learn linux

Well, I’m up and running already. Installed Slax to my USB flash drive, and booted right in. Only thing I had to do was hardwire my PC to the internet (was previously using a USB wireless adapter that wasn’t compatible with Linux). Unfortunately this means that my Xbox (which is hooked up to my PC monitor) can’t connect to the internet while I’m in Linux since I only have 1 ethernet cable. I just need to stop being cheap and pick one up for 3 bucks.

I’m feeling spontaneous right now, so I decided to download Slax and jump right in without any experience.

A couple of weeks ago when my boyfriend was around to help out and supervise, I installed a new hard drive (well, I installed it, uninstalled it, and he reinstalled it to make sure it was seated properly, but the point is I learned how to do it!), and then we set about creating a dual-boot system of Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.

It was a little stressful. It took two or three tries and by the last try my boyfriend was doing things I definitely wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing myself. It took a little experimenting to figure out how much of my IDE drive would be recognized (it’s an old system not compliant with SATA drives, and the answer was not the one we were expecting), and then he had to make a special boot partition for Linux at the front of my drive. I probably would have been able to follow instructions for it over the phone, but I wouldn’t have known how big to make the partition without help, for example. We were up until 1am for two nights over this. Honestly my boyfriend was doing most of it and I was just up supervising and fretting. :) A lot of the time was spent making sure the Windows install was secure, too, which I worked on more. I have an XP disc from waaaay back at the beginning when none of the service packs were out.

Ultimately it got done. My current boyfriend proved he would be helpful and dependable about computer stuff without being domineering (my ex was a little bit), so that was good. We celebrated by going to Cedar Point :)

My XP partition is almost completely to where it was before the reinstall. All the stuff under the hood is where it is supposed to be. I am one of those people who plays with services.msc and uses TweakUI and all that. My Firefox on the Windows side is just about perfect. I have all my Greasemonkey scripts in. Every once in a while I stumble on something I’d still like to change.

At this point, Ubuntu is less useful to me precisely because I know so little about it. I am trying to give it as much credit as it deserves. There are a lot of things that are second-nature to me in Windows because I’ve been on it since I was 7, when we got Windows 3.1. Linux doesn’t have that leg up with me. I think I am going to need to set aside a certain amount of time every week or two to just exist under Linux. I think the first steps will be installing a media player that works with last.fm (that doesn’t have a bug in it like whatever I picked for the first try) and trying all the Linux games.

This will require turning off The Sims, which, I must add, installed perfectly on Win XP. :)

x-posted: 43 Things and Livejournal

OK, I decided this weekend was gonna be it. I’ve a couple of old laptops, and for what I do, they make decent netbooks. Well, this week the T23 started not loading windows. Now I don’t care for Windows but that does make it unusable. I have Puppy 3.0 on a pen drive but neither the Thinkpad nor the Latitude C610 can boot from USB. So I’ve ordered a disc of Puppy 4.1.2. I checked out Distrowatch and one review on it was glowing. So next weekend I’ll find out.

While Puppy sounds great for what I need, I’m going to try the latest version of Knoppix as well. Never hurts to be familiar with two. And Knoppix is a big one, lots of use professionally. More than what I need but like I said, a good idea to learn it.

I started off with Linux when I got an Asus Eeepc 701. At that time I had no idea what linux was, and naturally I was amazed by the different distros it offered and the actual fact it was all free!

I didn’t have a lot of time to install and try different distros, and in the end only tried two, but let me tell you, I learnt a lot, (one that Windows suck).

I did learn a lot from this, although I never really intended to, but I’m happy to say that I can provide a linux newbie a little bit of knowledge even about it :)

I no longer have Windows dual booted, just linux now :)

I’ve been at this for years. Have run Suse 9.2 successfully, currently use Ubuntu. I’ve migrated all my internal business spreadsheets to OpenOffice, though I’m still using Excel for taxes, which might go to my accountant.

So in spite of my decades of experience with computers and college diploma, I’m still basically what we’d call a “power user”. It’s hard for me to put aside all the other 42 things, not to mention real life, and really get into it. But at least I use Linux and chat it up to people whenever I can! :c)

With my laptop and a dvd of fedora in place, I am starting off with linux this weekend.

know enough to get by with work, but there’s a lot more to it.
venturing into LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, and Perl) as a side project.

using it every day for various things.