Linux Laptop Tips from Mark Shuttleworth

If you want to support a Linux desktop, a traveling business user is the hardest person to keep happy and productive. Connecting to strange wireless networks and working offline are both tricky. We asked Mark Shuttleworth how he handles networking and mail.

By Mark Shuttleworth, LinuxWorld.com, 09/07/06

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I do use Ubuntu on my laptop, and travel a lot. My laptop is both my primary working environment and my primary development environment. I also have a desktop machine, which runs Kubuntu, and which I use for development at home over the weekends.

NetworkManager is (mostly) my friend. When it works on your hardware it's a blessing, though every now and then it can get itself into a horrible jam. The primary missing feature for me, now, is the ability for it to recognise "locations" and configure printers accordingly.

I'm a Thunderbird fan and use that rather than Evolution. The best tip I can give anyone is to try the Quick File extension for Thunderbird. It was developed in response to a bounty I put out some time ago, and has made my life much, much better in dealing with several thousand mail folders. In simple terms, it lets me file a mail to a folder by typing a hotkey and then a few letters from the folder name. This lets me drive Thunderbird almost entirely from the keyboard. Combined with the offline email function of Thunderbird I can be extremely productive with email in planes, trains and automobiles, which is where I get a lot of time these days.

One glitch in that routine is when people send me email with a URL in it. I am often offline when I get to the email, so it can be frustrating because I can't then see the document they are pointing at. To work around this I use a combination of Firefox bookmarks and T-bird labels. I have a "Needs web access" label, which I use to flag emails that have this issue. And I have a "To read" folder on my Firefox bookmarks toolbar. By right clicking on the URL in the email I can copy the URL, then I right click on the "To read" folder and create a new bookmark to that URL with a note about the context. Then, when I'm online, I can trivially get T-bird to show me all the mails that need online attention, and open all the relevant pages in tabs in a new Firefox window. The result is that I can immediately deal with everything that NEEDS me to be online. This is a huge win if, like me, you are travelling constantly and can only grab net access in short windows while parked outside a Starbucks or in an airport lounge.

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