Hard drive returns – ish!
After several hours of experimentation (bastardization?) with different bits from the “boxes of bits” I bought back in 2004, and after many attempts, I finally cobbled together two working hard drives – one 3gb (the former Maxtor D drive from the pc anyway), and one 1.7gb (a Western Digital model), and installed Red Hat Fedora Core Linux 2. I'd bought the book with CD “RHFL2 For Dummies” reduced in The Works (clearance type bookstore) reduced from $29.95 USD or £19.99 GBP to either £7.99 or £8.99, I forget.
The book included a DVD of the full operating system – a “legal” copy (for those who've never heard of Linux, it's an open source operating system, meaning anyone can distribute it, as long as you let people ask for the source code, and let them hack about with it). Dundee City Council use it in Finance, but not quite the same version. I've installed it – finally – and it's got OpenOffice already built in, it can do CD burning just like windows xp, and it's got a printer driver for mine already there (I was especially impressed that the Epson CX3200 was already there!)
But, it's slow on this. It's an x686 to Linux, or what Windows would call an Intel Pentium 2 400. I've just upgraded (with more bits from the box) to 96mb – the minimum for graphical use of Linux (recommended) is 128mb. If you right-click on a mis-spelt word in the word processor, it whirrs for two or three minutes, and shuts the program without prompting to save! So, for now, I don't see it as a replacement for the main hard drive, but at least I've got something I can write letters with etc. for the meantime!
posted by Suzy Scott @ 23:59
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home