Saturday, August 25, 2007

An afternoon of learning new swear words

LOML bought a new computer this week (rather than waiting for my 3 1/2 year old hand-me-down: the need was too urgent!) and I ended up spending today helping get it to the "usable" stage. Not perfect, just usable.

We are both linux users --- putting us in an even smaller minority than mac users, and without the cachet of social acceptability! But I haven't had a chance to put linux on the machine yet: there were more urgent things to be done: in particular, since we don't want to pay for office, Open Office was needed.

And this is where I hit steam. Full head of steam. Three or four times I tried to download it, and each time it'd get through about 40 MB and freeze. Over and over it did it. I finally downloaded it to the desktop machine in the office and transferred it over using a USB dongle.

And there are so many little things that need to be fixed, tweaked, changed, installed. It really would make more sense for me to take the couple of hours it is going to take, set it aside, and install linux on the damachine.

Yours, frustratedly,
N.

1 comment:

carmilevy said...

We'll need to talk about Linux. Because I got a new laptop in May, I'm cascading my old laptop to my wife, who then cascades her desktop to the kids. Which means the kids' old beaten-up Pentium III becomes a Linux box for me.

Do you have any suggestions on a distro and/or any other resources I'll need to get started?

(I'm so excited!)