But....one thing I have no experience with is computer hardware wrangling. Nope, I'm not interested in looking under the hood, formatting drives, installing this, that & the other. No, I want my computer to be somewhat like my toaster: turn it on and it just does its job. This desire has caused me to sit around on my hands looking for a solution. Sure, I could have gone the Mac route, but that involved more money than I wanted to be flinging at this point.
Then the solution appeared: Walmart began offering PC's with various flavors of Linux pre-installed. Now, I'm really no fan of big-box retail but to me this move struck me as a bold one. Heck, they even offered computers with no operating system installed. Can you imagine that? This seemed like something of a political move. A computer can actually run without software from Microsoft? My gawd!
Anyway, my more-than-fast-enough computer arrived a couple of days ago. The flavor of Linux I selected was Sun's Java Desktop System, which is really Sun's branded version of SuSe Linux. Setup was a snap: I plugged in an old monitor I had collecting dust, attached it to our home router with an Ethernet cable (phew! close to my technical limit there) and turned it on. It asked me a single question: what do I want to name this computer? Well, 'MarkBox' was born. I set up my account, fired up Mozilla and was connected to the Internet. All things computerish should be that easy!
Now I feel as though I've made my own computer/political statement. And...that's $99 less in the pocket of Mr. Gates & company (only how many billions to go?)
(First posted on Mark Is Cranky)
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
RADICAL!
2 - Mark Saleski
ya baby! i even light up the patchouli aromatherapy thingy and turn on the Grateful Dead before commencing to typin'