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Journal Sloppy's Journal: Have you ever seen a communist drink a glass of water? 13

Journal by Sloppy
Well, this Saturday I start my epic vacation: Oklahoma City, then St Louis, then several days in Chicago for CMF4, then Kansas City, then .. I dunno, maybe I should come home. Or maybe I'll go to Denver.

Er, anyway, I long ago decided I need a portable computer for keeping in touch while on the road. Using 3rd party computers just isn't cool, because typing your access credentials into an untrusted computer just ain't right .. no, I'm not really paranoid, but it's the principle, ya know?

I looked at things as small as Zaurus, and as "large" (yeah, right) as 12" Powerbook. But in the end, I went in between. I just got my Fujitsu Lifebook P1120 in the mail today. It's tiny (8.9" screen) but not as small as a handheld, so it won't fit in a pocket. That's a slight bummer, but other than that, it should be ok.

And I just realized something: I lost my Microsoft Virginity. I have never bought Windows before now, even indirectly. The last time I owned a computer that had any Microsoft stuff on it, was my C64 with its Microsoft-crafted BASIC interpreter. (And heck, my parents bought that, not me.) All my previous x86 machines were built from parts. This thing supposedly came with Windows preloaded, and although I'll never see it, I can be counted in some database as "another satisfied customer." And believe me, it's true: Windows was totally painless. It did not get in the way at all, when I deleted its partition.

I'm taking a break from my usual Gentoo zealotry, and I'm going to try out Mandrake. It's installing right now. The real reason for this, it that installing Gentoo without a CDROM is a bitch! Except for the HD, all this machine can boot off is network and floppy. It won't boot off a USB CDROM. I tried a lot of Linux boot floppies .. all I needed was something that would load the network driver, have a few utilities (wget, tar, etc) and a bash prompt, and from there I know I can get Gentoo going. So many boot floppies failed me, one way or another, and I evnetually gave up. I found out something: a lot of Linux floppy distros, use weird 1.7MB formatted floppy images: 82 tracks, 21 sectors per track. I was able to format 'em and put images onto them from another machine, but this Lifebook didn't like booting them. Some floppy images that did work, would just give me installation programs and no way out to bash, not even on other virtual consoles.

Anyway, a floppy boot for Mandrake worked fine, and now I'm downloading the packages from some ftp mirror. Maybe it'll be done tomorrow. ;-) I'll give Mandrake a fair chance. But I did leave room for a Gentoo root near the beginning of the drive, so if Mandrake cheeses me off, I'll just use it to get Stage 1 onto the other partition... or maybe OpenBSD, though probably not. Then my existing mandrake will become my new encrypted /home or something.

What a tiny little machine. The first other person who saw it was a woman, and naturally, she said "oh, how cute!" I guess size matters. Cute, huh? Can I use this computer for picking up girls? Is it like a puppy?!? Then after I have their interest with the computer, I can start talking about Linux, and describe my Mandrake-vs-Gentoo predicament. "Hey wait, why are you walking away?" Bad puppy!

Oh geez, Mandrake installer says it'll be 4 hours hours. Hm. Off to the bar.

This discussion was created by Sloppy (14984) for no Foes, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Have you ever seen a communist drink a glass of water? More

Have you ever seen a communist drink a glass of water?

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  • You are going to be driving right by me. heheheheh. :)

    I thought about taking a road trip to St. Louis this weekend to celebrate the end of the semester.

    (I go to school in Tulsa, btw)
  • Shoot sloppy, you'll miss your chance to catch Mike Black & the Stingrays in OKC -- we just happen not to be playing this week.

    gimme a shout if ya need any help in OKC. Where ya stoppin?

    griffokk at sbcglobal.net

    http:www.stingraysonline.com

    • Where ya stoppin?
      I'm staying at the Westin hotel, downtown. Got in late, but I think I'll go look for bars now, and see if I can find any live music.

      Shit, I should have asked you about that, earlier. I could have asked a local musician about bars and then had the info for sat night, and I didn't think of it in time. d'oh.

  • Isn't losing your Microsoft Virginity something like losing your Anal Virginity? ;-) Nah, seriously I was laughing when you said that Windows didn't get in the way when you deleted it.

    Anyways... Sounds like a nifty little toy, but I wouldn't buy Fujitsu anymore unless forced (or a damned good deal like 50% off or more). It's probably because I work for Fujitsu that I don't really like their products. I once bought a PC from them, 25% off... however to make it useable I had to exchange basically everyt

    • Nah, seriously I was laughing when you said that Windows didn't get in the way when you deleted it.

      Sometimes people complain about how software can be hard to uninstall with Windows, but I didn't have that problem at all! Even Internet Explorer was trivial to uninstall. Windows was very easy to work with. I should have booted it up once to see what version it was, so I could recommend that one to friends. ;-)

      Yow, your Fujitsu story is kind of scary. Don't get me down, man.

      Well, anyway, update: Mand

      • Don't worry too much about my Fujitsu experience. It is kind of my own fault. I got this machine not too expensive. They wanted to give us the possibility to have a nice machine at home. You could either choose a low-range laptop, mid-range laptop, low-end tower or mid-end tower. It was in the days where P-III 800Mhz was mid-end, so I took that. It came with Windows 98SE which I never booted in. I installed Windows 2000 because I just liked the NT-series better. That was not a smart move because the
  • There's a lot to be said for Distobutions that "just work."

    I haven't taken the Gentoo plunge, but I'm an old school Debian guy, and there's no other disto I'd use when building a server...

    In spite of my Debain fanboyhood, I'd be lying if I said it was good for laptops. Laptops are far too quirky, and I just don't have that kind of time.

    Mandrake, in the other hand, does a really good job with hardware detection, and has a pretty good user experience in general. It has all of the eye-candy (which is i

  • BTW, I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Anyone who says "Linux is hard to use" is totally full of shit. I won't pretend my Gentoo workstation is set up in a way that Joe Schmoe off the street would know what to do with it, but seeing a mostly default Mandrake 10 here... sheesh. Anyone who can figure out how to use Windows or classic MacOS (I don't have much experience with MacOS X yet) can figure out GNOME+Mandrake's tweaks.

    Getting stuff loaded is the only headache, and really, Mandrake was

    • Anyone who says "Linux is hard to use" is totally full of shit.

      Um, no.

      The fact is, if you have a system where one of the major distributions "just works" then you're fine. But there are many nooks and crannies where things DON'T "just work" on any of the major distributions. Wireless support is just one of them, but an easy example. Yes, you and I, as geeks, know that you can download drivers that will probably work from sourceforge, and maybe even resort to the Linuxant adapters for $20 in a pinch, but

      • I didn't say it's easy to install; I said it's easy to use.

        A hypothetical usage example: User wants to visit Slashdot. On Windows 98, you click an icon to launch your web browser. On MacOS 9, you click an icon to launch your web browser. On Gnome, you click an icon to launch your web browser. I haven't tried KDE lately, but I have a hunch my grandma would know what to do.

        • If it's not easy to install, it's not easy to use. Users want to change things from time to time, and if they have difficulty doing that, it's a problem. I'll leave my position at that.

  • Grr.. (Score:1)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) *
    Now I remember why I went to Gentoo and never looked back:
    # scp ...stuff ..

    Password: [types it in]
    scp: error in loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
    On Gentoo, if I have scp installed, then I know I have the fscking dependencies installed! Mandrake just lost a shitload of points on the "just works" scale. I needed scp to work.

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