Started out of necessity and accident. Necessity because using some old parts that were superior to the good lady wife’s aging Dell meant that the Dell XP wasn’t going to allow itself to be installed on any motherboard that didn’t have a Dell BIOS. Even though I would have bought a new XP (albeit grudgingly) so that she could do business as usual, she wasn’t going to allow that. Besides, I’d kind of mentioned a possible alternative that cost nothing.
Accident, because there are all kinds of Linux distributions out there, and my research wasn’t exactly thorough, finding as I did, an article that listed what it considered the 5 best linux distros.
I read about each of them, and other than openSUSE, the comments made about them didn’t always sound complimentary. So without any further ado, little Susie was chosen.
I have no prior linux experience, so I just jumped in both feet first, downloaded the livecd to see if this was something that could indeed give the functionality needed. Luckily, this basically entailed my wife and daughter being able to myspace, play spider solitaire and rumblecube.
It wasn’t long before I hit the “Install” icon, and not much longer after that than my wife’s “new” machine was ready.
Other than sound, which turned out to be a red herring thanks to that message saying that sound wasn’t working, almost everything she could do before, she could do now.
The sound as it turns out, was probably working just fine from the beginning, just that in it’s previous application, I’d removed 2 jumpers from the motherboard to route sound to a case’s front panel. Locating and replacing said jumpers cured the sound (not before I wasted some of OldCPU’s time unfortunately, sorry OldCPU). Not then an issue with Susie, just with me. In my defence though (because I know you’re all calling me a tard at this point), if it wasn’t for that stupid “phonon” message, I’d have probably checked the motherboard a lot sooner. When the machine actually shows a message saying the sound isn’t working… whatever, I realise you shouldn’t believe everything you read.
I knew that Rumblecube was going to be an issue. I figured Spider Solitaire might be also, but I decided I’d most likely be able to find suitable replacements for download. Turns out, that the patience game included with the distribution, has a spider mode, so that was sorted.
It also seems, that there were a number of those nasty online browser games that the girls liked to play, and I was already aware that some of these things exclusively require Internet Explorer (something I stopped using 7 or 8 years ago anyway)
Just when I was about to tell them about the compromise they’d have to make, another accident had me stumble across Wine. Then IE4Linux. 5 minutes later, as sacrilegious as it seemed, there was an IE Icon in the desktop folder, and all those nasty little online games that they play were indeed able to be played.
There’s something else gained in this transition to openSUSE too. I cannot tell you, in especially my daughter’s pursuit of “comments” to put on her friends myspace pages, just how many times I’ve had to battle one particular virus that always managed not to be stopped by the antivirus and spyware tools, coming even from pages deemed “safe” from such things.
The virus was AV2009. This is all now a thing of the past, even if one of the sites that has it is accessed. Nothing nasty gets installed where it shouldn’t. Nothing gets installed at all.
You can actually just close the window and be done with it. No nasty happenings afterward, or on reboot. Nothing. I love that.
So it’s a good deal more secure, and I have time to actually sit here boring you all with my incessant typing instead of wrestling a virus out of xp every 6 seconds (which gets pretty tedious, as studies have proven, this is obviously interfering with my thinking about sex, which is much better than thinking about viruses)
Tonight I downloaded the 64bit DVD version of openSUSE for my machine, after spending less than a copy of XP for a 750Gb hard drive. I changed my BIOS to use this drive as the first drive, set aside 200Gb of it for Susie 64 and that’s where I’ve typed all this from. I’ll have to keep my XP loaded drives for some things unfortunately, but for anything I can do here with Susie, I’ll gladly exit windows and do it here.
As soon as I figure out how to get this thing to play DVDs and avi’s with divx and such, that’ll be another reason not to have to use my XP install.
So my openSUSE adventure is very much in it’s infancy, but so far, it’s been a positive experience, and certainly in the case of my wife’s machine, has brought more advantages than disadvantages. It’s not Susie’s fault that I can’t just install my games and a few of my favorite apps directly, or that I can’t play my movie files or DVDs. Some of the games might run for me with Wine though (if I want to dirty my linux install with it, something I’m not sure I want to do really, it’s very nice to have something fresh to play with) and everything else I’m sure I’ll find an alternative or workaround for.
Very impressed.
