Another underwhelming blog….

Joy

Liz finally got her new laptop, which means that I've inherited her old one. It's not much in comparison, with only 1/6 of the processor, 1/8 as much RAM, and 1/15 the hard drive space. Despite the dismal numbers, it's still a working computer, and with the wireless PCMCIA network card we bought for $8, it gives me access to the web from any room in the house (or even the back porch).

So my project for the past 48 hours has been to rid this machine (That's right... this blog is being authored on my newly acquired laptop) of the resource hogging Windows OS (Win2k) we were running and install a nice lightweight Linux distribution on her. After a little googling, I settled upon VectorLinux, which is specifically made to run on older machines. Having installed several flavors of linux on several machines now, I was not exactly expecting this to work right the first time. Almost always, the video, sound, mouse, or network device doesn't work properly without a little post-install love and care. I was pleasantly surprised, though, at the end of my installation. I was blessed with wireless internet access from the first time I logged in after the install.

The video, on the other hand, took some effort. When I logged in to the command prompt I got beautiful color 1024x768 display. When I logged into the gui, however, I was stuck with crummy 640x480 graphics. I spent most of the evening googling and learning about XFree86 and it's configuration files, and the neomagic video card used by this laptop, and about window managers for linux. My struggle continued through the night (I actually had dream/nightmares about the state of this machine as I slept) and into the morning. I surfed the net, looking for the information that would be the key to my success, as Liz (when she finally woke up) lay next to me watching episodes of Everwood on the beautiful display of her superior laptop. I was sidetracked for a while, when I stumbled upon information about a special XF86 config file specifically for the NeoMagic card, but eventually discovered that this config file was outdated by later versions of XFree86 which directly support the card. So I grabbed and installed the latest version of XF86, and hit paydirt... almost

The new version of XF86 did start in beautiful 16bit 1024x768 glory, but not into the default vectorlinux window manager menu I was expecting. Rather, it booted into the default XF86 XWindows which, frankly, sucks. So, I read a little more, did some digging around in the X11R6/bin folder, set up my <$home>/.xinitrc config file, and now am running IceWM as my window manager. It's a little different than the KDE interface that has been the default window manager on every other version of linux I've installed, but it looks much better than the Windows interface, and runs very quickly considering the machine that's running it.

So, here we are. I'm reading email from my home and work address. I'm on Aim and have already chatted with several people. I'm blogging (for the first time in a long time), and I'm quite pleased with my technical prowess. Pure joy!