Dave's Blog

What Linux is missing for the home user

Linux needs:

• Clip art. There's some svg and OO.org stuff, but it is very far from a respectable collection.
  
• Smart media player (along the lines Windows Media Player). Amarok is getting there, but it's still a little buggy, doesn't support .wma and .asf files, and the 'play audio cd' feature needs to be much more obvious.
  
• something significantly functionally (not philosophically) superior to Windows. A compelling reason to switch.
  

linux

I'm home for a couple of days and my parents (and sister) were having trouble with Windows. It'd freeze/crash/BSOD fairly often. I suggested linux :-)

So last night I tried to set up a dual boot but had trouble resizing the NTFS drive. This morning I ran chkdsk on it and fixed all the problems (which I suspect caused the Windows problems too). Now it's got SuSE running just great on it. And I must admit, I'm liking SuSE a lot better than my own Gentoo box :-/. I may switch one day...

And it's been a fun little task of migrating email (outlook on WinXP to Thunderbird on linux), bookmarks (firefox Win to linux), docs (shuffle stuff around to make room for a shared FAT32 drive), and music (wma->wav->ogg). All devices (handspring, digital camera, usb pen drive, printer) worked almost flawlessly (had to create a /dev/pilot symlink). The geforce4 driver doesn't seem to stay installed though...

Amarok isn't quite as nice as windows media player and I still have to find some good tools to replace GoldWave for audio editing for my dad (he doesn't use a lot of features) but they should be pretty much all set. Let's see if they want to stay...

spiceriment

Take your favorite "tame" spice (I did cinnamon) and savor a significantly large amount (e.g. a teaspoon) of it directly. Quite a different sensation than when it's just sprinkled on a dish.

ChristianMortgages, Saving more than your soul

That's what one of my spams said today. Silly... spamming is a sin! 11th commandment, right?