TUTORIAL MIGRATE FROM WINDOWS OFFICE MIGRATION: TUTORIAL PRINTING AND EMAIL Is your home or work office still stuck on Windows? MARK DELAHAY Move it to Linux and save time and money. OHOs (small office/home offices) and SMEs Support There are many more support options in WHY DO THIS? (small/medium enterprises) are in a bit of a bind the open source world. Paid support is available • Free yourself from at the moment. Large numbers of organisations with the bigger distributions, and the support Microsoft’s licensing S costs still run Windows XP – so they need to consider their forums can resolve issues in a time frame so fast • Avoid the UI nightmare options now that Microsoft has ended support for that that would make commercial help desk staff quake that is Windows 8 OS. Doing nothing and continuing to use XP is an in their boots. • Get better performance option, but it gets riskier as time goes on. Upgrading to Ideology An increasing number of individuals and and security Windows 8 or converting to Apple is going to be organisations are embracing not just the expensive, but there is a third way: Linux and open commercial practicality of Linux, but also the source software. underlying spirit of community and co-operation. Now, chances are that you already run Linux on your home desktop and maybe a few servers, so Assess your needs you’re aware that it’s a very capable OS. But we also Once you or your organisation has decided to explore know that many Linux dabblers find it tough to move the Linux alternative, the first step is to assess the their home or work office away from Windows. In this application requirements in detail, which will save a lot tutorial we’ll make the transition easier – and if you’re of wasted time and re-work later on. There are forced to use Windows at work but would love to alternatives for almost everything in the FOSS world, move over to Linux, show this guide to your boss! but you may need to keep bespoke applications and Before we dive in, however, let’s consider the main run them using the Wine compatibility layer. benefits of making the switch: Converting an office to Linux is a mammoth job, so Licensing Here you have direct and indirect costs. here we’re going to focus on two of the most common With Windows you have to spend money on the tasks: printing and email. These are good places to operating system and office suite, and then add-ons start in a transition, so we’ll show you that it’s not so for security. Bigger organisations even have costly difficult with the right approach. And if you’d like us to licensing departments and servers, so there’s an cover other aspects of office migration, drop us a line indirect cost – manpower. and we’ll expand this into a longer series of tutorials. 1 PRINTING The previous generation of printers attached to PCs your Linux PC or even a Raspberry Pi print server is With Linux Mint, setting up a printer is straightforward (as opposed to departmental networked laser entirely possible, but this is the realm of die-hard thanks to a GUI tool printers) were strictly Windows printers, with an awful tinkerers, as some features may not work properly, like accessible from the Start lot of the computing power done on the PC instead of notifications of paper jams and low ink levels. menu. the printer itself. Attaching these devices directly to However, most of the current generation of printers are natively network-orientated with built-in print servers. Let’s have a look at two printers and how they can be installed on a fresh copy of Linux Mint 16, Xfce edition. First is a brand-new HP Office Jet 660 (approx £130 including fax and scanning features) which has been configured using its touchscreen and is on the network ready for action. Secondly we have a legacy Canon PiXMA iP5000 directly attached via USB. Printing on Linux is usually handled by CUPS (formerly an acronym for the Common Unix Printing System). This is installed by default in Linux Mint, with its daemon running in the background. Configuration is either via the web interface at http://127.0.0.1:631 or via the GUI application “system-config-printer” (just type “printer” into the search box on the start menu to 82 www.linuxvoice.com MIGRATE FROM WINDOWS TUTORIAL find it). For simplicity’s sake we recommend using the GUI application. Once the application is open, select Add Printer, and then (for a network printer) click the Network Printer drop-down list. You will see your printer there, ready to be selected. There will be a short wait as the driver is located and installed, and then all that remains to do is to name your printer and print out a test page. No more hunting for drivers Installation does not get much easier than this, but how do we fare with an older but perfectly usable USB printer, like the Canon PIXMA iP5000 mentioned earlier? The initial process is exactly the same and the Canon is correctly detected as a USB attached printer. The web-based front-end provides an alternative interface to CUPS configuration. However, this is where things can go wrong – in our case the installation process stalled when trying to find the correct driver. But this did allow us to try will appear. Choose the driver corresponding to your the alternative installation process via the CUPS web model, or one with a close model number if there isn’t interface on http://127.0.0.1:631. Open that address an exact match in the driver name, and then perform in your browser and click Adding Printers and Classes. a test print. You may need to experiment with two or You will see your printer in the Local Printers list, three drivers before getting the best results. and when you click on it a drop-down list of drivers So setting up a printer in Linux isn’t as tough as it may seem, and thanks to CUPS you don’t have to trawl through random websites to find drivers – CUPS is supplied with drivers for hundreds of printers out PRO TIP of the box. Plus, you can access CUPS via a GUI or its Read up on other migration efforts to web-based front end, for added stability. get a feeling for what’s Of course, some printer vendors are more required, such as when supportive of Linux than others. If you’re in the market the city of Munich switched to Linux (see LV for a new printer, it’s worth checking online for Linux issue 2, or read it online compatibility before you part with your hard-earned at www.linuxvoice.com/ cash, eg at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ the-big-switch). Printers. This author recommends HP devices for the Here, the Canon has been identified correctly, and we’re best Linux compatibility, but always browse the web prompted for a list of drivers. or ask on a forum first. 2 EMAIL Out there in the corporate world of inbox overload, few hours to accomplish. If you are migrating from email is a daily grind but it’s also a necessary evil for a Windows Outlook or Outlook Express solution, doing business. Outlook/Exchange and Office are there is a cunning plan to ease the pain of migration Microsoft’s financial engines – these are the that we’ll demonstrate here. We are going to install applications that businesses want and need to Thunderbird first on our legacy Windows machine, function. Fortunately, Open/LibreOffice can handle use it to properly create the folder/MBOX file structure their own when pitted against Microsoft’s mighty for storing mails, and then move the files to our target office suite. Linux build. Moving from Outlook can be tricky though, as it’s so tightly integrated with Microsoft’s other Office Export mail to Thunderbird on the Windows PC products. A Windows refugee who has used Outlook 1 On the source Windows machine, head over to for a while to access email from POP3 or IMAP www.mozilla.org and download and install the servers is going to end up with many PST files that Thunderbird email client. need to be kept and referenced. 2 Start up Thunderbird. There’s no need to run the These PST files store messages and calendar import wizard that pops up, or set it to the default mail events, and are in a proprietary format dreamt up client, and there’s no need to set up any email by Microsoft. So the first challenge is: how do you accounts at this stage. access them? The bad news is that there’s no magic 3 The menu is accessed through the button with pixie dust available for this and a bit of work is three horizontal bars on the right-hand side of the task involved; the good news is that it should take only a bar. Click Menu > Tools > Import. www.linuxvoice.com 83 TUTORIAL MIGRATE FROM WINDOWS Here’s the Local Folders file show you the location of where to copy the three structure after importing files from our Windows export procedure in step one the three files and folders. above, eg /home/username/.thunderbird/bqg0cpfv. default/Mail/Local Folder. So copy them into that location, restart Thunderbird, and you should have your nested folder structure as you had it on Outlook.