LinLog

As I mentioned to in my last post, I ordered some hardware from Newegg yesterday. It's for a system upgrade for my wife Sarah. She's currently using an old AT-based 400MHz Celeron system with 96MB of memory that's running Windows 98, first edition. I couldn't get Win98SE to run correctly on it - some incompatibility with the PCI bus, if I recall correctly.

After a fair amount of debate, she finally agreed to let me put whatever I want on it. Currently, I'm planning to try Xandros Desktop 3.0, Open Circulation Edition. I figure if Scott Granneman likes it that much, it's worth a try. It sounds like it would be good for her, and it's KDE-based, so I can leverage my own experience for any desktop configuration issues. Failing that, I may try Ubuntu.

Of course, her mother thinks I'm out of my mind. Why, I'm not sure. She broke out the old canards about being incompatible with everyone else, particularly with regard to Microsoft Office, but that's about it. Apparently she's under the impression that "everybody" uses MS Office and that if you don't, you'll be incompatible with them basically be left out in the cold. Of course, this is nonsense. OpenOffice can handle pretty much anything you're likely to come across in everyday non-technical business. And regardless of that, the only thing Office is really compatible with is itself. We use Office 97 at work, and if you check the "open" file dialog in Word, pretty much all it understands are documents for various versions of Word and WordPerfect and several varieties of plain text. Compare this to the range of file formats supported by AbiWord or KWord and you come away feeling like Microsoft short-changed you.

It will be good to get her on software that is 1) completely legal and 2) designed during this century. It'll also be good to get her off Internet Explorer. I'm hoping maybe it will be made easier by the fact that she's already come across one site that worked in Opera but not IE. It used the CSS :hover pseudo-element (is that the right term?) to dynamically display a pop-down, and IE only supports :hover on links.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes after the new hardware gets here. I'll probably have plenty to write about over the next few weeks!