It's starting to come together.

Linspire Five-O looks really nice. The application updates have resulted in some nice new features.

My CNR list is quite large. But a lot of that was just for testing and fun. My primary applications took a few days to reinstall and set-up. I am back up and running now and that is nice.

Tried the XSane scanner software with Linspire.

It works pretty darn good. Again, one set of programs that works with many types of hardware. You don't have to install tons of gobble-de-gook software every time you plug in a new device like you do if you run Windows which also installs their Spyware and Adware. You get a clean user interface without the [I Agree] disclaimer that you have to let all companies in the world scan your your hard-drive for personal information in order to use their product. (You really should read those EULA's sometimes. You'd be surprised at what you are agreeing to.)

Now there's Cedega.

I have to admit. About every two months I turn on the W machine. Why? I need a release. Usually I just pick up the guitar. But, sometimes I fire up W to play Doom 3 and try to keep from getting massacred by monsters. You know, a game that resembles life.

Now, Linspire is offering Cedega. It's a Linux application that allows you to install your MS software and run it on your Linux machine. This one is primarily for games and supports the top 300 titles. Even though Wine and Winex allow you to install and run MS Office or other W software on Linux, perhaps they weren't as strong in game certification. I don't know. I've never had the desire to run anything from MS on Linux because I have everything I need on Linux.

But Cedega is interesting. I may try it next time I get in the mood to Doom3. It does have a price. It can be bought for $45 - $60. Free magazine, memberships, updates and forums are included.

I'm past the upgrade bugs. Linspire has been working great. Life without Microsoft is good.

Linspire Forums - A wealth of Free Help

It never ceases to to amaze me how helpful the Linspire forums are. Have a question? The answer is likely there. After years of enduring horrible internet forums and non-existent customer support from that monopoly, it is like a breath of fresh air.

Logical explanations and solutions aren't the only thing one discovers. One learns all the time just how powerful Linux is as a platform, how well it is put together, how well it is secured and just how easy it can be. This is where home computing could have been a decade ago if it wasn't for some monopoly.

Here's a new internet user fact. 69% of the internet is now powered by Linux servers. Google, Yahoo and many others use what works!

Canon Printers

I've added a lot of printers to Linux distros. They all worked great. It seemed that either the Linux community or some of the vendors had the drivers covered for every printer on the market. Then I introduced Linux to the Canon i860. There are 'some' drivers for Canon printers but the i series isn't one of them. It turns out that all Linux distros have this problem. So I went to the Canon site looking for answers. I ran into a lot of pages that read: CZ01005CRE:System failure prevents us from providing you with proper service. Please wait for a while and then reconnect to the service.

Well no help on the Canon site. My Canon scanner was recognized with no problem. So, I sent Canon a note.

Canon Responded

They basically iterated they have no intention of providing Linux support. Oh well. Epson, HP and Lexmark aren't doing it either and their printers are garbage. (At least Canon does have some good printers.) Does Microsoft have them by the balls? Technically, this is no big deal. They all develop drivers for Mac which uses Unix below the GUI. Unix and Linux both use CUPS (Common Unix Printing Subsystem). The drivers could very easily be ported to Linux. They could do this but it might make Bill mad.

I found Turboprint from a German company. I will try this out and see if it works.

New Monitor

I bought a new Samsung monitor. Its a 19 inch with built in TV tuner and PIP. The install instructions said that I MUST run the software on the disk provided before hooking up the device, and then reboot. (Yeah, just like every other device sold these days.) But, the software is only for Windows or Mac so I can't run it anyway.

Being that most devices are not shipped with drivers for Linux I am always paranoid about new hardware actually working. But my worries were unfounded. Hooked it up and whollah! I've got a nice big new monitor now. I can watch TV in my PIP corner of the screen. I haven't had to install any new software. It all just works great. That's what I love about Linux. You plug in new hardware and it works. From what I've seen, the Linux distros include more drivers than what you get with Windows (which is why you need all those Spyware disks to use their hardware with Windows and Macs).

Turboprint Works Great

Seems I forgot to follow up on the printer issue. I tried Turboprint and it works great. The installation was easy and it added a config tool and a setup tool icon on the destop. It has drivers for the latest printers and supports ink level monitoring as well as other functions and features included by the software shipped with printers.

Turboprint isn't free. You can try it for free to see if it works. In trial mode it puts the Turboprint logo on every page. It costs about $30 for a license key. That's less than most ink refills. It is definitely worth it. New drivers are always being developed and are free to download.

