Starting small

I have a lot of ideas on the direction I want to go with regards to the whole open source movement, but first I need to start small. I want to move myself off of a MS platform and on to a Linux based platform. I hope to keep a similar set of functionality, which primarily include:

• Email, contacts, calendar, task list and memos (Outlook)
  
• Simple spreadsheets (Excel) and formatted text documents (Word)
• Synchronization with my Palm Treo 650 (Palm Desktop/HotSync)
  
• Outlook data: contacts, calendar, tasks and memos
• DocsToGo data: spreadsheets and formatted text
  
• Multimedia (e. g. MP3, DivX, CD ripping)
  
• Image management and posting (from my Canon EOS 10D and Powershot S3 IS to my gallery)
• Virtual Machine (VMWare)

Some other applications that I may need include presentation editing (PowerPoint), project management (Project), video editing, virtual machine and torrent client.

My initial choice for an OS was Ubuntu, which is based on the Debian Linux kernel and GNOME window manager. It's really easy to install, set up and maintain. However, I'm having some issues with getting it to work with my laptop and other accessories.

My primary computer at the moment is a Dell Inspiron 600m. It includes a built in Dell TrueMobile 1400 Dual Band WLAN Mini-PCI card. It seems that this card is based on a Broadcom chip set which has no direct Linux support. Some Linux drivers are in the works, but for the moment, it seems like the common method is to use ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers. So far I have not been able to get this to work on Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), but there is a nice script which I have used successfully with Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft).

Problem solved, right? Not really. Unfortunately, I can not synchronize my Treo 650 using Edgy. It worked with Dapper, but apparently some timing issues have cropped up on the Edgy release of gnome-pilot, the underlying Palm synchronization software. When I try to sync my Treo on Edgy it consistently resets the PDA!

There's a newer version of gnome-pilot which claims to fix the reset problem, and I have been able to download an build i t on Edgy. It even manages to identify my Treo correctly, however it seems I have lost a lot of sync conduits including contacts, calendar, memos, and todo (the main ones I care about). Ultimately I want to be able to sync with Evolution, which seems like a pretty good replacement for Outlook. I could go with Thunderbird, but I have become accustom to the nice integration between email, calendar, contacts, etc.

So now I can either keep working on fixing gnome-pilot/Evolution under Edgy (or fix the wireless card under Dapper), search for a different Linux installation that works with both the wireless card and Treo, or wait for the Feisty Fawn release of Ubuntu (which will not be final until April). At the moment, I have sadly returned to Windows...