I've spent the past week to 10 days trying out different small linux distros...not all of them by a long shot! Just checking to see what might run best on older computers...and the answer seems to be that it depends on the computer. For an all-around distro, I like Puppy 4.0 for moderately old machines--not for the really old ones. Out of the box it does great at networking, and flash and java work fine for viewing flash videos and doing jigsaw puzzles on jigzone.com. I have to admit it makes...

Yesterday, a friend came over to help me try to put Rapla, a resource booking software based on Java onto our server which runs SuSe 10.2. I had updated it in preparation. But in the end, neither of us had enough experience or knowledge of the command line interface to accomplish it, or not completely. Our server runs without a GUI, and I know just enough to administer day to day stuff. Sometimes.

We tried putting it in /etc...why? Well, as one person might have described it,...

I wanted to loan an older computer (Dell Dimension v333c) to a friend so she could try out Linux, specifically Xubuntu. But the (win)modem doesn't work with Linux...so I'm trying to figure out how to come by a serial external modem without investing a lot of money. I'm going to try OlyGeek in downtown Olympia and see if they might have something. And ask my OMUG friends, too! Anyway that is my project for right now; besides cooking dinner! Our cook is sick...

A short time ago, we bought a new computer for our New Membership Director. Got it at a place that installed Win XP for us, and then I asked the leader of our OMUG GNU/Linux SIG to help me install Ubuntu 8.04 alongside XP. Both he and I were surprised to see Splashtop on booting the computer--he had to explain to me that Splashtop is a very small version of Linux that works in the BIOS: so as soon as the computer is turned on and the Splashtop screen appears, you can browse the Internet or check...

A few years ago I heard about Linux while learning Windows admin by the seat of my pants and the help of some patient friends. I first joined our local computer users group, Olympia Microcomputer Users Group (OMUG), and a couple of years ago began attending OMUG's GNU/Linux special interest group. It seemed to me that Linux is the future, and I hoped "someday" to exchange some or all of our Windows machines for Linux ones.

I met some really interesting people in that group,...