Oh yes, I had another unforgettable experience with Linux and here it goes…
My sister-in-law, Elaine, owns a Celeron 766Mhz PC with 2GB Harddisk and 64MB of RAM. Audio and video cards are built into the motherboard and so video memory is shared. Well, this setup is quite old and it runs slow even on Windows 98. When I switched to Linux, I installed Fedora Core 2 to this PC and wow, it was very very slow. And so my search for a lightweight Linux distro started.
I came across Slacware Linux which is claimed by many to be fast and stable. I went to its website - www.slackware.org - and checked. I found out that they have ZipSlack - a stripped down version of the latest OS release and it was only 47MB - zipped. ZipSlack installs on a FAT32 harddrive and requires only 100MB for installation. It was no headache. I downloaded it, unzipped the stuff and followed the instructions. In less than 15 minutes, the Celeron 766Mhz PC was running on Linux! No headaches involved.
Then I realized that it didn’t come with a GUI, so I downloaded the GUI from the Slackware download site (plus some other apps), installed them, and poof, there it goes. I never knew that installing Linux was this easy! There is one problem though, the PC reboots randomly which I don’t think is a problem with Slackware Linux but a problem with the hardware. Perhaps, the RAM needs replacement.
Here’s the setup:
ZipSlack (from Slackware 10) OS
X Graphical Unit Interface
XFCE4 as Windows Manager
Mozilla 1.7 browser
Gaim Instant Messenger
OpenOffice for Office work
Plus some games…
So that’s how things went. Now, I’m considering to use Slackware Linux as my regular distro.
After weeks of looking for a good HTML/PHP Editor for Linux, I finally decided to take another good look at
Bluefish. Now that I have a DSL connection, downloading it became trivial. There’s this nice application in Linux called apt-get. All I have to do is type the following in the console (or command prompt):
# apt-get install bluefish
And it did the rest. It downloaded the necessary files and installed it. No need to search for the download site and it’s 100% free! Next time I need to upgrade bluefish, all I need to do is type that command again and it will search for the latest update and install it. Ain’t that nice?
Now it’s time to test it.
Geez! The whole thing is a lot different than before - I’m referring to the frequent hanging of the PC. Now it works smoothly and perfectly - just the way I wanted it! I think I will stick with Bluefish for a very long time. Also, Macromedia Homesite users will find it appealing and familiar.
Good work to all the Bluefish guys and gals. Keep up!
Those who have read my previous post entitled “
When Linux Becomes a Christian Ally” knows for sure that I can’t make my Intel Pocket PC Camera work on Linux - until today! I once more got the urge of making things work when I needed to download the recent photos from
Kei’s 5th Birthday. I tried the Java Implementation by David Morgan which worked before but now no longer works (for some reason) in Fedora Core 2. I then tried tinkering around GPhoto and looked for supported cameras that uses the same chipset as my Intel Pocket PC Camera. Guess what, I found a match! The match was the “Creative PCCAM 300″ camera which uses the same spca500a chipset by Sunplus. All that was needed was this:
gphoto2 –usbid 0×8086:0×0630=0×041e:0×400a -P
That did the trick. Photos started to download and I was very very very happy. Honestly, I laughed for about 5 minutes! If you happen to have the same problem or find this post useful, please feel free to post a comment.
