[NBLUG/talk] Hello

[Kyle Rankin]

On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 08:44:36AM -0800, Art Hampton wrote:
> OK. I'm tired of showing up at the nblug meetings and sitting quietly and
> enjoying the show. Maybe I can expose myself a bit and get more involved
> using this venue. Or maybe this is the wrong place for that and I'll get
> whacked. Whatever. Is there a repository somewhere of previous posts to this
> list so that a I can review what has been hashed over previously and not
> repeat all that?

Hi Art, welcome,

Here's the link to our talk list archives: 

http://nblug.org/pipermail/talk/

> 
> Just let me remark that I have a dual P3 machine which a friend and I put
> together a few years ago for editing video. It had to be fast and have fast
> scsi drives in order to do that job. It has 256 Meg of ram. It was a killer
> machine in its day. I have of course upgraded to a P4 and WXP to run
> Premiere and Photoshop. But I don't want to surf the web with Microsoft's
> crappy unsecure OS, so I use Linux on the P3. I've been running Ubuntu,
> which seemed like a reasonable release (Hoary). About a week or so ago I
> went to update my system and wound up with Breezy. Breezy almost killed my
> system. What was a reasonably brisk machine now is a slow slug. C'mon!! What
> the F is going on here? All I do is a little typing, a spreadsheet now and
> then and surf a bit. What is the advantage of the new and bloated OS? When
> Unix was invented did they have machines with 256 megabytes of ram? I don't
> think so...

True, they didn't have machines with 256MB of RAM back in the early days of
UNIX, but then again they also seemed to enjoy twm and CDE (no offense to
any twm and CDE fans on the list). The two main desktop environments on
Linux these days, Gnome and KDE, both really like a lot of RAM (I'd say
384-512MB if you can). There are plenty of alternative window managers,
though, that require less RAM and are much more response than those two. We
had a thread going on the talk list last week or the week before about a
number of them, but some of the more popular ones are xfce, fluxbox,
openbox, enlightenment, fvwm, and window maker.

> 
> My Commodore 64 almost worked better. So I'm exploring Morphix which I
> learned about from Kyle Rankin's lovely book, Knoppix Hacks. I'm looking for
> a simple system which will let me type and see what I'm typing. At times
> using Badger I'm looking at a dead screen while I type into the buffer,
> trying to not make any mistakes. Got to be a better way. End of rant.
> 
> Question - is there a place to check on what hardware works best with Linux?
> I'd like to get a dvd burner which is fast and dependable with Linux. It
> seems to me that if a hardware manufacturer or VAR provided great open
> source drivers for their equipment they would have a usable niche that the
> competition is avoiding. This has no doubt already been discussed to death.
> 
> Art

Honestly, basically all of the DVD burners that you are going to get should
work fine under Linux. The one that came with my laptop worked without a
hitch. For your desktop machine, I would just recommend bumping up to 512MB
RAM--it'll make quite a difference.


-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org