(no subject)

[mdlbear]

Went out to Fry's with chaoswolf to buy her graduation present, a digital camera. After three stores and two compenent salesdroids (the first wasn't), we found what was apparently the last Toshiba TDR3310 in Fry's northern California inventory. Very compact, 3Mpixel, 3x optical zoom, SD card, rechargable battery. Got a discount because it was open box.

Presumably the chaoswolf will post more info, and/or pictures, if she ever stops LARPing long enough.

Comments

Linux

[mdlbear]

Without question, the easiest way to fire up a Linux box is Knoppix or one of its derivatives like Morphix, which runs entirely off the CD and has excellent hardware detection. (I don't recommend it with less than 256MB of RAM, though it will run OK with 128.)

If you decide you like it, you can then run the script that installs it on your hard drive (takes at least 2GB). That leaves you with a Debian-based system that's trivial to install software on and keep up to date.

   apt-get update
   apt-get upgrade

...and you're up to date.

Another good one is Mandrake, which was derived from RedHat back in the distant past and is optimized for desktop use. I'm not too happy with RedHat at the moment because they seem to be using their free/cheap distro as just a staging area for their expensive/enterprise edition, and don't really care about keeping a full set of apps up to date.

RedHat and Mandrake both have a lot of GUI configuration tools. I'm less familiar with Debian, but it does have Webmin, which gives you a web interface for configuration tasks.

Linux does have web mail, calendars, spam filtering, and so on; Ximian's Evolution is specifically designed as an Outlook replacement. OpenOffice is highly compatible with Microsoft Office (and of course is also available on Windows).

The text editor I use is Emacs (also available for Windows) -- I also use it for email and news.

Linux doesn't have nearly as steep a learning curve as it once did. The KDE and Gnome desktops are both sufficiently Windows-like in their UI that they're probably easier to adapt to than Windows XP. And of course it doesn't crash.

Re: Linux

[asavitzk.livejournal.com]

I'll have to give Morphix a try since, well, it sounds cool like the Matrix. :)

I've actually been playing around a bit lately with OpenOffice on my Windows box at work. I'm looking forward to the next version with it's direct-save-to-PDF feature but I didn't want to load beta software that new onto my office machine.

I'll have to look into Evolution. I'm just so experienced in Exchange administration that it'll take a bit of getting used to no matter how easy it is to use. It's become second nature for me to send dinner appointments to Ruthie's exchange account so it shows in both our calendars and then cc my office machine as well as have it synch to my iPaq.

And I run Windows2000Pro, *not* XP, so it doesn't crash either. :) I personally hate XP with a passion and fight it tooth and nail whenever I get a chance. Activate this!

Re: Linux

[mdlbear]

Linux administration is generally simpler than Windows, from what little I've seen of the latter. It's certainly a lot less trouble; uptimes on the order of years are not unusual, and many of my configuration files haven't changed in years.