Geeky Weekend.

[vakkotaur]

Spent much of Saturday tweaking things on belgian and getting various stuff installed. Also just discovering how to do some stuff.

Now I have AbiWord and joe and Nedit (spent much time tweaking HTML highligting colors) and and Opera and xchat (and with yakko's help have a sound on notify so I know when Pa is on..). Need to tweak colors in xchat, but right now they're tolerable. Not great, but tolerable. Did tweak system colors. Much better than the default selections now.

Still haven't found the right rpm for Audacity on Mandrake 9.0. At least not a version that is both recent and stable. The claim that "urpmi audacity" issued from root is all that is needed is simply not the case. "no package named audacity" is what happens if it's tried. Bah.

But it was nice to see picture viewers and a neat world clock with times of various cities popping up when the cursor was over that part of the world. And it was really nice to get samba working right so I could look at the files on percheron.

That's something. In not all that long, I snarfed just over 2 GB from percheron to belgian. It's a neat thing to watch a couple gig go flying across a network.

That, and a quick check of mIRC for a script setting for someone was about all I did with Windows this weekend. I'm still a ways from using linux 100% of the time (at home). Yet I can foresee that in not all long I might be shutting down the Windows machine and only be bringing it up once in a while. In fact, right now I'm keeping percheron up mainly as a backup and so I can look things up if need be.

Need to do:
- tweak xchat colors (find out how to do it right!)
- get Audacity

There is more, like figure out how to rip & burn CDs, but those are things I don't have to figure out right now. And I expect they're probably rather easy.

Comments

[masem.livejournal.com]

One thing with xchat; make sure to save your settings every time you make a change and are satisfied with it; while there's a "save settings on exit", do not trust it.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Noted. I think I got zapped by that once some time ago and have been appropriately paranoid about it since.

[pharwarner.livejournal.com]

Belgian sounds like it's really coming along well, and developing into a fine system. Having the skills to be able to get the best out of a machine must be very satisfying, and the results so far have very effectively spoken for themselves.

I have many things that I need to do with poor old (And it seems only yesterday that I got her!) Minerva III. She's not been doing so well this past week, but that's all Window's fault. I'd love to find out about linux, and see about the Better Way of Doing Things (TM)

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

One way to start is to try using cross-platform programs. That way if or when you try linux, you have some nice familiar programs. It might also help your Windows stability as that means using fewer Microsoft products.

IRC: xchat is available for Windows - and does multiple connections without needing a new instance for each new server.

Word processor: I like AbiWord, but there are things like StarOffice and OpenOffice that you might like better.

Web browser: While I like Opera enough to pay for it, I know it isn't everyone's choice. There is Mozilla, and I'm sure a few others.

Things like file browsers (file manager), sound players, and picture viewers are generally alike enough that there is no big deal. So don't worry about them.