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.