[geeks] Desktops

[Chris Byrne]

A similar thing happened to me about two years ago. Windows utterly imploded
on my main machine at the time to the point where windows wouldnt properly
read the MBR or partition table. It would come up saying the MBR was
corrupted but that I could boot from the active partition, then it would
start to boot and crap out saying that the system disk didnt exist or
somesuch crap. I had data on that partition I had to recover so I stuck
another hard drive in, loaded the then current mandrake, and went to town (I
had no problem recovering the data with Linux, something I was not so
confident about with a fresh windows install).

Anyway I decided that I would just keep going with mandrake for a while. It
did everything I want, and I still had a laptop with which I could exchange
windows files if absolutely necessary (it was a few times for funky MS
Office docs). There were two reasons why I switched. One I had games I
wanted to play, and two, my wife HATED Linux in every way. She hated Linux
in the way that Linux zealots hate Microsoft and since this was her main pc
as well, after three months of her bitching at me constantly about how much
she hated it (even though she was WAY more productive, worked faster, didnt
EVER crash once in that three months etc...) I switched the system back to
windows.

Chris

> -----Original Message-----
> From: geeks-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:geeks-admin at sunhelp.org]On Behalf
> Of Mike Hebel
> Sent: 10 May 2002 00:52
> To: geeks at sunhelp.org
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Desktops
>
>
> Ryn wrote:
> >
> > Anyone completely  moved away from Winbloze? I am debating ousting
> > Win2k and converting to Gnome on Linux.
>
> As a person just forced to do the switch - why in the $DIETY didn't I do
> it sooner?
>
> My 1998 10-gig Maxtor hard drive blew two days ago.  Losing about two
> years of just downloaded stuff and a double-buttload of I.E.
> "Favorites".
>
> I find oddly that I don't miss them.
>
> Now I'm running on a 1.2gig and a 700meg in my PII-350 with SUSE 7.1
> with a 2.4 default kernel.  The machine performs much better.
>
> As for the advice.  Choose a fairly current distribution with some 2.4
> or better kernel and look _carefully_ at what kind of hardware is in
> your machine.  My Creative Labs Modem Blaster PCI is supposed to be
> supported under 2.4 kernels with HCF drivers but it doesn't work.  (I
> have the joy of retro-connecting with my old external 33.6 modem.)
>
> Then there's the ever present issue of connecting to other things in
> your house - for instance I still can't get CUPS to print to the Windows
> Postcript laser on my wife's machine and my scanner currently doesn't
> work yet.  Again, hardware issues - they come up with any operating
> system.
>
> It just occurred to me - I no longer have any windows desktop of my own
> except my gaming machine. Cool!  Next stop - RAM for the Sparc 5 and a
> configured/netbooted Javastation!
>
> Mike Hebel
>
> (Got the brick BTW - Joshua)
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