CoffeeBear.net

Bah

Posted by Mark | Filed under Computers, Life

A four day week­end goes by and I posted noth­ing. Noth­ing I tell you! Why? Because I was tired/sick/busy. Is that a real excuse? Not really. Many blog­gers post under those cir­cum­stances. Bah. You want an update? Well, here’s one…

Part of the being busy was enjoy­ing some mighty fine turkey with the future in-laws but part of it was also spent con­fig­ur­ing Linux on my lap­top. I’ve got this old Dell Lat­i­tude (PII-300) that I bought 3rd hand and which came with a copy of Win2000 loaded on it but with­out any discs. I’ve always sus­pected that copy of Win200o had been pirated but had no proof one way or another. And as I use SuSE Linux Pro 9.0 as my main OS on the desk­top; I fig­ured I’d give it a whirl on the lap­top. The only prob­lem with doing that is the mod­u­lar CD-ROM drive is nearly dead in the lap­top. For­tu­nately, a friend at work has a nearly iden­ti­cal lap­top with a com­pat­i­ble & fully work­ing CD-ROM. I bor­rowed his drive, loaded Linux in one night and returned it. Then I spent the next week & a half get­ting it con­fig­ured properly.

On Fritz¹, I’ve used APT to load all sorts of extra/newer pro­grams and am run­ning KDE 3.3.1. It’s pretty and comes with lots of eye candy. Alphonse² isn’t as beefy as Fritz is; so I fig­ured some­thing with a tad less eye-candy would be eas­ier on its aging CPU. I decided I’d still run SuSE Linux 9.0 Pro but would use GNOME. SuSE 9.0 doesn’t inte­grate their tools into GNOME as well as they do into KDE but after I got APT up and run­ning on it, that wasn’t much of a prob­lem any­more. After that it was sim­ply a mat­ter of updat­ing every­thing on the sys­tem and then set­ting up the Apache/MySQL/PHP cor­rectly. Unfor­tu­nately, I’d screwed that up when ini­tially installing Linux on the box and had to remove all of Apache & rein­stall it to cor­rect the prob­lem. RPM made it fairly sim­ple but I’m not con­vinced that I’ve com­pletely fixed the prob­lem. *shrug* It does seem to be work­ing fine for what I want though, which is a por­tal web­server with Blue­fish & GiMP installed so I can do web design while away from my home PC. Being able to do that will allow me to work on redesigns for CB.net and projects for some of my friends when I get stuck going out to my company’s home office for meet­ings and what not.

And you know what, I feel­ing pretty darn proud of myself & my shiny, new OS on Alphonse. That feel­ing lasted for all of about half a day when I saw peo­ple at work who’d bought new lap­tops on Black Fri­day. *sigh* Gad­get envy³ is an evil thing.

Oh yeah, the obser­vant ones amoung my 3 read­ers will notice that there are a cou­ple of posts entered by Ariesna. That’s my fiance and she’ll be post­ing the occas­sional recipie on the site. As far as I know, she’ll only post recip­ies that we’ve already tried out but you’ll have to read those entries to know for sure.

¹ Fritz is the name of my home-built desk­top PC. Why are you look­ing at me like that? What do you mean nor­mal peo­ple don’t name their com­put­ers?
² That would be my lap­top nat­u­rally. Named after the younger Elric brother in Full Metal Alchemist but it’s also a trib­ute to Pat­la­bor. :)
³ AWelkin: Envy was my top sin when tak­ing that 7 deadly sins quiz from your jour­nal. Gee, can’t say I didn’t see that one coming.

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