| O. S. Blues |
[May. 29th, 2008|04:42 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | knoppix | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | eLizabeth | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Bostitch: Polaris | ] |
I need a new Operating System. Right now, I am feeling a bit resentful about the fact that I can't get a legitamite copy of a fully functional operating system and feel good about it. Linux is free, but you need a PHD to do simple tasks on it. It (Knoppix) comes with a slew of applications, but getting the sound card or the network card to work is like pulling teeth. At work I have laptops, 2 desktops, and a slew of servers (literally, it's a slew. not 4 or 6, but a slew). The work machines run WinXP, and the servers run various versions of Windows Server. These are not my machines, so I don't want to get too deep in the habit of doing non work related programming on them. For those of you who do not know, I am a programmer. For the rest of you, I am typing this on my new Linux box ($80US). The Linux box is cute, in the same a child threatening you with a knife is cute. I had to change my home office around to accomodate the fact that this machine (The OS on this machine) will not accept any of my wireless cards, dispite the fact that they ALL work on my various Windows PCs. A few years back, I sold Kletus on the idea of buying a Mac using simple logic. I say "Kletus, you are not a programmer. You are a user. The one thing you always hear about Macintosh is the fact that they are 'user friendly'. I use PC, because I am a programmer, and my job depends on my proficiency in that O.S. You can have the benefit of the new Mac O.S., which can read the same office documents as my Windows PC". As far as I am concerned, that logic still holds. At the same time, I would not buy a Mac because what you save in ease of use, you pay for in hardware costs, software costs, and the fact that the licensing model is actually more restrictive than Windows. I have NO doubt that Mac is not the operating system for me. By the same token, I am getting sick of the whole Windows thing where I have to install some new piece of crap update or add on every week and run the risk of crashing something that already works or using a TON of space for no good reason. Today I removed something that was called the "MS Office Time Zone Tool." It was 19 megabytes. I don't know how many time zones there are off the top of my head, but even if there were 19 of them, I can't think of a good reason why any application would need one megabyte per time zone to be effective. Of course, that brings me to Linux. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about what's wrong with the whole model. There is a solution, but I have spent a lot of time trying to be a good APPLICATION programmer. I don't know that I could be effective or even useful at trying to learn O.S. programming. Of course, there IS a need for it. |
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| Knoppix |
[May. 15th, 2008|07:15 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | knoppix | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Elizabeth | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  confused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | American Football: Measure 3 | ] |
I recently installed Knoppix on a desktop machine of mine. I was surprised at how easily it went on. In previous installations, I found that it was impossible to get the application installed without knowing the intricacies of Linuxdom. Unfortunately, one could not learn intricacies of Linuxdom unless one were able to imitate a strong knowledge of Linuxdom. Linux users frequently seem to see themselves as the worlds elite, being forced to deal with the rest of us plebes. At any rate, I found the tutorial at IronGeek.com and got my install on. I won't make any mention of the problem that arises from the fact that you need a third party tutorial simply to install an operating system that is capable of running from the CD. I won't bother to mention that. At any rate, I got the install on, and soon noticed that the sound card was not working. Fortunately, there is a Sound card application. Unfortunately, it thinks that it will not run correctly in XWindows. At the behest of the sound card installer, I dropped to a bash window. Since then, the machine boots to the bash window every time, and I am unable to get a GUI window back up and running. I have tried every variation of "Start XWindows from BASH" that I can think of, but I get nothing useful. I have found that I can get back to the GUI by starting my machine with the CD in place. Of course, that means that I can't use my CD, which is why I installed Knoppix to the hard drive in the first place.
I did eventually stumble on the command, which is [startx] at [http://wolfrdr.tripod.com/linuxtips.html#xwindows].
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