Re: [Pan-users] To explain why I'm unwilling to up date my glib/gtk+/etc libs ATM…

[Paul Crawford]

Thanks Duncan for your details reply to SciFi. I'm not sure if you will 
start a flood of "how I converted" stories or not, but here is my 
tuppence worth:

Firstly, all operating systems suck! It is a case of trading off what 
you want/need to have, what you are willing to pay (both money and/or 
time), and what faults you can put up with.

Like Duncan I have been an MS user for DOS/win9x and then w2k for my 
home PC, and later I got XP at work.

I deeply objected to MS' "activation feature" simply on principle - I 
should be free to use my copy on any future hardware I need, and not to 
depend upon their good will in allowing me to do so (I am quite happy 
for MS to stop 'piracy' of their products, but this is not really the 
place for a rant about that).

My primary reason for changing to Ubuntu was down to trying it (8.10 
release) and finding it mostly worked, and thus allowed me to set up a 
usable web/email/music playing PC for family and friends who had a 
history of infested machines running Windows and various AV products. 
Not immune, of course, but enough to reduce the threat to acceptable 
proportions.

I bought some cheap-end motherboards, AMD CPUs, sets of 2GB RAM, new 
PSUs and fitted them in to the old PC's case. Result were decently 
usable PCs for a relatively small cost.

Now I run Linux as my main PC, and I converted my old w2k and XP 
machines in to virtual machines using the VMware 'physical to virtual' 
tool, saving me days of tedium re-installing, licensing, patching and 
configuring a dozen or more important applications. This became 
essential when my old motherboard had the 'bulging capacitors of death' 
and started falling over for non-software reasons.

What you will need to look out for is Linux compatibility of hardware, 
of course in the actual computer parts, but more commonly for printers & 
scanners. If you have Apple printers (mostly postscript?) they probably 
work OK, but start by looking here: http://www.openprinting.org/printers

Regards,
Paul
--
Dr. Paul S. Crawford
Satellite Station
Dundee University
Small's Wynd, Dundee,
DD1 4HN, U.K.
Tel: +44 (0)1382 38 4687
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The University of Dundee is a Scottish Registered Charity, No. SC015096