Monday, January 09, 2006

Quiet, but not still

A lot of time has past since my last post, but that doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything. Of course illness and holidays make it all that much more challenging.

I manged to get the Windows 2000 working fine, and installed some programs (Open Office 2.0, Gaim, Gimp, Pinnacle Studio, Firefox, etc.) to make my base-line system mostly operational. So I turned my attention to figuring out what I need.

Ultimately, I need to have the system be able to do what I need and the first step is to determine what it is I need it to do!

NEEDS

I have come to the realization that my biggest culprit in making the system unstable, bloated and otherwise troublesome is .. me. So I need to stay focused on what the users will use it for. This includes:
  • CD/DVD Burning (CD-RW/DVD+R drive)
  • Web Browser (currently using Firefox)
  • Email Client (currently using Thunderbird)
  • Instant Messenger
  • Office (esp. Word Processor)
  • Desktop Publisher
  • Image Editor
  • DV Editing
  • Video Player
  • Picture Album
  • (MP3) Music Player
  • Web site manager
These don't look to be anything exotic, or more than general home computer uses so it isn't difficult to find a program to fit. This makes it easy, and when this is all complete I will be able to use the Sony to install and use the programs I am interested in that nobody else in the house has a need, such as Mono & Monodevelop, Quanta Plus/Bluefish, Apache, MySQL, Povray, and such.

My other concerns include what the users will not see; patches and keeping the system up-to-date. I also want to make sure I can easily install programs in the future without destabalizing the system or screwing anything up! This can be narrowed down to package managing system (Yast, up2date, APT-GET, Portage, Yum, etc.). This piece, though, is more specific to the distro.

In the past couple of months I took the opportunity to install and try out 2 distros noted for their hardware detection; SuSE and Ubuntu. After the problems I've had before with getting the printer, scanner, scroll mouse and sound working (especially all at the same time) I liked the idea of having the system do that for me.


That, though, should be my next post.