To Mac or not to Mac, that is the question
A week after Mac, it has still failed to sweep me off my feet.
I don’t know if 2 gigs of RAM is indeed too small to handle three operating systems at the same time. But things become so slow when I try to run three operating systems together. Also, getting all the operating systems to read all the hard disks at the same time looks difficult too. I operate 6 portable hard disks to keep my data. So with data transfer becoming a chore, some times it looks like the windows way was simple.
Debian too runs on a Mac. But Mac had a much smaller range of applications to choose from. There are sadly no equivalents to the small but powerful FlashGet and uTorrent in Mac. Azuerus seems to be a complicated program to do a simple thing.
In the place where I live, we lose electric power many times a day. When we have power back, I need my PC needs to return to what it was doing even if I’m not sitting in front of it. There seem to be a few problems in getting the Mac to do it. But I think, I’ll eventually tide over it.
I think I need to live through this period of difficulty before I learn to shuffle data between NTFS, ext3 and HFS+. Not to mention, that the keyboard bothers me too. I surely cannot unlearn the windows shortcuts because I need to use windows at work. Remembering how to do it on a Mac with a keyboard is clearly an extra load on the head.
On Debian, again
I didn’t realize that months had passed by since I changed my default boot OS to Win XP.
Now I’m on Debian again. 
Reading Linux Partition from Windows
Just so that I am always able to access my data from Linux, even when I’m on XP, I installed this little utility.
http://www.diskinternals.com/download/DiskInternals.zip
It loads the Linux partitions as read-only and lets you copy files from Linux partitions to Windows partitions.
Cool
Moved to Debian
After downloading 3 DVD isos totalling 13 GB, after a week of 9 hour per day scheduled power cuts, after sitting up all night, after drinking precisely 11 cups of tea with sour milk, after the first few install attempts crashed due to NVIDIA, after GNOME, after KDE, though I’m still on Iceweasel – I movedto Debian.
Good bye Mandriva 2008, You gave me the confidence that Linux can be truly fun.
Good bye Vista, You suck.
KDE 4 release event
KDE 4 release event is planned on January 17-19, 2008
Living with Linux
Setting up ktorrent to start automatically after a power cut:
With KDE:
Open up the file manager (konqueror) and browse to ‘/home/username/.kde/Autostart’. Right click in that folder and create a shortcut to ktorrent
Without KDE:
You can also add the command in your .bashrc – This is not dependent on KDE.
Using Yahoo Chat on Mandriva:
Gyache is the solution. I just ran this rpm.
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gyachi/gyachi-1.1.0-1.i386.f7.rpm
Setting up NTFS read write:
Mandriva 2008 release notes read as follows:
In Mandriva Linux 2008, drives and partitions formatted with the NTFS file system can be made writeable via the use of the ntfs-3g
driver. If the package ntfs-3g is not installed, install it. Then use the Mandriva disk management utility, diskdrake. Select the desired partition, unmount it, and switch to advanced mode. Change the partition type to ntfs-3g.Click Options, and ensure the checkbox labeled ‘ro’ is unchecked. Now mount the partition again. Exit, and save your changes.
But for whatever reason, I was unable to install ntfs-3g through the internet. I ran the following packages from the install DVD manually in the following sequence:
1. fuse-2.7.0-6mdv2008.0.i586.rpm
2. libntfs-3g10-1.826-1mdv2008.0.i586.rpm
3. ntfs-3g-1.826-1mdv2008.0.i586.rpm
I then tweaked the mount points settings and restarted the machine.
Bingo! I was able to move 200 MB of downloaded stuff to my 320 GB hard disk which is NTFS. Now who needs Vista?
Living with Linux
Now here is a story that is a living proof of people’s laziness to move out of Windows:
http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/
For the last two weeks now, I’ve been playing around with computers and operating systems. I’ve finally settled on Mandriva 2008. Its been a week now. I haven’t booted once into Vista though it is installed on my PC – some austerity is required, if I were to ever learn Linux.
Just so that I don’t forget it, I need to document my steps every now and then.
Installation (12th Nov 07):
I re-installed from the Mandriva 2008 Powerpack DVD iso which I downloaded. My earlier installation did not include GNOME so I added it on. Install process was simple. I allocated only 15 GB space to the root ext3 partition, which seems to be big mistake now though. The remanining 65 gigs of this hard disk and the other 320 GB hard disk are all in NTFS. This is limiting my ability to handle data.
I could not boot any version of Linux with my NVIDIA geforce 5200
plugged in. So I simply pulled it out and am presently on i915G
graphics.
Configuration of installation sources and update (13 Nov 07)
After repeated complaints about the installation media not being readable, I used to Mandriva control centre to change the media source for installation and updates to be from internet and excluded the installation media. No complaints since then.
Added compiz effects (16 Nov 07)
Now the 3D graphics rocks . Shame shame Windows Vista.
Viewing .rar files (17 Nov 07)
Added capability to view .rar files on Mandriva by running this rpm
ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/plf/mandriva/non-free/2006.0/i586/unrar-3.51-0.1.20060plf.i586.rpm
Now set to learn Linux
For the last two weeks now, I’ve been playing around with computers and operating systems.
One thing comes out clearly. Open source software has come a long way.
In the last two weeks I tried SuSE 9.1, openSUSE 10.2, openSUSE 10.3, ubuntu 7.10, kubuntu 7.10, Mandriva 2008 power pack. I loved what Linux did to my PC.
I could never resolve the conflict between my nvidia geforce fx 5200 and the onboard i915G that kept preventing Linux from booting. I finally yanked the nvidia card out and settled for the onboard graphics.
Vista runs on my PC with an experience index of 1.0 and the Aero interface disabled. Mandriva rocks my PC.
Haven’t used Vista or XP in weeks. I dont think I need these anymore. I need to learn Linux to survive.
Powered by ScribeFire.
