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desperanceI don't (you may have noticed) much like bandwagons, following the crowd, marching in step. That kinda thing.
I am extremely, some would say excessively, sometimes self-harmingly loyal.
Change makes me anxious; I will put up with a lot of sub-optimal stuff rather than risk what is new and might be better, might be wonderfully better but, y'know. Might not work. Might be calamitous. Like that.
So. I have spent - oh, all the years since I got broadband, which is many - saying that I really don't need wifi; when I'm working, when I'm using a computer for anything I'm always on the desktop, so why do I need wifi? Ect ect.
Turns out that I needed wifi for Other People, who are a goodness.
So. Wifi was achieved, and I have been ill, and a few days ago I was sitting on the sofa shivering mightily over the gas-fire and wanting to check my e-mail and not wanting to drag my achy body upstairs into the cold, and I thought to myself, "Y'know what, self? I have wifi now. If I weren't pinned into this chair by the contentment of a cat, I could just reach for the Laptop of Heavenly Perfection and check my e-mail right here, right now. And read LJ, that too. And..."
And of course I could do none of that, on account of pinnage and the importance of not disrupting contentment; but the thought was there.
Hold that thought.
The Laptop of Heavenly Perfection, being Sony, is full of non-standard hardwares and cryptic components. I dual-boot it with the Windows that it came with, which is Vista (yes, I know: but I don't use Windows, so it doesn't matter to me) [hold that thought] and Linux, as is my custom. Only, I am a Suse man by long habit, and the version of Suse that I tried on the LHP gave me no visuals at all, it just couldn't drive the screen. So - following a recommendation from this here flist - I fell back on Mepis. Which worked, and continues to work, fine, except that it can't run the wifi. If I want wifi, I have to boot Windows.
Hold that thought.
Working as I do, many mornings in the Lit & Phil and evenings & weekends back here, I am necessarily always shifting files between laptop and desktop. Sometimes I do this physically, via a USB memory stick; sometimes I do it electronically, via my G-mail account.
Last week, in pursuit of other options, I started playing with Dropbox. A self-sync'ing storage system, up in the clouds: how useful is that?
Except that Dropbox doesn't want to install in a Suse/KDE system, such as I am running here. The download options for Linux are Ubuntu or Fedora (or compile-from-source, but that won't either; it needs Gnome packages and pathways that just aren't there). This could be fixed, I think, with fiddling; but I keep putting it off.
At the moment I have Dropbox on all my Windows installations, so I find myself actually working in Windows when I'm at the Lit & Phil, to take advantage of that with their wifi; and when I come home I download the new files from the Dropbox website. Which works, but is an extra step and inherently sub-optimal.
Hold that thought.
This week, being sick, I have been noodling with the LHP, with wifi, with Windows...
This morning I downloaded an ISO image of Ubuntu, burned a CD, ran it live in the LHP.
Works fine. Wifi and all, straight in there.
Um.
I'm a Suse/KDE man to my bones. I don't like change. Ubuntu is way too popular for me and I've never used Gnome.
But: wifi. Dropbox. Convenience. Workingness. Newstuff to play with...
I think, I think I am going to blitz Mepis, install Ubuntu and see how we go. If we go well, I might even make the same change on the desktop here, just for Dropbox. I'm thinking about it, anyway.
I am extremely, some would say excessively, sometimes self-harmingly loyal.
Change makes me anxious; I will put up with a lot of sub-optimal stuff rather than risk what is new and might be better, might be wonderfully better but, y'know. Might not work. Might be calamitous. Like that.
So. I have spent - oh, all the years since I got broadband, which is many - saying that I really don't need wifi; when I'm working, when I'm using a computer for anything I'm always on the desktop, so why do I need wifi? Ect ect.
Turns out that I needed wifi for Other People, who are a goodness.
So. Wifi was achieved, and I have been ill, and a few days ago I was sitting on the sofa shivering mightily over the gas-fire and wanting to check my e-mail and not wanting to drag my achy body upstairs into the cold, and I thought to myself, "Y'know what, self? I have wifi now. If I weren't pinned into this chair by the contentment of a cat, I could just reach for the Laptop of Heavenly Perfection and check my e-mail right here, right now. And read LJ, that too. And..."
And of course I could do none of that, on account of pinnage and the importance of not disrupting contentment; but the thought was there.
Hold that thought.
The Laptop of Heavenly Perfection, being Sony, is full of non-standard hardwares and cryptic components. I dual-boot it with the Windows that it came with, which is Vista (yes, I know: but I don't use Windows, so it doesn't matter to me) [hold that thought] and Linux, as is my custom. Only, I am a Suse man by long habit, and the version of Suse that I tried on the LHP gave me no visuals at all, it just couldn't drive the screen. So - following a recommendation from this here flist - I fell back on Mepis. Which worked, and continues to work, fine, except that it can't run the wifi. If I want wifi, I have to boot Windows.
Hold that thought.
Working as I do, many mornings in the Lit & Phil and evenings & weekends back here, I am necessarily always shifting files between laptop and desktop. Sometimes I do this physically, via a USB memory stick; sometimes I do it electronically, via my G-mail account.
Last week, in pursuit of other options, I started playing with Dropbox. A self-sync'ing storage system, up in the clouds: how useful is that?
Except that Dropbox doesn't want to install in a Suse/KDE system, such as I am running here. The download options for Linux are Ubuntu or Fedora (or compile-from-source, but that won't either; it needs Gnome packages and pathways that just aren't there). This could be fixed, I think, with fiddling; but I keep putting it off.
At the moment I have Dropbox on all my Windows installations, so I find myself actually working in Windows when I'm at the Lit & Phil, to take advantage of that with their wifi; and when I come home I download the new files from the Dropbox website. Which works, but is an extra step and inherently sub-optimal.
Hold that thought.
This week, being sick, I have been noodling with the LHP, with wifi, with Windows...
This morning I downloaded an ISO image of Ubuntu, burned a CD, ran it live in the LHP.
Works fine. Wifi and all, straight in there.
Um.
I'm a Suse/KDE man to my bones. I don't like change. Ubuntu is way too popular for me and I've never used Gnome.
But: wifi. Dropbox. Convenience. Workingness. Newstuff to play with...
I think, I think I am going to blitz Mepis, install Ubuntu and see how we go. If we go well, I might even make the same change on the desktop here, just for Dropbox. I'm thinking about it, anyway.