Cracked Linux machine!
Submitted by rich_c on June 12, 2010 - 6:05am
I just read a pretty plausible sounding account on the Mepislovers forum of a Mepis box getting cracked.
rich_c's blog
Further phone adventures.
Submitted by rich_c on April 19, 2010 - 7:21am
Last night I managed to get my Nokia N900 tethered to my Mepis 8.0 laptop. It was one of those things where little bits of info from various sources slowly slotted together until all the promising signs of progress came together in a proper network connection!
Adventures with my new phone.
Submitted by rich_c on February 12, 2010 - 7:15am
Today I took delivery of a shiny new Nokia N900. I have to say, my impressions over the first hour or so of using it are that I made the right choice.
I can't imagine any other smart phone that would let me run Openoffice.org remotely from my desktop machine without some serious hacking,not by just installing ssh!
Congratulations Nokia, with this one you seem to have embraced the Linux spirit of enabling users to do what they want! This entry was made from my N900 by the way.
Total Cost of Ownership
Submitted by rich_c on December 4, 2009 - 4:39am
Among my web pages is a piece comparing Linux and Windows. In it, I mention TCO. To me, Linux costs a lot less to maintain. I just went through a practical example of that theory.
I've just had a family laptop 'return to base' to make sure it's all up to date and virus free. I set it up as dual boot with Vista (Pre-installed.) and Mepis 8. This laptop hardly ever gets used on the internet, so the updates that needed applying went back to before Vista SP2 was generally available. I fired up the Vista partition first... It took 2-3 hours and more reboots than I cared to count to get Windows up to date. While this was going on, I upgraded Firefox and one or two other apps. Probably not best practice while Windows was doing it's thing, especially as one of the changes I made was to remove AVG and install a version of McAfee that comes included in my ISP subscription. (So, a little monetary cost there...) In summary, half an afternoon of my time and a small outlay of actual money.
Then on to the Mepis partition. I fired up Synaptic, hit reload, marked all upgrades and applied the changes. Synaptic downloaded the updates for the operating system AND installed apps in about the time it took the vista partition to 'do' one of the update/reboot cycles. Say, 15-20 mins? That done, I set about making a few enhancements like adding the Vista partition to fstab and putting a shortcut on the desktop to the Users directory to make sharing files between Mepis and Vista that little bit easier. I haven't attempted to enable Vista so that it'll see files from the Mepis partition. That would involve downloading and installing an app & I feel I've wasted enough time in the Vista environment to mess with that! Summary of the cost of the Mepis update? Enough time to make and enjoy a leisurely cup of tea while updates were applying, then maybe another hour tweaking things to make life even easier! Oh, and I recently made a donation in the community end of 2009 funds drive.
Stats compiled from server logs.
Submitted by rich_c on November 20, 2009 - 4:51pm
I just saw an article on TuxRadar about some stats from their web server logs. The amount of Windows machines visiting a Linux site was noted. I'd guess you'd find similar for this site! (That'd make an interesting blog post - hint...) What at first might seem a bit odd is, however, easily explained...
It all boils down to reluctant Windows users at work! In fact, I'm posting this from IE6 on an XP machine. Suffice to say, I'd rather be at home using my Mepis box! I wonder how much Windows 'desktop market share' is enforced?
