Month: May 2002

Officially an adult

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It’s my 18th birthday!!!

Yup, I’ve turned the big 1-8 today. Marissa (my new laptop) is now up and running, though admittedly not under Windows. I decided to go ahead and install Mandrake 8.2, and I’m very impressed. The CD autoran in Windows, and gave me the option of either booting from the CD (didn’t work) or creating a boot disk and using that. Although the boot disk creation was a little difficult (I had to read the documentation to find out what to do), it was done quickly and I was able to boot into the installer.

The installer was great – the ‘express’ option take about 30 minutes and was nice and easy to understand – there was plenty of help available and no confusing dialogs. The partition manager was excellent, though I did have to say goodbye to Windows XP due to the fact that Samsung had chosen to use NTFS, which, although it is recognised by Linux, isn’t supported. But it is a new system so I wasn’t going to lose anything.
I’m using KDE as my desktop – not KDE3, since this isn’t yet included – but 2.2.2 (I think). It also comes with a full office suite, more web browsers than you can shake a stick at (including Mozilla, which loads much more quickly than its Win32 counterpart) and various other tools.

There are down sides – I couldn’t get the sound to work, and I won’t be able to use the internet for a couple of days until NTL get their act together (I’m on Marianna, the old machine), but on the whole, I’m pleased with what the Open Source community has done here.

My other presents included a laptop backpack – or rather the money for it, though I got one today from PC World. It’s great – not only will it carry the laptop but the transformer, extra mouse (which also works in Linux, despite the fact that it is USB and has a wheel) and Ethernet lead, and a great deal else. I also got a wallet (to complement my proof of age card, which arrived this morning – nice one, Portman Group) and more money. The rest of my presents will be here tomorrow when my grandparents and cousins come over for dinner.
Anyway, I’m off out for my birthday party. See you later!

Back online

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Woo! I’m back online at home! The new 17” monitor is great – it is digitally controlled (as most are nowadays) and has a very sharp display. It looks good too. It’s made by Relisys – I don’t know if it is a good make or not but York Computer Clinic, who sold it to us, say it is a very good brand.

Although I won’t be allowed to use my laptop (when it arrives) until my birthday (darn parents), I have a new gadget for it – a USB->Ethernet adaptor. It means I can use one of its USB ports to hook up to the broadband connection, or, if I end up at UMIST, their internet system. It’s made by Linksys (who I gather are a good firm when it comes to connectivity products). So why didn’t I just get an Ethernet PCMCIA card? Well, although Computer Prices UK (the service I used to find my laptop) lists such cards at prices as low as £23.85, PC World were selling LinkSys cards for a hefty £69.99. This was only £39.99, and has the added bonus that it’ll work on any machine, whether it happens to be a laptop or not. Maybe what I read in the UK PC Magazine about the demise of PCMCIA was true…

The laptop, by the way, is due to arrive on Monday or Tuesday – Comet made a cock-up so they had no delivery address or time. Fortunately, a quick phone call sorted everything out. Buying online is great, when it works, and I think this is perhaps an example where it hasn’t quite worked. Incidently my mother’s credit card company actually rang her up to ask if her card had been stolen, since she bought both the laptop and our holiday (in July) on it, and thus was out of sync of her general buying profile. So a thumbs up to the Halifax Bank for keeping an eye on credit card fraud, even if it was a false alarm.

The computing project eventually got handed in on time; in fact the network server came back up shortly after I’d posted. So now all I have to do is revise for the exam on Monday, which hopefully shouldn’t be too difficult.

In case you’re interested, I’m using a new browser – Crazy Browser. It’s actually just another front-end for the IE HTML rendering engine, but offers many more features, and is very efficient – it doesn’t take ages to load or render pages, unlike Mozilla. Though I may take a look at version 1.0 when the final release is available and the debug code has been removed – and I still have RC1 installed.

In preparation for my laptop, I’m downloading the ISOs for Mandrake Linux 8.2 – after pressure from some of the people in , I’ve finally decided to venture into the world of Linux. Mandrake is supposedly the easiest to use (or at least to set up), and from experience I know that it can co-exist with Windows, so it’s worth a try. The first CD (the installation CD) has already been downloaded and burnt to CD, and I have 57% of CD2 (the supplementary CD). I’ll probably also get CD3 too, so that I actually have some programs to run; it includes StarOffice, which, along with Open Office, may be the program that pulls me away from the MS suites. Even with a student discount, £110 is still too much for Office XP.

Sorry for the long post – a week without blogging has given me too many ideas to post about 🙂 . See you later!

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