And here's what I really like. Most of the software that comes with printers these days includes Spyware and Adware. With Turboprint, I'll never have to use those worthless disks that come with a printer again.

Just Linuxing along here.

Everything is working fine with Linspire. Go to Michael Robertson's site for some great commentary.

I just heard that Microsoft may add PDF support next year.

Duh! We've had this with Linux for over two years now. For all of you who are thinking of buying a new PC. Demand a Linux machine. Or go for an Apple. Windows is a loser.

It's been a year now.

I've been using Linux and Linspire at home for over a year. I love it. It works. Great customer support from both Linspire and 3rd party software vendors. You can't get this kind of support from MS, HP, Dell, Epson, Gateway, Lexmark, Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA or anywhere else.

Played with Rosegarden.

What great midi music file editing package. More features than I ever imagined. WOW.

What a year it has been! My Reflections!

A full year of Linux at home. Stuff just works. A few bugs here and there but no big deal. There's always help in forums from the Linux community. And it just keeps getting better all the time. I renewed my Warehouse Gold membership for another $50 (regular is $20). Almost 300 new downloads were added to the warehouse in the last year.

Happy New Year!

I tried a greeting card software package called Kreeting. It was developed in Japan. It wasn't ready for prime time so I deleted it. But hey, it was free so nothing lost but a little time on the venture. Maybe in another year it will be better.

Helped a friend get set up with a new Linspire machine from Fry's

Took about 3 hours but got a lot accomplished. Internet was set up. Email was set up. Address books moved over. Browser was set up.

How did YOUR last Windows upgrade from an old machine to a new one go? Lose anything?

I truly believe that if you can manage a MS to MS upgrade you can manage an upgrade from MS to Linux. It is so much more intuitive. Current Linux programs handle your previous Windows files better than Windows does. It's amazing. In Windows, if you receive a Word document and you only have Word for Works, it refuses to open the file because you haven't PAID Microsft for the 3 year old MS program required to open this version. At least with OpenOffice, under Linux, you can still open the file and save it as an MS file, an open-office file, a PDF or any other file type you like. It captures your data just fine which is what you want. You can reformat it from there.

The jury is still out on this one. The $200 Linux box that Fry's sells will run faster than XP on the same box but it isn't a screamer off the shelf (see my upgrades throughout this log). So for those expecting the same whamo like the last time when they plunked down $1000 for a W98 PC, it aint gonna happen.

My Linux PC isn't a screamer by some standards. It just always works all the time. That's what's important to me. Many of the things I do run faster and better. That's my experience.

OpenOffice 1.1 and StarOffice 7 (built on OO 1.1) Exploration

Played with both of these. Found some pretty neat stuff. A lot of good templates and the ability to create your own. The Presentation tools have a lot of good templates. Wish I had these years ago.

OpenOffice 2.0 and StarOffice 8 are now out. This is the dilemma. These OO 2.0 based office suites get so much better every year. Should I upgrade every six months? Didn't have this problem with Windows. We just accepted the blue-screen-of-death and waited 5 years for the upgrade or new PC that might fix it.

I think I'd rather have what keeps getting better by leaps and bounds than what breaks

Xandros machine acting weird

For some reason, maybe it was because of a year passing by, the Xandros machine started requesting a logon and password that it would not accept. It wouldn't boot up.

So decided to try Linspire on the older machine. This was an utter failure. Linspire was a lot slower and there were network programs dying during start-up. Couldn't get Linspire to use the modem no matter what on that machine. Even though the printer was listed, couldn't get that to work either. Everything else looked good but it was slower than molasses.

Found the Xandros disks and re-installed. Modem configured great. Printer configured great. Went into OpenOffice and printed a document on the ol' Epson. The Xandros desktop was even nicer than before on the new flatscreen monitor.

Conclusion: Xandros will work on more machines than Linspire will. And it will run a lot faster than Linspire. Linspire runs great on my other machine but I am beginning to think that Xandros may be a better way to go for many first-time Linux users. In the install arena, Xandros beats Linspire in every respect. Xandros is also 3 times faster than Linspire in almost every aspect. It will run faster than Windows on any platform. Linspire, though more reliable than Windows, doesn't have the speed increase one would expect.

Opera

Decided to try the Opera web browser for Linux on Linspire.

