Once again, it
takes me a while to post things on the blog. I guess part of it is
I'm still trying to get things back to something resembling normal.
Although I highly doubt what I used to know as normal will ever be my
normal again. Of course, I could try and talk about politics again,
but once I realized that popularity contest known as the Presidential
election is now officially underway with Senator Cruz's announcement,
my brain did an automatic 'check out'. So, I'll just talk about
something I've been doing that's slightly less controversial.
Computers and operating systems.
I have a number
of older computers in the house. At least I judge them as older when
you consider the operating systems found on them. As of January, I
had one operating on Windows XP, three operating on Windows Vista,
one operating on Windows 7, and one on Windows 8.1.
I'm the
(un)official tech support for the house. When one family member has
an issue with their machine, I get either a frantic phone call at
work, or a 'dad, can you look at...?' when I'm at home. I'm not a
'techno geek' by any stretch of the imagination, but I would put my
knowledge level at the 'knows just enough to be dangerous'.
My method of
trouble shooting is encapsulated in the phrase (and I can't claim
this as my original) 'Google is my friend.' I put the operating
system and the error into the search, and more often than not I can
find a fairly simple method of fixing it. It may involve going to
the command prompt and putting some commands in, but it's not
anything I would consider 'graduate' level.
I ran into a
problem with one of the children's Vista machines. The recommended
resolutions for the error listed were either playing with registry
keys (moving into graduate level) or reinstalling the operating
system. I just wasn't comfortable with the registry key
instructions. Since I didn't have a spare system disk laying around,
and I wasn't about to shell out the money required for said system
disk, I stared looking into alternatives.
I would dare to
say people are only familiar with the Windows family of operating
systems for computers. Microsoft has made it so their systems are
well known and fairly easy to use. They're not perfect (not by a
long shot), and they do have a number of issues. One of the reasons
Google works so well for finding out how to fix problems with Windows
is because of the number of issues Windows has. I had been aware of
'the other side' of computer operating systems (known as Linux), and
more specifically the distribution (OS) known as Ubuntu. I started
looking at how easy Ubuntu or other Linux type systems would be to
use and install. After some looking and asking around, I finally
chose the Linux Mint system. You can read more about it here.
I have to
admit, the system itself was easy to install, the hardware worked
without any issues, and the installation even recognized a Windows
operating system was on the computer and asked whether I wanted to
install Mint alongside (dual boot – where you choose the operating
system you go into every time you boot up the computer), or install
over the Windows OS. For this situation, I needed to install over
the Windows OS.
The next task I
undertook was to update the Windows XP computer. Although I enjoyed
XP, and thought it was one of the better Windows OS's, it is no
longer supported by Microsoft. And considering the machine running
it wouldn't have handled an upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 (I doubt it
could even handle an upgrade to Vista) I decided to switch that one
to Mint. It handled the switch OK, with one issue. The wireless
network card was one of those that had proprietary drivers. Now
what? I went back to Google. There was also a community I could
look into as well. I found the necessary commands, and got that to
work.
For my final
trick, I decided to put two machines into a dual-boot configuration.
One Vista machine (the one I work on) and the Windows 7 machine
(which is the wife's. I don't think the eldest would let me touch
the Windows 8 machine). I had to do some looking into some higher
level tasks to prepare them (unallocating some hard drive space in
particular), but there were no problems. Both computers boot up and
run Linux faster than Windows, but Windows still runs with no new
issues from having Linux installed.
To me, the
operating system is simply a tool for people to use. If you're using
your computer to access the internet, do email, and maybe some simple
writing and work tasks, then in my opinion Linux Mint (and most other
Linux distributions) is a viable alternative to Windows operating
systems. It doesn't require a lot of RAM or hard drive space to run
the OS itself, and perhaps most importantly, it's free for download
and installation. If you have a lot of games, or do a lot of gaming,
then it gets a bit more difficult but there are software packages
that allow you to run Windows games. Not much else, but at least you
can install your Windows games and play those. Not that this was a
review, but if you ask me, having choices is always better.
