My Story: A Year With Dapper Drake
I first began using PCs on an old Amstrad PC1640 DOS 3 and 640k memory, 30MB HD and a Hercules green screen graphics card. Crappy kit, I agree, but it gave me a taste for PC's and I went on to build my first 386, 486, P100, P166, Celeron 400 and current Windows box Celeron 2.4HZ sitting next to a lovely 3.06GHZ Celeron Dapper machine.
Written by Steve Thompson
Well, here's my story, I think the first Distro I ever tried was Red Hat, dunno which version, but it was about 12 plus years ago, as my first son had not yet arrived on the scene. It installed with a command-line interface as I recall -- not very friendly. I dabbled with it on an old Celeron 233 for a few months eventually giving up as I couldn't get it to see any of my hardware. My next attempt was Open Caldera (What ever happened to them?). This was a wonderful Installer; you could play Tetris while installing! It installed pretty well, seeing most hardware, but it had a reoccurring problem of all the distros I tried in the 90's... KDE worked great, but when I quit the gui when shutting down, or for other reasons, the command-line totally corrupted on the screen, and couldn't be read. You could still type commands, and they would run, but nothing intelligible in the terminal. This put paid to my Linux endeavours for several years, as a new baby made such demands upon me, that sleep was a more important issue than cracking the technicalities of Open Caldera!
My second bite of the Linux cherry was the Live distro Slax, a really nice Linux which was released as a Live CD only, but a lot of the guys using it (including me) were very keen to do a hard disk install. Maybe I should add at this point that I have worked in Educational IT Support for 14 years now and at my last job, when I was on the Help Desk, there was a lot of time in front of a PC when I wasn't doing much, and it was a great excuse to play with a Linux Live CD! I fiddled with Slax for about 18 months on an old 733 Celeron I has liberated from a dusty store cupboard into the shining light of a Linux install. I had it running Pan for Email and Newsgroups, a very nice little program, very similar to Forte's Agent which I had run in Windows since Windows 3.11. The biggest problem I had on the Slax box was my shared Internet connection, which I was sharing a dialup on through a switch box, but I was using AnalogX's proxy program to share the connection with my son's Windows 3.11 machine. This caused nightmares as Pan didn't at all like using a proxy.
After playing with many live CDs, I downloaded Dapper, and realising it wasn't a live CD, I stuck it in my office drawer and forgot about it for a couple of months. Finding myself with some time on my hands one weekend, I decided to install Dapper to an old 1.1 GHz AMD Duron I had kicking around after upgrading my son to a faster machine. Wow! I was impressed! all the hardware was detected, including sound and video, and even the Internet came straight on courtesy of my wired router. That was it, I had the bug again big-time! I spent a lot of my spare time from this moment on tweaking my little Dapper One Gig to my hearts content. After about four months I decided it was perfect apart from one thing – More power Scottie! Yep, that's right, I decided to build a dedicated brand-new Linux Dapper machine and so I did. I'm writing this story on it now. Its got a rather cheapo Asrock motherboard £34.00 or so, 3.06 Ghz Celeron – nice, half a gig memory, 250MB hard disk, Aopen DVD ROM and Pioneer DVD writer. Video is an Onboard Intel 82865 as the rubbish Asrock motherboard wont take any AGP video card I have tried – just won't boot up. I've been trying to use the Dapper machine for everything I did on Windows, and for the main part, I think I've succeeded. Video conversion & VCD authoring is better than Windows applications allowed; I always got some drifting in the sync between video and sound in TmpegENC and Nero. Hasn't been a problem in Avidemux & K3b.
There were some initial problems with flashplayer in Firefox as I had both the Dapper Repo install and a manually installed latest version from Mozilla, it seemed to want to install flashplayer to the Dapper install rather than mine. I also got an unresolved problem with Java in Firefox – and when I did some forced upgrades of Java runtime libraries, it killed one of my favourite programs – Democracy TV. That took some serious tweaking and requests to the Ubuntu forums to fix! I'm still trying to get my head around using Cron to schedule programs to run on a schedule. Various people has suggested things to try, but the schedules never kick off. I'm thinking of thing like DemocracyTV and Icepodder for all my Podcasts. Windows scheduler is SO much easier – don't need a brain to use it, just a clock! Ubuntu's (and other distros') biggest failing is sound editing. After using Adobe Audition I found the Linux equivalents weak to say the least. Audacity is a basic editor of audio files, but is light-years behind Audition. I use Mozilla Thunderbird for email on both Windows and Dapper, so no complaints there. I use Firefox in both, occasionally along with Opera. Beep Media player for mp3s, Ktorrent for a nice scheduleable torrent app, Kget for use with Flashgot covers my cloning of my Windows program Getright and finally Video Lan Player for all my video format playing. So that about sums it up so far for me. If only they could make cron a bit easier to use and write a really good audio editor, I could throw my Windows XP disk into the games box along with all the PS1 discs!
