The Tao of Walking Ridge

My subtitle for this article is “The Linux Chronicles”.

I became so impressed by the Linux server software, that I decided to try and go totally open source. I have an IBM Thinkpad 600X and I decided to put Linux on it and see if I could get it to fire up. There is the potential advantage of getting it to run faster. Especially if I can tweak the operating system to do exactly what I want to do. And I have a pretty specific and finite number of things I want to do with my laptop.

One is be able to update this blog on the road. I have a Verizon aircard, and together with the laptop this should be a piece of cake. Especially since now the server has the necessary software application. Before, I had Microsoft FrontPage on my machine and used that to keep up WalkingRidge.com. Now, I just need a browser. Strip that down to only what I need, and this could work better. The seemingly subtle change to server side applications really has advantages on laptops (when you can connect to the internet).

The other thing I use the laptop for is dragging video files off of the thumbdrive kite video camera I have. This may need a Windows OS, so I may go dual boot. Also, looking at RAW files from my Nikon. I need not edit them on the road, but I want to be able to proof them. I figure the other basic stuff like work processing and emails should be a snap to do in Linux.

So, decision number one is which Linux OS for a 600X. This distro selector was great. First of all, I love the name “distro” because it is like “bistro”. It stands for distribution, essentially version. Second, the selector considers many. And for my compudinosaur it recommended OpenSuSe which I had never heard of. It weeded out distros that may be too much for the 600X. Another option was Fedora, but it would require more expertise. I can usually figure stuff out, but decided on the OpenSuSe.

Next decision is which desktop. Wow. Choices. Here, I chose GNOME because it was less resource intensive than KDE. In general, the GNOME OpenSuse distro got high marks for stability and ease of installation. We will find out just what that means next

       - the Muse

Tags: Linux

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.