Linux Monday

Linux Monday

I hit the wall of fail on one of my Linux projects: Kid Linux. Oldest son has moved back to Windows. As it often is with kids and Linux, it was a game that just won't work except in Windows, combined with a free machine that fell into our laps needing a new hard drive and a reinstall.

So I spent about five hours of Saturday night on a disk format, an XP install... upgrade to Service Pack 2... upgrade to Service Pack 3... install Firefox,antivirus, memory manager, firewall and MS Office. And after all that... the freakin' game doesn't work.

He still wants the Linux box on standby just in case. And the little guy wants Tux Paint back.

The latest Open Office, version 3.2, is out. If you're in Ubuntu, here's how to upgrade.

Command line voodoo? Sure. But after that Windows install marathon. I'll take cut and paste

tar xzvf OOo_3.2.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz

into the command line over squinting to read a 25 character Windows activation code (is that WS85B or W5BS8?)

More clips from the last couple weeks:

This guy says the best way to advocate Linux is... don't. I'm ignoring the advice, naturally.

Here's another "Best Distributions" piece, and if you're geekier than even me, advice on building your own.

Open source means freedom from 'anti-features':

“The aim was to make (the Home Basic version of Microsoft’s Vista) so bad that anyone would pay to upgrade to the next version,” he says.

Well, they succeeded in making Vista bad, at least...

This is the strategy of market segmentation — the creation of classes of user who pay different prices for what is essentially the same offering.

And stereotypes in action, or Linux not good for dating.