Thursday, June 26, 2008

Weekend, etc.

Saturday was Jenny's birthday - Tigger and Lincoln came over, we ate cake and played boardgames... apparently that's our thing now. :)

Sunday we went over to Jenny's folks' place for home-made chili and presents. Jenny's dad took us out to see the new Indiana Jones movie, which was awesome. It was silly, but a lot of fun, and still felt like I was watching a continuation of the series (even if it has been almost 20 years...).

Jenny got a shiny new MP3 player from her dad, so I spent the next couple of days ripping CDs, making playlists and setting everything up for her. This in turn reminded me of how infuriating Windows can be.

A little while back Jenny's dad gave me her sister's old laptop when she got a new one for her birthday. It works all right, but I've been curious about giving Linux a shot and am thinking about installing it on there to try it out. I just checked out a book from the library which has a Linux demo that runs inside Windows, and I'll try that out first, see how I like it and go from there.

I also have an old laptop I got from my parents which I'm not really using for anything. I've found a couple of "light" Linux distributions that should be able to run on it, so if I end up loving this whole Linux thing, getting it up and running on this old machine might be a fun project.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Peter, check out Suse Linux, It's free and powerfull. I've used it for a few years and it's pretty stable. They also have a bootable demo that you can run from a CD. You just boot to it and you don't have to affect your hard drive in order to try it out. Find it at www.opensuse.org and the bootable CD is called LiveCD.

Peter said...

Kent - Thanks for the recommendation! I figure I'll probably end up trying out a few different distributions before I decide which one to stick with, and I'll definately give that one a try.

Anonymous said...

I'd recommend Ubuntu, which is probably the easiest Linux for non-geeks.

Specifically, check out the XUbuntu version (http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/xubuntu) which is geared towards older/slower PCs. It even includes GIMP in the base install.

It is also distributed as a live CD that you can boot from and play with before installing.

Peter said...

Dave - Yeah, another friend of mine also uses Ubuntu and recommended it as well. And I had seen XUbuntu and thought it might work really well for what I was considering. Thanks!