The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
.:6:17:58 PM:.
Adventures in Linux-Land
So my brother recently asked what Linux was all about. He had noticed that after installing SP2 his laptop was noticeably slower and wanted to check out Linux. So after scratching my head and trying to figure out if he was playing a joke I said I'll get something for him. I had heard about Knoppix (a version of Linux-think of it as WinAmp to Windows Media Player) as a nice FREE and temporary introduction into the Linux realm. So I went and downloaded the iso burned it the next day. We rebooted the computer with the CD inside (and typed "knoppix" at the prompt) and less than ten minutes later we were running Knoppix. It was much faster-we're talking crazy fast! Menus popped in and out, Open Office ran and loaded Microsoft Word documents fine and in much less time.
One of the qualms as we were checking out different distributions I found it increasingly difficult to explain what GNOME and KDE were, what the difference between all the distributions were, etc. While DistroWatch provides a short summary it's sometimes used to describe the company but what we're really looking for is something that will tell the difference between Distro A and Distro B, etc. Google seems to pull feeds out of newsgroups and discussion boards that seem biased.
