high-end NVidia graphics system and a bunch of other bells and whistles. In order for the installer to work properly, I had to set a few options for the install process, since the NVidia card needs special drivers that are not included in the install CD. Not a big deal, as they can be installed very easily after the installation is complete.

The desktop that is currently being updated is another AMD64 dual core beast with an NVidia graphics system, but the installer didn't need to be altered in this case (probably because it's an older graphics system and the installer recognized it without a problem). I did, however, have to disconnect the external US hard-drive that is usually attached to that machine before the partitioning portion of the install could run properly. At this point, the update is wrapping up, so I'll take a break here and finish that install. Back soon!

Old Machines and New Operating Systems

One of the major differences that separates Micro$oft from many of its competitors is ever increasing resource requirements needed to run its operating systems. While many of the newer Linux distros also require large amounts of system resources, there are also quite a few distros that have been created to be run on older machines with smaller hard drives and lower memory capacities. In many cases, this will allow older machines that would never be able to run any variant of Windows to be used happily as Linux machines, more than capable of handling modern computing tasks.

As I write this, I am running a Linux Mint install on a decidedly older laptop - an HP Omnibook 500 that is at least 10 years old, with a 40 GB hard drive and 256 MB of RAM. After a bit of a glitch because the system didn't find the driver for the wireless card, it's now happily downloading updates. Luckily, the install process copies a bunch of wireless drivers to the disk, so that it's pretty simple to find the right one and get connected properly.

There's something quite satisfying about taking an old machine that most would simply send to a landfill and giving it a new purpose though turning it into a Linux box. Since Linux and the vast majority of the software written for it is open source, there is no huge investment in software, for either a home user or a company, so Linux solutions can be a huge money saver as well. What's not to love about that?

Taking the Plunge

At some point, in the summer of 2007, I decided that I was ready to look at running a Linux distro again, especially since I just bought a new machine and was already learning to hate Vista. This was before I took over the guest room in our house to use as an office, so I had the new machine sitting on the coffee table in the living room while I started playing with it.

Because of its popularity, Ubuntu was the first distro I tried. Not exactly what I wanted, especially when it had real problems setting a decent resolution on my wide screen monitor. Since it's been a few years now, I don't recall which of the other distros I tried at the time, but I know it was three or four of them until I finally decided to try Sabayon. Not only did Sabayon find and configure all my hardware properly, it played nice music while it worked. Up and running!

I think I probably ran Sabayon for at least 6 months with no major issues, but eventually I decided to see what some of the other distros looked like, so it was playtime again!

The Frugal Geek

When I first started messing with computers, I had a very limited budget, so wherever possible I looked for the cheapest solution to whatever issue I was facing. The commercial packages tended to be pretty pricey, so I spent a lot of time investigating shareware and freeware options to save money. I couldn't even begin to count how many different software packages I've looked at over the years. Most of them were DOS-based and were designed to run on the low-end machines of the day. Some of them were pretty robust, some were not, but that was the premise behind shareware - you got to try it out on your machine first before investing any money in it.

In those days, I was pretty committed to running Windows as an OS, though my job at the time required my supporting Macs as well. It wasn't until about 10 years ago that I really started to look at alternate operating systems - not counting some early experiments with OS2 and NT. Since my first web project was running on a Linux box of some variant, I had learned some real basic commands, but hadn't given any real thought to the idea of Linux on the desktop until about 2001.

Linux as it existed for the desktop back then was a much more difficult beast to tame than it is now. There were an awful lots of areas that had to be configured by editing files rather than using a graphical interface, so it was a daunting proposition at best back then. Frankly, since most of my work involved Windows applications aback then, it wasn't really helpful to me, so after awhile, I didn't mess with it and went back to doing things in Windows.

About three years ago, I decided it was time to take another look at Linux. I had stopped working for the big corporate place which provided me with most of my Windows-based software for free, so it was time to consider the options again.

Attitude!

Years ago, when I bought my first PC, a CompuAdd XT10, I told myself that it was probably just going to be used for word processing and, in fact, had even looked into buying a dedicated word processor at the time. In the end, though, I figured a full-blown PC would be a better option since I might want to use it for more than word processing at some point.

The XT10 was a bit of a beast, looking back. An 8088 processor, with a turbo switch to allow to to run at 10mHz, rather than the standard 4.47 and DOS 4 for the OS. Yowsa! It had a 5.25 floppy drive and a whopping 20 MB hard drive. For 1989, it was a pretty nice intro package, though it wouldn't be long before I wanted more of a machine.

Soon, the XT10 was replaced by an SX16, capable (barely) of running Windows 3.0 and I began dabbling with a very early version of Word as well as Excel. I also starting learn my way around WordPerfect, DBase and Paradox on the DOS side and even watching the occasional DOS batch file. I should point out that I was quite the tomboy growing up, so I had no qualms about messing around in the male-dominated world of early geek-hood.

Over the next several years, I migrated upward several times, even building a couple of machines myself - at that point, it worked out cheaper to do so, though I doubt that it is anymore.

Sometime in the mid-90's, the web started looking a bit like it does today, though there were still lots of pages out there with the default black type on a gray background. It was about July of 1996 when I started working on my first web page, learning as I went. I had volunteered to maintain a site on a national genealogy project, so I had to learn some basics of page creation to get the site up and running. A rather steep learning curve at the time, to say the least!

Looking back on what the internet looked like back in the 90's brings back some real interesting memories, most of which seem real obsolete now. Things like external modems and 5.25" floppy drives have virtually disappeared from the technology market. We've come a long way since the world wide web blossomed back then and I'll be spending some time talking about the impact of those changes in later posts. Stay tuned!