Posted on 03/19/2012 7:37:40 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Lost In Stupid Parentheses? Oh, yeah!
Yep, I had a C-64 with a 300 baud modem. There were some local BBSs to hook onto and Q-Link and CompUserve.CompUserve was the closest thing to the internet, where you could send messages to fellow users and witness online conversations. I recall one that had you log on to at a certain time to interview Isaac Asimov. My slow modem didn’t allow me to get in a question but at least I could read the other questions and Asimov’s replies. Ahh, texting in the Stone Age.
Broadcom chipsets suck. I would never buy a computer that was destined at any point to have Linux on it that had Broadcom wireless. You're just asking for trouble and headaches. It's easier to get around these days, as the reverse engineered drivers will work with them, but you never know when things will break, and they are fragile drivers IMO.
Screw broadcom until they decide to work with is rather than against us.
If you don't have a backup, you obviously don't care enough about your data for it to matter if you wipe ~/*
There are plenty of really painless backup programs out there that you basically fire and forget. I use 'backintime" which works a lot like "time machine" for Mac. I can recover any file that has existed on my computer for over a year if it has been on my computer for 24 hours.
Wireless networking is one of the things that works well "out of the box" now. However, the Linux community still treats the GUI and usability as if they are passing fads. Good luck getting a mouse with more than two buttons to work right. I'd love to dump Windows, but each year I try a few distributions and am disappointed. I get more lockups in a few days testing Linux distributions than I do the entire rest of the year with Windows. This year a keylogger in a "spin" of one of the more popular distributions tried to break into my email account. It does make a great rescue disk, though.
The rescue disc idea is the one reason I’ve kept a DVD of Linux around all this time. Someone has a problem booting, it may come in handy getting into the system and retrieving data.
After several hours of “playing” with two distros yesterday, I finally went and did something worthwhile; helped a friend out with a computer problem (actually two minor ones).
To recap: Ubuntu 10 recognized the wireless card on my 1 year old Dell, but not on my 6 mos old Toshiba. Mint 12 recognized both wireless cards but had no method of installing a printer. Upon doing a Google search, this was shown to be an “issue” with both Ubuntu 11 and Mint 12.
Who knows, maybe someday I’ll get a distro as a 2nd boot on one of my PCs. Maybe. But I stand with what I stated earlier; Linux in its many varieties isn’t ready for prime time. Its a tool that intrepid computer geeks may enjoy messing with, but for the great unwashed its simply too daunting to appeal to the average computer user.
And how did PCLinuxOS work for you? Or didn’t you try it?
Didn’t try it. What with the issues I had with Ubuntu and Mint, I decided to back away from the project. Thanks for asking.
Next time you work up a little courage to experiment again, go with PCLinuxOS. I was like you, didn’t know anything about Linux. Installed PCLinuxOS and it was relatively painless. I even manged to network a couple computers in my house with it.
Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.
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