LincolnBlogs

Since my wife is home for good now, I got a “honey-do” list. There are a lot of computer related things on there actually, and one of the first is get her online again. Well, that may not be at the top for her, but for me it is because if she has no online access, she just uses *my* equipment. We tend to have different ideas on what is proper care of said equipment, so I want her to use *hers* 😉 Yes, after years of being a computer guy, I am kind of particular about how I like things, and my wife, well, as I have said before, is one of those “Linux Killers”. This is not to say that she actually kills Linux, but that even Linux cannot keep her from destroying whatever computer she is happening to use at the time.

Now to be fair, for the last 6 or 8 months, my wife has been using an old G4 Mac running OS X, and she has been doing really well with it, except lately, right before the move, she began to tell me that she was having increasing troubles with the machine locking up on her, etc. Telltale signs of the impending doom of the computer I am sure. Now I could simply fix that mac and let her continue to use it, however, in the new apt, she did not want to be relegated to having to sit in the bedroom all the time to use the computer, so I suggested an old laptop I have, where she could roam anywhere. I have taken the bedroom spot for myself, trying to keep all the computer equipment explosion from happening in the main living areas of the new apt like it had at the old place.

Now the old laptop I suggested has been my old standby for years. An old Dell 400mhz Pentium with 256 megs of ram and a 6gb hdd. I did have it running Arch when I first showed it to my wife today……. Well, she immediately killed xfce, not that she really liked it anyhow. I decided that it might behoove me to make things as easy as possible for her while making sure that I put the most robust Linux on there I could. I reached for Ubuntu, none of which current versions would even complete loading. I reached for Mepis, which loaded (take that Ubuntu), but was slower than death. After I thought about it for a second I slapped my forehead in that “could have had a V8” motion and reached for the best – Slackware – v11 in fact. Slackware is installing now, and happily I might add, and Slackware comes with kde by default now, so I don’t even have to mess with an after install install like I would have had to have done with Ubuntu.

Well, have to see how the install goes and how well it holds up to the spousal abuse it’s going to get 🙂 But I am betting that Slackware will be just fine until the hardware fails. And, running Slackware on that laptop will fulfill my “at least 1 Slackware machine” quota on my network. I just realized that since the move, when I shut off my old server, that was my last Slackware box. Time to set things right again 😉