All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Microsoft-free computer

VSarkiss on 2003-04-22T14:14:52

When I originally built the PC I'm using, I set it up to dual boot Windows 2000 and Linux (I think I had a Mandrake distro at the time).

Last year my hard disk developed bad blocks, and started making occasional electric-shaver noises. I bought a new 100 GB unit, and installed both in the machine so I could transfer files over at my leisure. I loaded Red Hat 7.3 on the new disk and put the old one on the second IDE adapter. After a few minutes of futzing around, I couldn't figure out how to make GRUB boot Win2K, so I left it like it was, thinking I'd come back to it "one of these days".

This weekend I blew away the Windows partition, realizing if I hadn't booted to Windows in a year, I probably never would again. So now I have a spanking clean 30 GB /misc partition.

Mmm... MP3s...

Can you use Linux in Armenian?

avik on 2003-04-23T01:43:23

Off topic, but I was just wondering if you, assuming you were interested in it and tried it, were successful to use configure Mandrake to read and write Armenian... I tried, but my attempts failed. What do you use Linux for primarely?

I experimented with ASPLinux distro until it reached version 7.3 and zapped it. It is probably good for something, but I found it rather hard to configure and use, and went to Win2K. So far so good.

Re:Can you use Linux in Armenian?

VSarkiss on 2003-04-23T02:51:00

No, I didn't try it, at least not very hard. I tried to install an Armenian font once, but I got frustrated with it. I made a little progress with "Papazian layout" of the keyboard, but it took me so long to write anything that I just gave up.

I use the box for some development (Perl and databases) and also for day-to-day use: email, browsing, document preparation (all my company invoices and accounts are on it). I started with Linux mainly because it supported development so well and so cheaply. Plus I'm an old Unix guy. Now I like having more choices in browsers, email clients, and also freeing myself from Microsoft shackles. ;-)

Re:Can you use Linux in Armenian?

avik on 2003-04-24T03:11:11

I wish one day someone would find out a way out of all that charset/encoding/keyboard mess that Armenian language, unfortuately, inherited from our smart developers. Other languages have this problem as well, while "menq qich enq, baic hye enq".

You are right about Microsoft. I use it only because I cannot use Linux at work, and Linux seems to be little hart for my laptop to chew. But as distributions get better and new drivers are added, hopefully, we'll get some wonderfully useful Linux distribution some day... Hope it will still be needed.