2/26/09 16:16

Linux didn't work at all: can't run office, can't run efax, can't run outlook, can't take advantage of any of the new web video rental and purchase sites like Amazon Unbox ... Also, found windows to be just as stable as linux. Linux just made life unnecessarily difficult.

One neat thing I've started up again recently is listening to audiobooks. I tried listening to them on my blackberry with AudibleAir, but it was so sluggish and unpredictable I broke down and purchased an mp3 player. On the blackberry, it would take forever finding a place in my book. I would fast forward and rewind to a spot that seemed like it was proportionately as far as the number of pages I was in my book. Then I had to wait 15 seconds while the device buffered and then wait a little longer to see if it actually played or if I had to press "5". Sometimes, of course, pressing "5" too soon meant that when the device did decide to play "5" made it pause, because "5" is a toggle switch between play and pause. Then once I'd found the spot and was playing, it would stop sometimes randomly at different places and do one of three things: go into pause mode, restart at the beginning of the book, stay in play mode and just do nothing for a few seconds and start playing again. And this isn't an old blackberry. Its an 8330 with the newest version of audibleair. I VERY much appreciate that audible tried to make a player for the blackberry. I'd have been annoyed and would have been wishing for a software player for the blackberry if there weren't one. I mean, its a perfect match. But, whether its a hardware or software problem, listening to audiobooks on the blackberry is doable but it is a frustrating experience. I had tried audiobooks on a sansa player before and it was extremely sluggish as well. Worse than the blackberry I would say. So, I tried finding information about which players could handle these large files. I settled on a zune 8 because i could get it cheap second hand, it can play zune marketplace material (monthly subscription to millions of tracks with 10 free conversions to drm free mp3s is reasonable) and it was supposed to have a somewhat powerful processor which meant it wouldn't be so sluggish when i was jumping around the book looking for my place.

It just arrived. I am able to track back and forth in the file to find my spot very quickly. There is ZERO wait between finding a spot and playing audio. Unfortunately the one place where the player has given me an issue is that the file names are very long. Tack on the end of the file name"Part 1", "Part 2"... and since the player cuts off the end of the name you've got to try each file to figure out which part you're on. This is very annoying. You'd think they'd make it scroll at least for long names. Anyway, this is much better than the blackberry 8330 with audible air.

6/13/06 15:56

Have switched to linux desktop. Some things are nice - others not so nice. I found Stanton Finley's Fedora Core 5 setup extremely helpful in getting the basics working. But there are some things which have been a pain. For example, I have a vtbook from village tronic that requires a kernel patch to use. Over past few days have tried to find fedora core 5 source to patch against - don't know why this is so hard but for some reason it is. src.rpm from fedora does not contain yenta_socket.c - the file I need to patch. I downloaded the official vanilla source from kernel.org and can see it there - but not in fedora. Also, was a pain getting win4lin working - once again had trouble getting kernel source - luckily the scripts in win4lin ended up compiling against the "vanilla" source I downloaded in attempts to fix the vtbook and kqemu installed by itself. Will have to try to patch against the vanilla source and load that into the "fedora" kernel.

Win4Lin works ok - once kqemu issue was resolved. Only issue was upgrading from xp sp1 to sp2 - windows refuses to finish the "cleanup" phase of install. I decided shut down and restart and sp2 was installed and working - hope that didn't do any damage.

Would be nice to use OpenOffice exclusively but formatting of documents gets all screwed up when exchanging between Office and OpenOffice. Since I work with people who use office and can't really switch to open office, I have to use office. Also, haven't found good acrobat alternative for linux - maybe there is one out there - but using adobe's software is a really easy way to make pdfs. So have to use windows for some stuff.

I wanted to use crossover to run office but looks like it is a nightmare to get that running. I know everyone says that you can use it to run office - but they must not be reading the crossover website which specifically says that they are working on trying to get support for office2003.

I'm running kde(at Linus's suggestion) and using evolution for email. For a day or so all icons in evolution were red X's. Then on a hunch installed gnome (yum -y groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment") and magically the evolution icons appeared.

I am unsure if making the move away from windows was good or not - time will tell.