Daily Archives: 1/3/2005

Brainwagon Radio: A Minor Revolt, Linux on the Laptop

my desktop! Wherein your host describes his pique with Windows XP and describes his installation of Fedora Core 3 onto his laptop, followed by his recording of a podcast using the new software setup. Links from the show:

I chose Fedora Core for my Linux variant. It works rather well, and has the most polished installation of any Linux distribution I tried.
The ndiswrapper project allows you to use Windows network drivers on Linux. This allowed me to use my Belkin F5D7010 card (an 802.11g card) which would have otherwise been unsupported. Seems to work fine, even without the kernel compile they recommend.
You can get audacity packages prebuilt for Fedora Core 3 from Dag’s repository. I also installed mplayer from his packages, as well as some other packages.
Can anyone tell me of a cheaper bluetooth GPS than the Delorme Bluelogger?

Quality note: The sound is a bit crackly, which appears to not be a problem with the microphone. It may actually be a software issue. I’m looking into it.

Free! Free from the shackles of Microsoft!

Now, back to playing Halflife 2 on my other box which still runs WinXP.

TiVo to Go Released

Slashdot reports that TiVo to Go has been released. I’ll download it later, and let you know how it works!

(For those of you who don’t know, Tivo To Go allows you to transfer recorded programs to your PC.)

I’ve had it!

I have finally decided to take the plunge: my laptop is now running Linux instead of Windows XP.

I got tired of trying to debug the mysteriously long boot times, purchasing yet another update to Norton’s Anti Virus, and generally just being mystified at how slow a 2 ghz laptop could act.

This morning (in fact, right now, as I type this) I’m running Fedora Core 3 on it. It’s not without its problems (as yet, I’ve been unable to get my Belkin 54g card working with it) but overall I’m fairly happy. It even works with my scanner and my cheapy IBM webcam.

Here is to lowering my cost of ownership.