Missing True Type

If you notice a slight difference here, it is because I decided to change my default serif font in the CSS to Times Roman because the existing choices sucked when I looked at my weblog using Mozilla under LInux. How odd that True Type fonts, the thing I liked most about Windows 3.1, is the thing I miss the most under Linux.

Otherwise I don’t miss much, though it would be nice to get my Palm synchronizing with Linux, and to be able to use the scanner. Since the scanner, flash drive, and digital camera are all USB, I figured that getting the flash drive and digital camera to work would imply that the scanner should work as well, but no….. Linux obstinately refuses to see anything as a scanner but a video card that I didn’t even know this computer had.

Response time differences between my old Windows 98 system and Linux are a bit hard to figure. Some things seem to go more quickly, and some things more slowly. This machine is fairly robust for a Windows 98 system because Jack bought it for multimedia applications. However, it is at the low end of what is supported for graphical applications with Redhat 9 Linux. I am starting to fantasize about putting in more RAM memory, but that way lies madness. I keep reminding myself that this is a five year old machine.

I love having access to a Unix type shell again. I had used a shell product called Take Command under Windows for year, but it had some limitations due to the funkiness of DOS.

Linux

I am exhausted from a day spent exploring Linux. For some time, I have been intrigued by the idea of using Linux as my primary operating system. However, I didn’t want to give up Windows 98 on my machine in case I decided to go back. A few days ago, I bought a sixty gig drive, and yesterday Jack installed it for me. I’ve installed Linux Redhat 9 on the new drive, as a dual boot system with Windows 98. Everything went fairly smoothly until we attempted to use DHCP when connecting the LAN. Nothing we tried worked, and Jack finally set up static ip addresses in the router so we could use them instead.

However, everything seems to be working now for my machine, for both Windows and Linux. First thing tomorrow, I will install Mozilla 1.4 since the distro we used provided Mozilla 1.2. Then, I will probably attempt to get Windows file sharing working using Samba.

My goal is to see if I can do everything I normally do on Windows in Linux, with the exception of updating the household accounts in Quicken.