It’s been 10 days since the manditory meeting and things seem to be chaning for the better. Information gathered says a lot of the employees that don’t work and are lazy will be gone by the end of the week. The 3am flow process “change” is supposed to be completed by March 1. By then everything should be working and lazy employees gone. Only time will tell and I hope what I’ve heard comes true.
Well I was minding my own business this past Friday (Feb 18), playing with the cat and I heard a pop then a buzzing sound. I looked over and my beloved ViewSonic PF790′s screen was blank. After checking a few things, and opening the case, I found the high voltage power supply blew. Bah.
Went 2 days without my system. I picked up a Samsung SyncMaster 997DF at Circuit City only beacuse I couldn’t bother with any ordering/shipping. I wanted something now. So far so good, the new monitor is a overall lighter and smaller then the ViewSonic (but still a 19 inch old school CRT flatscreen). I still need to tweak it and adjust the settings. One thing I don’t like about it is the menus are just icons, unlike words on the ViewSonic. I also need to take some time and adjust to it, but I swear at times text looks funny. But then I think I had a bias towards my ViewSonic and just want to find things wrong with the Samsung. But I found plenty of reviews that were in favor of my new purchase. I’m just glad to be back online.
Well this morning at work was a MANDITORY meeting. It was to discuss the fact we can’t get ‘clean’ (entire turck pushed and back stockrooms completely done). A little birddie told me to expect it to last 3 hours and that support help from another store would come to work our truck while we were in this meeting, Well no one from the other store came and the meeting only lasted 30 minutes. Blah. Not much of anything important was told to us. I felt sorry for the people that came in on their unscheduled night for this meeting. I mean 3am and retail. This wasn’t a major ‘state of the company’ type meeting.
Today marks the day I have converted to Linux completely. I spent the last 4 days in Windows deleting old data. Nuked over 55GB of stuff between my 160GB and 250GB drives. I wasn’t just uninstalling programs, Windows had a 20GB drive to itself, but downloaded things. Old documents, saved web pages, old versions of programs, useless media, etc. I got enough off of the 2 drives to move what was left on the 250GB to the 160GB. At that point I was ready.
Shutdown, switched my hard drives around and rebooted. How nice it was to be back in Gentoo. Fdisk’d that 250 and applied a ext3 filesystem. All is good now.
I just need to get an external case for my 160GB since I’m out of IDE connectors and something is going on in Linux with my IDE PCI card. The BIOS sees it after the motherboard IDE but Linux sees Mobo then PCI. This of course has an effect on a drives assignment. When nothing is attached to it, it’s BIOS doesn’t load so it’s as if the card isn’t installed. But at some point linux was still seeing it. I dunno. I yanked it out yesterday and got rid of the Windows drive. I’m not dual-booting anymore. On the other hand I could just take my DVD-ROM (reader) out to free up a IDE connector. I still have the DVDRW (writer).
Now to really dive into the new OS and not look back.
Well I took the plunge back in December and migrated to Linux. Gentoo linux to be specific because my friend spoke highly of it. I have been spending all of my time in it since and am picking up linux-centric things fast. Linux seemed the perfect OS due to my technical and dorky abilities.
Today I finally bothered to move my Thunderbird email over. I found a howto for sharing TB mail between linux and windows, with the mail staying on the windows drive. My problem was windows had to be on a FAT32 parition and mine was NTFS.
I successfully took the tips from the howto for what to edit on the linux side to point to the windoiws files but instead just did the edits and pointed them to the new location on linux.
I hope i didn’t muck anything up but just straight moving the profileover, editing the profile.ini file to use that one in linux. I did remove all extensions and themes in windows before I brought it all over to linux.
But everything looks and is working good so far. I do rememebr seeing something looking for migration info before on just moving the files with no extensions and leaving the .msf files (they’re index files and will automatically be recreated). Perhaps I should just nuke them and restart TB. I don’t know if these index files have specifics to the OS used. But I do have all my email that I had in Windows so I’ll assume all is well.
Now to reinstall my favorite theme and extensions.
Software wise I have found some good replacements.
Web – Firefox (same as in Windows)
Email – Thunderbird (obviously from the above text)
Newsgroups – Pan (formerly used Xnews in Win)
Video – mplayer (with a plugin to use in XMMS)
Audio/MP3 – XMSS (compariable to winamp/windows media player)
FTP – gFTP
IRC – XChat2
IM – Gaim (also used it in windows)
Office Suite – OpenOffice (switched to in Windows before going Linux)
Graphic Manipulation – The GIMP
CD/DVD Burning – k3b (just like Nero)
Bittorrent – Azureus (also used in Windows)
Ipod – trying GTKPOD. Used Anapod Explorer in Windows.
I’m sure there are others I missed but overall I’m very content with going to Linux 100%, All I need Windows for in the meantime is my Garmin GPS Mapsource mapping software, some geocaching programs ( i know there are linux alternatives, I haven’t looked into them yet), Tivo Desktop to transfer recorded shows, and a coulple of other utils. If I can run these program from within Linux with an emulator like Wine or other alternative then I’ll never have to boot into Windows again.
