Install, install.

I mentioned last week that I’d re-formatted and restored a work laptop back to its virgin condition last week, plus added office XP, and the sum total space used was >8.5Gb. What I didn’t mention was tweaking the drive partitions around to install Fedora 6 (Linux) and that gave me a windows partition of just 10Gb i.e. 1.5Gb free for all data etc. As its been a couple of years since I last played silly beggars with partitions I had to go back a re-remember the correct process. Red Hat’s partition software doesn’t totally hold your hand either. But between Ubuntu’s partition tool and Red Hats I seemed to re-size and re-partition the drive entirely successfully in just a few minutes.

So we now have a T30 that will dual boot into WinXP or Fedora.

And this is where my delight in things Linux stops.

I went hunting printer drivers on the net. Nada without paying (at least, as far as I could see). Looking at screen fonts with my R32 (3 years older) sat next to the T30, Windows is really crisp at 1024 X 786 with a 12 point font. Linux can only look on like a poor sister in rags, with messy fonts that bleed at the edges. Generally it *looks* much nicer in Gnome than windows, although many of the icons lack crispness. It’s also a bit slow considering it’s a decent system.

Then there’s the ‘package updater’ which seems to just sit there as if it’s hung. Resolving dependencies for updates. Right. Got there eventually, and now it’s downloading the packages as slowly as someone used to XP would expect. (edit - took around 3 1/2 hours to download and install 190 updates! That's still quicker than XP).

So I’ll see if I can find printer drivers to make it useful. If it were based on looks alone then LINUX would walk all over M$ (and challenge the Mac). As it is, a gorgeous front end will never compensate for fuzzy fonts and the hassles of LINUX management.