Backpacking-Geek
After taking last year off to take the big family RV trip, we're back to the annual men's backpacking trip! This year we'll be spending 6 days in the Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico.
Here is a map of the area that we plan to hike in:
Day 1 – Leave Michigan 9:00am
Day 2 – Arrive at the wilderness 24 hours later and start hiking.
1st night will be along Rio Santa Barbara.
Day 3 – Hike up above tree-line, past No Fish Lake and over to the South side of the ridge
2nd Night near Truchas Lakes
Day 4 – Leave camp set up, and go day hiking up to Truchas Peak, or just hang out in the quiet solitude near camp.
3rd night in the same location
Day 5 – Hike East along the ridge line
4th night near intersection of trails 26 & 36
Day 6 – Continue hiking along the ridge, heading North today
5th night near Jicarita Peak
Day 7 – Hike out by evening and start driving home
Day 8 – Arrive back home the following night

Please “...keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give [us] the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that [we] may know him better.” (Eph 1:17)

Storage-Geek
Back in the old days (early 2006), we stored all of our important documents in a shared folder on one of our Windows desktop computers. This was handy because all 4 computers in our house could get to the same files, but had it's share of problems.
One problem was that the sharing computer had to be running all the time - an obvious waste of electricity.
Another problem was even more important - a single point of failure. That computer decided to have hard drive problems one day and we thought all of our family photos were lost forever! That's a terrible, sinking feeling. The backup of that computer was several months old (quit shaking your head, you're backups are old too), and we were really worried. Fortunately, with a little tinkering (including putting the drive in the freezer), I was able to recover almost all of the data from the failed drive.
So learning from that experience, we decided to buy a RAID NAS to store our files a little more safely. We decided on the D-Link DNS-323 (from NewEgg of course), and a couple of Seagate drives for it (because they have a better warranty). The only minor issue with the DNS-323 is that you will need to install the latest firmware, but if you're buying a BYOD NAS, then you probably won't have a problem with that. It was real easy to set up in a mirrored RAID array for redundancy, and now I feel like my data is at least safe from a single-drive failure. I bought a third hard drive at the same time, and still use that to back up the NAS periodically to guard against a catastrophic accident of some kind.

The NAS has been working great with Windows clients, and I assumed that it would also work great with linux, but I did run into a slight problem. I was able to browse to the NAS over the network, and get to the files, but some applications didn't show the network in their "open" dialogs. So I had to figure out how to "mount" the NAS differently.
To get it to work in linux for every "open" dialog, I had to mount it using the /etc/fstab file by adding the following line using a text editor:
//192.168.1.48/Volume_1 /media/nas smbfs username=myuid,password=mypwd 0 0

Now all is working very well, and I feel pretty safe with my files. :-)

iPod-Geek
This episode in my Ubuntu adventure has to do with my iPod music player. I love my iPod, and would be pretty upset if it wasn't going to work with Linux. Fortunately, I am not too attached to the iTunes application or the iTunes Music Store. I've purchased a few songs from the ITMS, but not very many. Most of my songs are in the MP3 format, ripped from CDs that I've purchased.
So anyway, with that as background, I found that gtkpod works just fine for my needs. It read the library from my iPod without any trouble, and I was able to easily put new music on my iPod. I had been a little worried that the music wouldn't show up properly on the iPod, but it was exactly the way I expected it to be.
It's not as seamless as iTunes, and if I had a lot of DRM'd music, I think that would have been an issue, but for me it is exactly what I need. I am really looking forward to Amazon.com opening their music store that will sell platform-independent music, so I can buy the music once and know that it will play on any device.

Printing-Geek
One of the problems that I've run into already with Ubuntu is printing. I think if I had a locally attached printer, it would be simple plug-and-play (or close to it). But I've got to complicate things by having a networked printer.
I'm using a Brother MFC-420CN printer. Not only that, but it's a multi-function device and I'd like to be able to scan too. Picky, huh?
Anyway, after a lot of head scratching and trying to follow the instructions at the Brother web site, I found this help page.
There are some bits that only apply to the older versions of Ubuntu, but it's pretty easy to figure out which ones, and follow the instructions that apply to Feisty Fawn.
Once I followed these instructions, I was able to print and scan without a problem!

Transition from Windows to Ubuntu
Since I have almost no experience with Linux, I chose to install Ubuntu on a separate hard drive, and dual-boot with Windows until I get everything figured out. I'm not sure if this is the best idea, since I'll still have a crutch to fall back on. If I were "upgrading" to Vista, there would be no turning back, so I'm not sure why I'm being so cautious here, but it seems like the safe thing to do.
The installation went surprisingly smooth! Compared to installing Windows, it was a breeze! This is certainly encouraging. All the normal stuff was installed by default, the updates ran automatically, and didn't even have to reboot 42 times. Having OpenOffice and Evolution is comparable to MSOffice and Outlook, and I didn't even have to install anything extra.
There are a bunch of optional packages that are easily installed from the "Add/Remove..." application, and they're all free.
So far, I'm not seeing any fatal flaws or show stoppers in my plan to switch completely to Linux. I'll get it all figured out on my PC, and then I'll go ahead and roll it out to the rest of the family. The goal is to be completely switched over by the fall.
One significant thing to note here is that I'm not switching because it's free, I'm switching because it's better. We're relatively happy with WindowsXP, but we're going to have to switch to another operating system in the future, and it looks like Ubuntu is the best choice.

Linux-Geek
I've been a long-time Microsoft customer from the days of MS-DOS 3.3, and have seen each iteration of their operating systems as an improvement (WindowME excepted). Until now.
Windows Vista does not seem to be an improvement. There is much on the web about the many issues with Vista, so I won't go into detail other than to say that my experience and the experience of people I have spoken with tells me that I don't want to use it.
So if I'm going to have to switch operating systems eventually, perhaps Vista is not the only option. I could replace my 4 computers with Apples, but that would be really expensive! So I've decided to make the switch to Ubuntu Linux instead of switching to Vista (or Apple).
I know that there will be some bumps along the way, so I'll try recording my experiences in the hope that I can help some others who want to do something similar.
Wish me luck!