Ed Stoffel

I've purchased Xandros Premium and installed it. I was running Xandros Professional's trial version, but Premium required a complete reinstallation. I still have Windows XP-SP2 on another machine.

Before completing a switch to Linux OS, it is necessary to determine whether I can do all the things I wish to do apart from Windows. Using an internet browser is not much of a problem, except for sites that require specific browsers. I ran into that problem with SunTrust Bank's online bill pay system which won't allow Mozilla Firefox, telling me to use Internet Explorer or Netscape. My employer's intranet site also requires Internet Explorer.

In searching for email solutions on Linux, I've found that while Hotmail works OK in Windows' Outlook Express, it doesn't work properly with any Linux email clients I've tested. Yahoo Mail's paid service allows POP access as well as a handy archive feature which ZIPs entire folders as individual .eml files. For saving individual messages, I wish the web interface had a "save-as" button for saving individual messages locally, but it doesn't.

If I wish to handle email at my own domain, AQ Host offers Horde and SquirrelMail, both of which have "save-as" buttons to save any message locally as an .eml file. AQ Host also includes Spam Assassin for scanning incoming email messages, if desired.

The point of saving messages in .eml format is that it preserves the headers, format and attachments of email messages. While Yahoo Mail's free service offers a "save text of message" link on each message, saving in .eml format is better. I've been archiving in .eml format for over 10 years (except a brief test using Outlook, which oddly uses the incompatible .msg format).

So I plan to read .eml archives with any one of a number of email clients in Linux, and continue saving .eml files with Yahoo Plus or Horde on my own server. Now I need to figure out if I can run all my other essential apps.

My made-to-order bare boned box arrived from TigerDirect and I installed the trial version of Xandros Professional. Many applications I need already run on Linux, but there are a few that don't including Quickbook Professional, Microsoft Money, and iTunes. That's where Crossover comes in. This part of the Xandros operating system supports the installation of specific windows applications where you select them from a supported list to setup the correct environment for the application to run in. It's also possible to install unsupported windows applications, which I'm pleased to find allows me to resurrect some Windows applications that no longer run under Windows XP-SP2, such as older versions of Quickverse (I've collected numerous translations).

Email in Linux is still problematic, as I'm unable to find a way to replicate the way I currently use Hotmail... reading and sorting mail into folders at work, and later saving that email at home. POP won't recognize online folders, and I've been unable to get email clients in Linux to recognize email folders from IMAP services (such as AIM and Fastmail). I don't want to handle email twice (I want it to stay sorted), but I want the ability to archive a selection of it each day at home. The old Mailblocks service would have done this, but AOL shut them down. AOL has lousy spam filtering, too. I haven't given my AIM Mail address out, and my AIM Mail box is full of undetected spam.

Gmail has excellent spam filters but does not allow auto-deletion of spam. Gmail also does not allow the creation of folders, rather hoping you'll depend on their message search ability. AIM Mail offers IMAP, but I've been unable to get email clients to download mail from folders other than inbox. Don't other people archive important emails?

Switching from Windows XP to Linux presents a number of challenges regarding email... how to receive email, how to save email locally, and how to read email I've saved over many years.

I currently use Hotmail, which I can read online while at work, sorting read mail into various folders. When I get home, I can pick up where I left off with that mail in the same folders, and save some of the messages to my hard drive in .eml format (Outlook Express). In the past, I've eschewed the though of using other email clients including Outlook because they would not support the .eml format. (Outlook uses .msg). In Linux, I can use Mozilla Thunderbird to read those old .eml messages, going back to the mid-1990s.

However, continuing to use Hotmail presents a challenge. With the paid version, Hotmail is available inside Outlook Express, but the server type is not POP or IMAP, but HTTP... a type not supported by most email clients. Thunderbird claims to be able to handle Hotmail by using the Webmail and Hotmail extensions together, but I was unable to get these to work properly. They will pickup any mail in my hotmail inbox, but all my other sorted folders full of email do not appear in Thunderbird.

If I am unable to identify a Linux email client that works with Hotmail, I may be forced to change email services. I want to be able to work with email online, but then permanently archive all email messages locally in individual folders, and NOT inside of an email client.

With increasing concerns about Windows OS in general, and Vista specifically, I've decided to explore the possibility of survival in a non-Microsoft OS. In the article What's the best Linux for beginners?, the version that seems to be the best fit for me is Xandros Professional. Though many applications are written for Linux, some are not. For that, Crossover allows the running of Windows applications.

I downloaded the trial version of Xandros Professional and installed it on my D-drive. It installed a dual-boot wedge on the C-drive so on boot, it presents me with the option of running Windows XP from the C-drive or Xandros Linux from the D-drive. Xandros runs well and connects to the internet fine. But now, Windows XP doesn't "see" the network adapter -- I'm getting the error msg "Network Adapter Unplugged". (It's a Broadcom 440 in a Dell machine.) I've tried a number of things to resolve the problem: a true cold boot (powering down for 10 seconds, then turning back on), rebooting the network router and cable modem, and disabling and reenabling the network device in Windows, all to no avail. I left the machine off for 20 minutes and when I came back and rebooted, Windows XP once again "saw" the network adapter. I then rebooted to Linux, which worked, but when I rebooted to XP, once again, it didn't see the network adapter.

So even though Linux is installed on a completely different drive, and I cold boot from one OS to the other, it still interferes with the machine's network adapter. In further experiments with longer cold boots, I considered installing a second network adapter, dedicating one to XP and the other to Linux to avoid this problem. Then, I reinstalled Windows XP... but the network card still refused to work.

It finally occurred to me that if Linux could mess up the card, maybe it could fix it. Instead of running Linux from the D-drive, I inserted a CD copy of Mepis Linux and ran it from the CD. The network card worked fine (as it always has within Linux). But then, after rebooting the computer, the network card once again worked from within Windows XP!!!

There may also be a software solution, getting Linux to release the network card as it powers down. But for me, the solution will be to dedicate a separate machine to Linux, not allowing it to run at all on the Windows machine.