I’ve migrated all my data (including my documents, my photos, my music files and my mails) from my Kubuntu Linux desktop PC to my new Apple MacBook.
Here is a brief recap:
I transferred the data files using Fugu which is a SSH and SCP client.
I copied my photos (all in JPEG format) to a directory and I imported this whole directory in iPhoto. I had to recreate the directory structure I used in digiKam (i.e. by date / by event etc.) manually. It was not too tough because I had renamed all my photos to YYYY-MM-DD-#####.jpg in Linux beforehand.
I had little difficulty transfering my MP3 collection to a directory which I then imported into iTunes… only to discover that some files had not been transferred by Fugu owing to the presence of “funny” characters in their filename (things like ( or french accented characters). For those files, I had to resort to putting them into a ZIP file manually and then transfering this ZIP to the Mac using Fugu. To unzip, I needed to use the -p parameter to unzip (man unzip for more info).
And finally for the emails in Mozilla Thunderbird, I proceeded as follows:
- Compact the emails in Thunderbird
- Transfer the Inbox (and Sent) to the Mac using Fugu
- Drop each onto Eudora Mailbox Cleaner which, as its name indicates, is a fantastic program to convert emails in the Mozilla Thunderbird format to Apple’s Mail format…
Migration done!
Ah, Mac OS euphoria quand tu nous tiens! I give you like 2 years or less before you get sick of it and format the Apple OS and try other ‘free’ alternatives.
Else, I might be wrong. :)
True. I’ve noticed that I switch to a new OS every 5 years or so. I’ve been using up to now:
MS-DOS (1988) -> AmigaDOS (1991) -> Windows 98 (1997) -> Linux (2000) -> Mac OS X (2006)
So, according to my calculations, I’ll quit Mac OS X by 2010 ;-)
God knows for what!
For Gentoo or FreeBSD perhaps?
I’m an ex-Gentoo user. Life is too short :-) As for FreeBSD, I don’t really know as Mac OS X is, in fact, a BSD Unix…
In 5 years, the OS will be irrelevant in my opinion provided you have a decent web browser. All major applications will be web-enabled. RoR will rule :-)
Although I agree that a lot of apps will be web-centric, i still think infrastructure-type software will be ubiquitous. Because of business decisions, politics and power, software vendors will still focus on specific platforms for deployment… after all, portable code is not on everybody’s agenda given commercial constraints.
You are right though… I think many more apps will be web-centric, with industry killer Microsoft jumping in the arena with the Windows Live platform. Microsoft’s strategy: buy or assimilate, then kill.
The question is though, if you’re running a business and have to deal with confidential information, would you like to have your data hosted somewhere else? You benefit from redundancy perhaps, but what about privacy?
How about hardware access? Computationally demanding app’s? =)
Software-as-a-service IS real, but maybe it will just create a new way of using software with only slight interference with the way we use the computer. With the millions of people getting in touch with technology, this is quite a good prospect!
Hi Olivier,
Mobile devices will be pervasive in 5 years. Most people will access the Internet using such devices. Hence, there will be a strong tendency for software vendors to create device-neutral applications (for instance by relying more on W3C standards)
Many major companies (IBM and HP for instance) are promoting Grid architectures where computing resources can be obtained on demand. This is the future. It’s too expensive for most (small) businesses to have their own IT department. Obvously, there must be some guarantees concerning confidentiality.
And, don’t forget Google! God knows what they are thinking to do in 5 years. Pity I don’t know Peter Norvig personally.
I agree. Embedded devices, wearable computing, this is big. =)
Hmm.. influenced by RoR hackers I believe.. working on TextMate err?
I’ll stick to RadRails.. don’t have a mac handy..
cheers
Kailash
I would love to have TextMate but I haven’t bought it yet. Perhaps in 1-2 months time. It seems to be really good. I have been using TextEdit (and, of course, vi) lately but TextEdit seems very primitive.
I bought TextMate some months ago… and I’m still discovering its features :-)