“The RoseBouquet”

Back about March or April I had an older laptop given to me. A CTX Ez-Book 800 Series. The giver explained that he had only taken it along on two trips, so it has had little wear and tear. However, he has bigger ones, so he was willing to give this one up. Turns out the CTX EzBooks are no longer made. Obsolete. The CPU is too old for most of the newer, better operating systems. It had only 32 MB of RAM memory, which meant that of the 11 or 13 Linux distributions I was trying to install, some of them came to a halt because of lack of memory, and some switched to bare text mode. Hmm…. well, I wasn’t about to give up just yet. I could just re-install Windows 98, but not until I was convinced there was NO linux system that would work.

So over various weekends I’ve spent some hours trying this and that. (Like Heinz’ varieties, there are over 300 flavours of Linux). I had read about Debian some years ago, but sort of avoided it, because it looked like I’d have to learn some command line to run it. I had downloaded one or two of them though, and that was one system that seemed to be comfortable installing on this laptop. Only something went wrong the first few times. Gradually, by checking online, I was able to understand what I had done wrong in each case, and the way around that.

Saturday afternoon and evening I tried another time. This time it worked, except that it complained of only 300-400 MB of space left over. That wouldn’t do, as I need space for all the emails and files I save. So on Sunday I researched and learned how to delete some. I tried to take out the games, and lo, the whole Gnome desktop system got washed away at the same time. (sigh). But in researching Debian sites some more I saw that I needed to do a very bare, basic installation, and then install the KDE system, the one I like much better because it has my favourite programs, with a few simple apt-get commands.

Since a full installation can take 3-6 or more hours I made that my main project yesterday. I got the right web pages up in various Firefox tabs on my desktop computer, and also downloaded the pdf manual, then I gave the internet cable to the laptop and got it set up to do the install. Meantime, I could do some work on this computer too, just not online. Hallelujah, at 3:14 pm it was done and I could see that I have a working system up and running!

This laptop will now be my own private computer at my Azaleas Virtual Assistants (AVA) office, and I will be able to use a USB stick to carry my files back and forth between home and the AVA office. The laptop Debian needs a bit of tweaking so it looks more like my setup here in Suse 10.3, and I need to copy some working files over, but I am positively thrilled at this success.

I’ve learned to know and appreciate Debian better. The commands are not that hard to learn - at least not for downloading and installing, and it works, even on oldie computers. Guess what I’m going to go put on the office computers that are too old for Suse?

Incidentally, I had some great feedback last week on the article about a book review website. I’m sure there is room for all of you to run with the idea. I’ll see if I can toss out more ideas from time to time. Right now I’m mulling over an idea for a site, or even a workshop on how to install new operating systems on your computer. What if I invited them to bring their own…?