My attempts at switching to Linux since Christmas have been finicky and largely unsuccessful… until today when I installed the x86_64 free DVD version of Mandriva 2008. The things this distro configures perfectly and without effort, all out of the box, are endless. If you prefer KDE and want a bit of eye-candy with Compiz, look no further than Mandriva…
This past week I have evaluated five Linux distributions to see if any of them would make suitable replacements for Windows XP so that I could avoid Vista. Sadly, Linux proved to be far more finicky and troublesome than I expected. Take it from me, if Windows XP is behaving itself, then don’t try to fix what ain’t broken; stick with what works…
At first sight you might think that the Windows XP installation CD might contain an operating system, but more importantly, some sort of tool that could prove useful if your computer should ever run into trouble. The CD has a nice, blue, cloudy watermark on it and the interior rim has a shiny hologram. Clearly, there must be some goodness locked inside - it just oozes quality…
I’m a very fussy user when it comes to my operating systems and I have managed to get by with Windows XP for a long time, but its days are numbered. Vista is looming and I refuse to install that rubbish, so I have chosen Kubuntu 7.10. Normal Ubuntu users might be wondering why I chose Kubuntu. To demonstrate just how fussy I am, I installed Kubuntu because…
Just now I copied several gigabytes of data from one partition to another on my Windows XP Pro (64-bit edition) Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 machine. Having toyed around with Linux here and there over the years I’ve come to know that such a request isn’t beyond the realm of reasonableness. Linux can carry out this seemingly trivial task with aplomb but if you try to get Windows to do the same thing, old faithful shows just how crappy its inner workings truly are…
This morning I read an article on ZDNet Australia titled “Andreessen: PHP succeeding where Java isn’t”, which is about a speech given by Internet browser pioneer, Marc Andreessen, wherein he predicts that PHP will inevitably become more popular than Java because of its simplicity. PHP might appear simple at first glance, but if you actually spend some time working with it, you begin to feel as though the language was built by a thousand monkeys at a thousand computers - the dumb kind employed by C. Montgomery Burns…
Since figuring out how to connect to my home machine using plain, old, VNC over a separate Secure SHell (SSH) tunnel, a few people have asked me to document the procedure so that they may easily implement it themselves. I, myself, have been known to forget some of the steps involved, so this is for my benefit as much as theirs.