Migrating off Windows

I've been using Ubuntu Linux for several years as the operating system on my laptops (which I also use for testing my web programming work). But until recently, I was still using a desktop computer running Windows XP as my primary home office computer. With Windows XP nearing (or at) its end of life, I've been planning for quite a while to migrate away from Windows rather than purchasing an upgrade. In order to do this, I first needed to make sure I could do all the tasks I normally do on my Windows computer on Linux, and make sure I could migrate the data for these tasks from the Windows applications to the replacement Linux applications. It turned out to be feasible (I've now migrated), and I thought I'd write up a list of the replacements and data migration notes.

Web development tools: Eclipse, Emacs, CVS, SVN, Git, Firebug, Filezilla

These tools are pretty much the same on Linux, and I've been using Linux for web development and testing for quite a while anyway, so this wasn't an issue.

Web browsing: Firefox

The versions of addons and availability of addons is not necessarily the same on Windows and Linux, so I didn't try to migrate my entire Firefox profile from Windows to Linux. I did migrate the bookmarks, however, using the Export/Import functionality (which you can see when you go into Manage Bookmarks). I also use somewhat non-standard settings in Firefox (such as not having a memory or disk cache for ease of seeing changes when web programming), so to transfer the settings, I went into the advanced configuration page (URL about:config) in both machines, sorted on Status, and made sure the settings with status "user set" were present on the new machine. This only took a few minutes.

Email: Thunderbird

Thunderbird is available on Linux, but I definitely wanted to transfer my email archives and email settings to my Linux machine. These are stored in the Thunderbird profile, and here is an outline of how to transfer it:

1. Find the Windows profile directory, and copy it into the .thunderbird directory in my Linux home directory.
2. Run "thunderbird -profilemanager" on the Linux box. Choose "create new profile", then browse to find the profile I just copied into .thunderbird.

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder and http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_from_Windows_to_Linux for more information.

Chat: Pidgin

Pidgin is available on Linux, and since it only took a few minutes to set up my accounts, I didn't bother to try to migrate the settings.

Document editing: Microsoft Office

Open Office is a fine replacement for Microsoft Word, Excel, and Power Point.

Calendar, To Dos, and Contacts: Palm Pilot

Believe it or not, I'm still using an old Palm Zire to carry around my calendar and contact list (I'm used to it, it still works fine, it has a really great list making application called HandyShopper and some games I like to play on the bus, and I prefer using a stylus to typing with my thumbs or fingers). I also think that the Palm Desktop software for Windows is excellent calendar software. The Linux replacement I chose was JPilot, which works fine, though the calendar user interface is not quite as nice as the one in the Palm desktop (for instance, it doesn't color-code my appointments by category, and the week view is harder to scan). I also tried Evolution a while back, which is another alternative, but I wasn't happy with it (I can't quite recall why right now).

Printer/Scanner (HP PSC 750)

Since I have a network storage device that supposedly supports printer sharing (iOmega StorCenter ix2), I tried connecting my printer to its USB port. The StorCenter immediately recognized it as a printer, with no additional setup required (and no setup options offered). With Ubuntu's Printer Setup utility, I was able to see it as a network printer, but when I tried to actually print to it, I got errors saying "Destination printer does not exist". I didn't try to troubleshoot this for very long, though; instead I just connected the printer directly to my Linux computer's USB port, where it worked fine with no setup needed. Although I have several computers, I don't print things all that often, so I'm not too worried about possibly having to move the USB cable to a different computer every once in a while. Besides, it's also a scanner, and I think that it would need to be directly connected to do any scanning.

Money management: Microsoft Money

I was using an ancient but functional version of Microsoft Money on Windows to manage various bank accounts. I tested various replacements in Linux, and the best one I found was KMyMoney. Transferring the data from Microsoft Money turned out to be fairly easy: in Microsoft Money, export each account to a QIF file, and then in KMyMoney, import each exported file. And voila! All the transactions, categories, etc. are there (though the terminology and layout is a little different from what I was used to). One caveat: you'll want to export even your old closed accounts to KMyMoney so everything balances out (and in the version of Microsoft Money I was using, I had to change them to open accounts in order to export them, for some reason). KMyMoney should also be a fine replacement for Quicken or newer versions of Microsoft Money, and I don't think the export format has changed. The one caveat is that I will need to recreate my custom reports in KMyMoney -- at least, I don't know of a way to export them.

Microsoft Access databases

I did have several Microsoft Access databases on my Windows computer that I was still using.... How to migrate them to Linux is still an open question for me. The data can pretty easily be exported to Excel or a text file, and I should be able to import it into MySQL or the Open Office database program (which I've never tried). However, I don't believe that there's an easy way to migrate the forms, reports, and Visual Basic programming to any Linux software, so it would be some work to re-create the functionality of these databases. I'll probably be blogging on this soon... stay tuned!