Computer Upgrade

Well it happened more easily than I expected... I somewhat nervously upgraded my computer yesterday.

We discovered on the weekend that we had been given a perfectly good Pentium 4 computer with two DVD Reader/CD writers., and even better, USB ports at the front which certainly makes plugging in cameras and mp3 players more convenient.

On Sunday afternoon I started to install the Debian Linux operating system. This basically consists of burning a small installer program onto a CD then using that to boot up and then you download the rest of everything you want from the internet.

Last night I transferred most of my files from my old computer to the new one. There were a few hiccups in installing my email program (claws-mail) from the source code, and I ended up downgrading a couple of versions to use the Debian package version.

Opera and even open office installed easily. Open office is a huge program and for some reason I don't understand, the people who produce it continue to provide rpm but no deb packages. But a few minutes running alien got them all converted and installed. Actually it all went a bit too easily, and I was worried that maybe I had messed it up but everything seems to be working. :D

One of the great things about Linux is that usually data files and configuration files are in plain text and you can find them easily. It was very little trouble to set up all my applications the way they had been previously... just copy a bunch of files or directories over.

The final stage of the upgrade is to lug my old computer over to our bedroom where Margaret will be using it to do the EBay stuff.

Blessings

Keith