Janette’s Linux Odyssey
Janette’s new laptop is here, and it’s a nice one. It’s under 5 pounds, has a 12 in. screen (with 1024×768), is an Athlon XP-M 1600, 30 GB, 512 MB, builtin 802.11b, DVD/CD-RW, and so on. And, it was cheap, only $940, which is $600 less than any other laptop with the size/featureset combo. Really cool. I wish I’d known about it when I got mine.
Anyway, she wanted to run Linux on it. There are a number of reasons, but I think the deciding factor was the SameGnome game. She may be the only person in the history of computing to switch to Linux for the games.
The first install of Gentoo was a disaster for her. Random things were crashing right and left. Distributed builds didn’t work. The synaptics driver wouldn’t load. Firefox was crashing. OpenOffice wouldn’t start. Just horrible. My guess is that we got a bum stage 1 tarball, and the compiler or the glibc was borked. Just painful. And, nothing like that has ever happened to me before.
So, I decided we should reinstall from the GRP (prebuilt packages) disks. A couple of hours laster (downloading two ISOs takes a while), we had a full install, minus OpenOffice. Everything worked great. We emerged Ximian’s verison of OpenOffice, and all is now working great. Phew!
Now, we’ll see how Janette gets along in Linux.
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