Linux Neophyte

I screwed up. In the history of screw ups it’s minor, but I did screw up.

A long time ago I settled on a Windows only password manager (PM). I have hundreds of passwords and I keep them in an encrypted Password Corral database. The program & db live on my Windows box and I keep a copy on my flash drive that goes everywhere with me. I assumed that I would never use another OS and this program would last me a good long time. <– That’s where I screwed the pooch. I find myself using Linux almost exclusively now and I want a PM that will not only work on Linux, but on Windows as well (and I’m keeping my options open, I might have a MAC some day too).

I did some searching last night and found a nifty looking cross platform replacement PM named KeePass. It’s open source (I like that very much), uses strong encryption, and it’s portable. I can keep a copy of the Windows exe on my flash drive as well as a shell script that will allow me to run it on a Linux box (it seems to have all of the libraries in the tarball so it should run on any distro with a GUI).

Both programs have a similar set of features and both satisfy my needs. So I have some options here, and now I need to decide what I want to do.

Option 1: Do nothing

I’ve found that Password Corral works well enough in Wine, but I prefer using Linux native apps when I’m using Linux (who wouldn’t?). If I do nothing, I will always need to have Wine installed on any machine I want to run the app on. I must admit that this option does NOT appeal to me.

Option 2: Migrate to KeePass

KeePass has a nifty import feature, and Password Corral has a nifty export feature. Sadly, they don’t read/write common formats. That means I’m going to have to manually move everything over to KeePass. That sucks (to put it mildly). I REALLY don’t want to spend my time using copy/paste to get the data from one app to the other. This option doesn’t appeal to me either.

So, I have 2 options, both rot. Not sure what I’m going to do at this point.

If you’re looking for a portable app, something that you’re going to rely on, put some thought into it. Consider open source and whether or not the program is cross platform. You may not always be in front of a Windows machine!

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, Desktop, Musings