The migration continues.

[vakkotaur]

If installing and using a new system bores you, don't bother with this link:

After fiddling around for a while, it seemed reasonable to start over, really. So Mandrake 9.0 was downloaded, burned to CDs, and after a false start or three, loaded onto pasofino again. Lycoris was considered, and would have been tried (for a while anyway) but no site that had the ISOs would yield them up in a sane amount of time. I don't mind letting something run overnight, but over a day for an ISO is just too much to ask - and yes, that's with DSL on my end.

The good:
Mandrake's setup is pretty painless when it goes right. And what doesn't get installed right away is easily handled from the GUI.

X-chat seems to be able to most of what I want, and is now pretty much set up. If I can get it to do sound on notify, I can forget mIRC easily. (I have to do a think with sound on this install though.)

sshd and ssh Just Work. Samba needs more setup, but I'll put that with good as at least it isn't leaving something wide open when it should not be.

The bad:
I had not realized until now just how much I like Opera and TextPad. Linux has a nontrivial selection of browsers and (graphical) text editors.

I was genuinely surprised at how much I wasn't able to readily change in Galeon and Konqueror. Mozilla, while sluggish, is a bit better about things at least. I suspect I'll be getting Opera again. Configurable, snappy.. and worth the price they charge. Sometime free isn't the best price.

I know MDI or tabbing is unusual for *nix but it seems a logical thing for a text editor to be able to handle multiple files without needing multiple windows. It also seems reasonable to be able to select text color as well as background color, and have the cursor visible even with a black background. GEdit comes closest, but I suspect I'll have to figure out how to dig inside it to get a visible cursor with the background I prefer. It's almost enough to make me consider installing wine and using TextPad if I can.

The ugly:
I'm told there are TrueType fonts and TrueType font server I can set up. I see I really should do that. The available fonts seem to range from just tolerable to horrifyingly bad. I have a managed to get something tolerable for a terminal window and for x-chat, but I'm far from happy about the selection. The choices for editors just don't work, at least with my preferred color scheme.

So, since the thing nowadays is 'Desktop Linux' what do I think? I think if one liked black on white text and was used to Netscape or maybe IE, that it'd probably be acceptable. But I can see valid criticism of it - some things still take hand editing of setup files.. and not just 'advanced' things. TrueType fonts should be installed by default, or at least be an option in a non-expert install.

Not ugly:
A KVM is nice, but sometimes logging in "remotely" is better: It can be useful to read and work on the remote system (a whole two feet away!) while keeping up with things with the familiar machine.