Looks good so far but will take some playing with.

Opera

I'm not sold on Opera. It's not faster than Firefox. Sometimes it loses track of the internet connection and 404s. Still has some bugs.

I don't know how well it works under Windows or Mac since I do not run those. Firefox is still my browser of choice.

DSL and routers

I have a new project.

I'm going to test various DSL routers and modems with Linux. I'll let you know the results. The biggest pain in the butt so far has been the phone companies.

Thought I had a problem

Time to unload the camera with 305 images on it. Using LPhoto, I clicked on delete after doing the import.

Then I noticed I only had imported 226 images. ??? Uh Oh! Did I hit some kind of limit?

After going through the photo library I realized that I must have done an import without doing a delete when the camera had 79 photos on it. Lphoto was smart enough not to import what I had already imported. Whew...

On Linspire, this was too freakin' easy

Time to hook up DSL and a router. Decided to practice first on a Windows XP machine. After about an hour of software loads I still couldn't get ethernet card that was pre-installed on that machine to work. Troubleshooting said it was OK but it wasn't. Finally got XP to work with a DSL USB connection.

Now to try this on Linspire.

I plugged in the ethernet cable, opened up a browser window and was surfing immediately. I'll take the two minute solution over the two hour one any day.

Too much to report.

DSL is woking better on Linux than it does on Windows (I had to test this). I downloaded 17 program updates to (Linux) software I run. It just keeps getting better. Also downloaded KGuitar and the Hydrogen Drum Machine software. This stuff is pretty cool. I'll report more later when I am not having as much fun playing with it. This Linux software just keeps getting better.

GoDaddy goes pro-Microshaft. Moves millions of domains from Linux to Microsoft servers.

What they didn't mention is that these were "parked" domains. Many of them set up to be ad pages loaded with all kinds of malicious adware, spyware and trojans.

Need to host malware? Then you need a Windows server!

Wireless Internet on a Linux machine.

I really wanted to get the Xandros Linux machine working with DSL without running wires to another part of the house. There are literally thousands of forums available on the best way to do this. So much so it can get confusing. Most hardware vendors adamantly REFUSE to support Linux (and I suspect that they get brownie points from Redmond for doing so).

But, as usual, it turns out that even though the hardware vendors refuse to support Linux, Linux marches right along and supports the hardware anyway (without any help from the vendors).

I installed a newer D-Link wireless adapter, set up the WEP and other parameters. And the device took off as if by magic.

I didn't need to use the the disk that came with the hardware saving myself 20 meg of hard disk space loaded with Windblows spyware and adware. I didn't even need THE DRIVER which incidentally is now cleverly hidden in a Windoze executable. Linux does have utilities to convert drivers but I didn't need them. The vendors can try to hide their drivers but resistance is futile.

Just an overdue update.

Not much to report though. Linux is running smoothly around here.

It does everything I need it to do and more. What can I say?

Got an idea. Wanna see my current Linspire Desktop?

Then tell me there is no software for Linux.

My Linspire Desktop

Stardate 60177.4 Time to update the crew.

The lack of negative events must have the crew on edge.
All the ships computers are working flawlessy under Linux.
The Master Control Program remains under our control.
Everything is functioning without problems. Your Linux efforts have paid off immeasurably.

Had the chance in the last few weeks to install both Xandros and Linspire on a 5 year old Dell and a new Dell laptop.

Very interesting. Everything worked flawlessly. What did this prove? It proved that when these Windows PCs got all messed up, it was Windows (and not the hardware someone paid $1000 for) that was the problem.

Found a neat little thing in Linspire (or the common KDE ).

Very interesting. Ever have a time when the system freezes up? It's waiting for something but you don't know what? In many cases, just use the alt key to cycle through the windows until you get to the one holding the lock on your system. Click yeah or neah and the system resumes.

Tip

My recommendation is this. Buy the boxed Linspire or Xandros distro. Either, install it on a current or old PC and try it out or have a PC built by the local PC guys with everything you want (except the $100 extra which goes to Microsoft) and then installing Linspire or Xandros on the new PC. Just pop in the disk, click OK about 5 times.
Another option is to buy Xandros. It has a great installation program that will partition your hard drive and give you a dual-boot option so that you can choose to run your old Windows or your new Xandros Linux distro. And you still have access to all of your old Windows files that you can open with OpenOffice or the Linux version of AdobeAcrobat, etc.