[NBLUG/talk] The Debian Way

[Walter Hansen]

Yes, yes, fighting words, I know. I'll probably even learn emacs when I
get a chance. In my view a text editor should primarily be easy to use and
focus on editing text. Simple enough to do most normal things without the
help of a manual. When vi came along I'm sure it was simple, after all it
was replacing things like edline (pain in the ass to program with). But
since that time (1975?) a lot of easier to use text editors have come
along. But vi remains on every *ix system as a tribute to our geekyness.
Why not edline? It's even more geeky. I think vi was probably the first
really usable text editor on *ix systems and everyone collectively heaved
a sigh of relief and said "I guess that will do" and nobody has had enough
motivation to replace it with something better.

KDE
No, I don't dislike KDE, I actually like it better than gnome because it's
pretty. I've just spent 99.9% of my *ix life on a terminal. I'm not used
to configuring anything under *ix GUI and it's my first real experience
with a debian system at that. I configured the resolutions by editing the
text file (with vi) and guessing what the card/monitor could support. It
didn't blow up. I think I left it at 1280x1024 as that looks pretty good
on a 17" monitor.

Now it's set up on my wifes desk and I've got to figure out how to work
the modem sometime soon. Meanwhile it takes forever to boot as some
service (probably network) is failing after two minutes of trying. Hey,
anybody know what log file gets the boot log in debian?

It's a dual boot with win2000. I'm trying to make it so that her My
Documents folder is read/writable from ether system (fat32). I almost had
that set up, but she doesn't have write permission to the directory. A
little more tinkering and I should have it. I also noticed that the
version of OpenOffice is 1.9 and I know the 2.0 version is now out. I'll
have to get her that, probably using a CD as downloading 60megs over a
modem wouldn't be much fun.

Also I found that the DVD player won't play copywrighted disks under
debian and I need some debian-dvd package. I tried to set up everything on
a fast network connection, but I missed that. I can probably use apt-get
once I figure out the modem thing. It probably won't play copyrighted
disks under windows ether as I'll probably have to get a new video driver.
I had one machine recently say "DVD is copyrighted, please remove monitor
to watch." or a very similar message that had the same meaning, what did I
expect with a win box.

My wife is all concerned that she can write books and stuff and be able to
submit them to a publisher. I showed her that she could easily write
something in OO and save it to word format. She was really pleased
although she's a little scared. Then she discovered all the arcade games
and played asteroids for a couple hours.

So far debian is not bad at all. It feels a little more rustic than RH.
>From a server standpoint I like it. I assume it works well with samba. It
looks like I may be setting up a new server for work as our
NT4(workstation) server is acting twiggy and annoying us. If I do so I'll
want to make a nice apache/mysql/samba/webmin server with some decent
speed. I've used samba on my store server for years and it seemed pretty
easy to configure. I think I ended up just using the text configuration as
it was easier to figure out. I think I'll leave our current web server up
as a ssh gateway machine so that you have to ssh into it and then ssh into
the other server. That way someone could compromise the gateway machine
and it wouldn't even matter. I'd remove samba completely from that
machine. Maybe even leave it set up as a web server so they could put up
evil stuff on a machine that's not really in use at all.

Enough rambling for this morning.....