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.