Subject: Journal of a mad man (long)
From: Mike Barsalou (mbarsalou@aidea.org)
Date: Fri Aug 02 2002 - 17:55:12 AKDT
Well that's what my wife currently thinks of me.....I think we will win her
over sometime soon though.
Here is what happened.....
After the discussion on the list about the "cheap" computers at walmart.com,
I got this idea. Hey, maybe I can pick up one of these and put Linux on it.
Then I can start walking this talk I have been spouting.
Hurdle #1:
Walmart.com doesn't ship to Alaska...this is pretty common and ticks me off,
but I have found a way to over come this limitation. We use a mail
forwarder. In my case I used Mail Boxes etc.
I ordered the product online and set the shipping address to MBE in Seattle.
Then I contacted MBE and asked that they ship the box to me via USPS Express
Mail (NOT UPS). The guy I talked to had never heard of Express Mail...so
there was some training involved, but after I pointed out that it was
possible, he was willing to help. It was about half the cost of FedEx or
UPS. We used Express mail so that we could track it.
The computer arrived in about two weeks.
Hurdle #2:
First thing I noticed is that it didn't have a floppy drive. I went back to
the website and sure enough it doesn't list it as an item of the sale...oh
well...didn't really need one anyway.
I turned the computer on and it came up without a lick of trouble...in fact
it used DHCP to get my IP address from GCI and VIOLA! I was connected. That
is were the fun began.
I tried to download some packages from the Click-n-run site, however, I
couldn't get registered. After fiddling around with that a while I decided
I really didn't like Lindows any way. I did find the apt tool and it was
kinda fun to play with....now I need to get it working on my RedHat box.
I installed RedHat on the machine with KDE. I like KDE...it has some nice
features. I am excited about Gnome 2.0, however. I did have some trouble
during the setup, setting the resolution..I had to settle for 800x600 but
when the machine came back up, all was well. the sound configured right out
of the box as well. Nice!
OK...I bought a copy of Win4Lin....I know there a few people on the list
that will frown at this, but I needed to be able to use Quicken until I can
get Gnu-Cash running. I ran into a snag installing Win98, because I had an
upgrade version. However, I was able to take another CD and copy the
bootimg.bin file to a directory. Then when Win4Lin asked for the boot
diskette...I pointed to the image file. This worked famously. Of course I
still had to have my original Win95 disk so it could verify that I wasn't
trying to use an upgrade CD on a fresh machine....sheeesh!
I installed OpenOffice from the CD's we have been handing out and Red-Carpet
to help me install other packages I might need. RedHat 7.3 comes with
Evolution, so I didn't have to fiddle too much with that.
Hurdle #3:
On my old machine I had a Zip 650/Cd-RW(USB) a Zip 100 (parallel), a pilot
cradle, and a HP 540 printer.
At first the Zip 100 wouldn't work, so I had to hunt around to find an
answer...basically you need to add these lines to your modules.conf file:
alias block-major-8 ppa
add above ppa sd_mod
Then the zip drive showed up as /dev/sda and I mounted /dev/sda4 to
/mnt/zip.
Of course, if I wanted to burn CD's I also had to add the stuff to the
kernel line and modules.conf.
put this in the append= if using LILO or at the end of the kernel line if
using grub:
hdc=ide-scsi
in the modules.conf add this:
options ide-cd ignore='hdc'
Now I can use xcdroast and it works great!
SETTING IT UP:
I also setup CUPS instead of LPRNG. I had read in an article that RedHat
8.0 is going to use CUPS, so I thought I better learn how it works. I like
it. It was relatively straight forward to setup.
Audio CD's worked on the spot. No need to fiddle at all. I like that.
If I had a DVD player, I would have talked about that...anyone care to
donate? :)
This was my first real experience in setting up all the things I wanted to
use without logging in as the root user. It presented some interesting
problems, but I am worked through most of them.
I will keep everyone posted on how my wife is liking the new system. We
have already bumped up against the usual requests for different fonts and
changing the screen colors, etc.
One thing is for sure...in Win4Lin, Windows98 is TONS faster. There is no
direct-x support or USB support, however, I can still see both CD-Roms and
the zip drive...so no real loss there. I haven't yet tried her Sony-mp3
stick that uses USB, but I am betting someone has written a driver for it to
work.
Recommendations:
I don't feel comfortable making a recommendation about buying the Walmart
PC's...certainly not Lindows. I think it is a good machine, don't get me
wrong, although you may spend about $50-$100 more to get one locally, it
seems like it would be a lot less hassle.
Make sure you let your wife...or significant other... know what you are
planning to do...I didn't really do that in this case....luckily for me, my
wife is a great gal and understanding of my need to tinker.
I'm sure there are great things to be said about Mandrake, SUSE and Debian
as well...don't take my using RedHat as a dislike of the others. It is just
what I started with and works well for me.
I will be adding my own mail server and then the IMP interface so I can get
my mail from wherever. The ISP we use offer's that kind of service, but I
have a bunch of different accounts and I want the mail to be sorted and
virus free before I look at.
Eventually we will be networking the Old computer and the new computer,
setting up a firewall, etc.
I hope this was informative.
Mike Barsalou
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Fri Aug 02 2002 - 17:56:08 AKDT