25% Microsoft Free!
August 23, 2004
6:45 p.m.
Today, I am a new man. It was what, two years ago ... or maybe three ... that I gave up the tiny little handhold of sanity that I had clung so doggedly to, and became assimilated fully into the world of Microsoft. Oh, I had already been using all the Office stuff, and Windows itself, of course. But there was a definitive time that I can still remember clearly that I decided that Netscape and its e-mail client would have to go. I struggled with that decision. I mean ... geez. Microsoft? But the new Netscape was DOA, and the old Netscape had been passed by. Something had to give. I tried Opera, and I tried Mozilla. Neither one were particularly robust at that point. In fact, several places I frequented just flat-out wouldn't render in those browsers (being standards-compliant is not meaningful if the coders aren't following standards, I guess, eh?). The truth of the matter is that for a period of time, Microsoft had the best product on the market. In my opinion, anyway. Not that I liked it. But it was the best, and so after coming to grips with the idea of letting Microsoft take over my computing life, I steeled myself and took a weekend to convert. I've been unhappy ever since. Until a couple months ago when I had a tiny little revolution inside myself, and took back e-mail. I grabbed Mozilla's Thunderbird and took it for a trial. It worked great. Then, maybe two months ago, I installed a fresh copy of the full Mozilla suite. Gorgeous. Fast. Simple. Tabbed browsing. Configurable stuff with few-to-no odd defaults that leave you going "what the hell?" What a blast. And even better, I've not run into a site that I'm interested in that didn't render! I think I've used IE three times since I went back. I mean, not counting the gazillion times that some other Windows program uses it to do something. Fact: Despite not purposefully using IE for two months, it remains on top of my list of most used programs in the XP start-up pane. In short order, Mozilla and its e-mail client were soon the #1 choices on each of our machines. Life was finally good again. And so we run time forward to about two weeks ago. Lisa and I aree talking about our fourth computer (Lisa, Brigid, and I each have a personal machine, and we have an old, clunky 400MHz, 8GB machine hanging around collecting dust). "We could use that machine just as a back-up file server," one of us, I think it was Lisa, said. "It would make backing up so much easier." "That works," I think it was me who replied. "It'll need to have Windows reinstalled." Windows, in this case, is Windows 98, which we decided we needed because it actually supports that piece-of-junk scanner we have, a One-Touch USB that's not being supported by Visioneer anymore. So Lisa spent two days trying to load Windows 98 (which she successfully did several times), and get both the network and scanner running. At no time could we get the network components to run. Both of us worked on it. Several times. Then several more times. It's not like we don't know what we're doing. I mean, we do run a home network, and I am an IT semi-professional. "Maybe it's a hardware thing," one of use eventually said. "Could be," the other agreed. "I don't know." Finally, I looked at Lisa and said the magic words. "You know, we really don't have anything to lose here. I could just grab a version of Linux and give that a go." "You could," she said. "You've threatened to do that often enough." And so, that's what I did. Do you hear the bells pealing? Do you see the clouds opening to let the sun shine through? Well, I did. For that bare, briefest of moments I had that feeling that all was right in the world. Now, I'm no super-whiz, but I know my boot loader from my drivers. The first thing I decided I needed to do was to read something. Then I grabbed a copy of Fedora, and waded in. To say it was a snap would be false reporting. My thinking skills at that level of detail are rusty. But the first day saw me with Linux running, at least, and the network enabled enough that I could see and access all the other machines. This was good. I wish I could report that the next steps went flawlessly, but that would be a lie. Working with Linux is an interesting exercise, or in this case I suppose I should say working with Samba (the software that I'm using to connect the Linux machine to our network of XP boxes. Information exists. In fact, the problem is that there is almost too much information, and that most of it is at exacting levels of detail. It really helps to know what you're doing. Which I don't of course. Or didn't. To put it directly, it took me three days to accomplish what a normally competent Linux/Samba person could have done in about 2 hours. But still, it's done. The system works. We've named it Lucy, and we're very happy to have her as part of our network. We're 25% Microsoft free--more if you could the Mozilla stuff. Hoorah, me. Next week I'm planning on looking at a dual boot on my machine. Who knows? Maybe 50% is right around the corner.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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