So, my iRiver seemed to be playing up. I deleted all the songs and copied them back on, and for some reason it was missing out whole directories. I reformatted, defragged, ran scandisk and so on . . . everything seemed to be fine.

The problem? Turned out it was Linux. When I copied my files from an NTFS partition to an EXT3 partition I didn’t realise the consequences of migrating to a case sensitive file system. In certain folders I’d somehow (not quite sure how) ended up with both a Folder.jpg and a folder.jpg file… for these folders when I tried to copy them from their home EXT3 partition to the FAT32 formatting of my iRiver Ubuntu – rather than throwing up an error message (grrrr!!) – just decided not to copy the folders. I used my newfound knowledge of regex to remove the offending files, and voila – everything works fine. And I only wasted about 8 hours trying to find out what the problem was

I’ve now created a 100gb FAT32 partition for music, video and photos to try and avoid such problems in the future.

Still, on the plus side I learnt a hell of a lot about ‘diff’, ‘fsck’, ‘mount’ and ‘umount’ – a few new Linux commands successfully under my belt.

So… I’ve been trying to move over to Linux. Every job that I’ve looked at in recent months seems to want some knowledge of Unix, so I figure the best way is just to jump straight in and try and make it my default OS.

I’m running Ubuntu, and for the most part it’s working great. I’ve (kind of) got to grips with GIMP and Open Office, Muine is nice for MP3’s. I can burn disks okay, I’ve got my dual monitors working (although the Open GL stuff seems a bit off at the moment). I’ve even managed to get the house network up and running in both directions for local file sharing. Even managed to get Torrents working fine.

But… I keep on running in to problems with annoyingly ’simple’ things. Trying to get NEF’s working in GIMP seems to involve installing and compiling 101 different scripts. Firefox works, but the keyboard shortcuts in the Web Developer toolbar don’t… I’m sure I’ll get past these things EVENTUALLY, but anyone who ever says that making the change is ‘easy’ is lying.