[wellylug] Hi

[Steve Withers]

antony wardle wrote:
> 
> Well, I might have to rethink my thoughts on linux
> as a home machine.
> 
> After having windows pc die on my, I decided to try out mandrake 7.2
> and so far I have been pretty impressed.

Linux is closer now to be ing a viable, general purpose OS than it ever
has been. 

> It has managed to auto detect my usb mouse, my sound card (winME couldn't do
> that) and my video card. And as for the internet, all I had
> to do was enter my password and phone number, and I was away.

Yep.....still some device drivers missing....(GeForce 2 MX), but it got
just about every other thing right. 

> all pretty painless. Still not 100% that I feel comfortable with dad having
> it on his pc, but on mine its good. I have it set up to triple boot between
> ME, w2k and linux.

I got VMware Express 2.0.3 (download from www.vmware.com) for US$79 and
let's me have a Win98SE virtual machine running on top of my RedHat
Linux 7.0 (kernel 2.4.0) system. You want to have 256MB of RAM (128MB
133Mhz SDRAMs are $150 at Quay Computers right now....my system now has
384MB). 

I run Office 2000 SR-1, Lotus Notes 5.0.6 and Lotus Smartsuite 9.5
Millenium Addition just fine. The VM has it's own IP address on my LAN
(via a bridged ethernet connection through the Linux host) and can see
and share any / all other SMB-based LAN resources. 

Sound support in the VM is best of you have a standard Sound Blaster
card set up in Linux. 

I chose VMWare over Win4Lin (despite Win4Lin having several advantages
and being faster) because VMware is much less sensitive to the kernel
you are running. Win4Lin requires patches to the kernel to work and not
all kernel levels are supported......it seemed a trickier way to go,
considering I wanted to upgrade to 2.4.0. Whereas with VMWare all I had
to do was re-run the install script and it reconfigured itself for the
new kernel....took about 30 seconds....and used all the defaults from
my previous install. 

> Is there a better alternative to netscape? I have 4.75, and I find that it
> isn't very reliable. Konqueror seems better, but doesn't handle the jave sites
> very well. I have managed to find Kmail, and Knode for email and news, and
> they remind be a bit of outlook express, so I am happy with them.

Netscape 6.0 is better in a lot of ways and worse in others. Java
support is spot on....but it has some annoying little "quirks". 

> Is there a resuming ftp client for linux like getright? I want to download
> star office, but don't want to have to try a dozen times first. Why does
> linux log me on without asking me for a password. Did I have something ticked
> by mistake when I installed it?

Linux logs you on to Linux without a password? Or to the Net? 

Steve 

-- 
Regards,

Steve Withers
swithers at paradise.net.nz

Registered Linux user #24688
http://counter.li.org