Migrating from WinXP to Linux

Introduction

This document contains a few tricks for PC users that wish to change from Windows (WinXP in our examples) to Linux (Debian Linux in our examples).

Contents

Read Files on WinXP-Partitions from Linux
Import Mail from Outlook Express to Evolution
Import Address Book from Outlook Express into Evolution

Read Files on WinXP-Partitions from Linux

Recompile the kernel with the following option:
File Systems --> NTFS file system support (read only) Y

Add the following line to /etc/fstab:
/dev/hda2 /winnt ntfs ro,user,noauto,uid=eperron,gid=users 0 0
The different options mean the following:
ro - read only
user - any user may mount it
noauto - one needs to mount it manually
uid=eperron - the owner of the mounted directory will be "eperron"
gid=users - the group of the mounted directory will be users

Import Mail from Outlook Express to Evolution

First, download the Windows version of Mozilla from www.mozilla.org. Boot your Windows partition and import Outlook Express mail folders into Mozilla. Re-Boot Linux. Mount your Windows-XP partition. In Evolution, select File --> Import --> File --> Mbox, then select the file "my-file-name" from the Mozilla mail folder on your Windows-XP partition (not the file "my-file-name.msf").

Import Address Book from Outlook Express into Evolution

Boot your Windows XP partition. Export Outlook Express address book in .csv format (comma separated values) and transfer the .csv-file to Linux.
Evolution wants the vcard format for import of addresses. This is why you need some conversion tool. Get csv2vcard from sourceforge.

To run it, you need the ruby interpreter ("ruby" package in Debian). Ruby is some programming language, I don't know it but it seems to work and to be good at text processing.
You also need the CSV module for ruby csv-1_2_1.tar.gz, which can be found here. To install this module, just unpack the tar.gz and run install.rb this ruby-script will install the module (it's already compiled, or doesn't need to be compiled or whatever). You also need the the debian packages libgtk-ruby, glade and libglade-ruby.

Now, you unpack csv2vcard and run cvs2vcard.rb. Select the .csv that you exported from Outlook Express and convert it.
Attention: the Outlook Express .csv format has semicolons as separators, whereas csv2vcard requires commas, so open the .csv file with xemacs first, delete all "," then replace all ";" by ",".