RasterWeb!This has been a terrible time for Mac-related thingies… While on the upside I did get a new G5 at the office, (initial observation: it’s extremely big, and extremely fast!) I’ve been otherwise plagued with stupid ditto mistakes, possibly failing NIC‘s, Firefox and Mozilla repeatedly quitting and those damn kernel panics…It’s enough to make me switch to Linux!
Well, it’s not that bad… ;)
Oh sure! You all laughed when The King of Pointland washed and dried his USB thumb drive. I know I did…
Of course yesterday I was looking for mine and thought perhaps I left it at the office, or misplaced it somewhere else, and eventually discovered that I too ran mine through the washing machine. (I skipped the dryer though!)
And yes, my data was all still there…
I got a new Linux box a month or so ago. By “new” I of course mean a machine built out of scavenged parts hobbled together… Still, it’s new to me!
It’s an actual desktop machine, being the first Linux box I’ve owned that could run XWindows without just crawling like a snail. So onwards with the adventures of Desktop Linux!
I’m using Fedora Core 1, which I’m finding to be pretty nice. While looking through the menu at installed apps, I found one named ‘Scanning’ which is really XSane. Since I’ve got USB ports, I figured I test my old Umax scanner, and lo and behold, it sort of worked! I got line art to scan ok, but not photos. This is good, as I have to send faxes out once a month, and always hated using the buggy old Vistascan software under Mac OS 9 to do this… I’ll probably play around with it some more and see if I can get photos to work as well. Score 1 for Desktop Linux. (As long as we’re on the subject of old hardware, my next experiment will probably be with the old Palm III I’ve never got to work in Mac OS X.)
I’m finding it all quite exciting. I now have Mac OS X and Fedora right at my fingertips, with just a KVM switch to choose which I want to use…
I found this email from my ISP, aka cable company, slightly amusing…
If you ever have trouble connecting to the Internet you might be able to fix it quickly.
- Turn off the cable modem, if it has an on/off switch.
- Unplug the modem from its power source
- Turn off your computer completely. Do not immediately restart the computer. Keep everything off for at least one minute.
- Plug the modem back into the power source. (If it has an on/off switch, turn it on)
- Restart your computer and try to connect to the Internet.
I know, I’m enough of a techie to know what to do, but what if you have one of those little firewall/router boxes? Or use wifi? Or have some setup that does not involved a single computer plugged directly into a cable modem? I would think that situation is more common than ever before, with most households that have broadband having more than one computer using the connection…
(Of course the real fix is for my ISP to provide more reliable service…)
Years ago I tried out Webmin, and it seemed like a neat idea, a web-based app to configure a *nix server. I never got too far past the “neat idea” stage of using it though, until now…
Webmin really impresses! It’s got a lot of great modules, as well as third party modules, and things like Virtualmin for managing virtual hosting, and Usermin which is aimed towards system users. (There’s even a wishlist for future modules.)
Looks like I’ve got a lot of research to do. Luckily there are books available, as well as documentation.