Uphill. In the snow. Both ways.

And so. The final tally in the ongoing Linux project here at Casa RainCrow. To expand on my previous post, on the newish Dell Inspiron laptop from my brother, I installed Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon after installing a new 750 Gig hard drive. It's working very well.  I have both Wine, with a front end of Play On Linux, plus a Virtual Machine with Windows XP, to handle the various things that I'm too stubborn to give up but that refuse to run on Linux, like my CAD programs, yWriter5, Personal Ancestral File (which is now an orphan program anyway), and a few other things. I did have to change up a few ways in which I did things, but nothing serious.I still tweak here and there, though I haven't started twerking yet. Overall I'm happy with it.

On the legendary desktop computer, the fairly old HP Compaq tower system. I finally settled on another Linux Mint 16, the Mate version. It's in a dual boot setup with the Windows XP that was already on the unit. As I did in the Virtual Machine setup in the laptop, I disabled the internet capabilities of the XP system and rely on the Linux for internet linkup. The XP is stand alone. As I said before, I don't really use this one much, but it's there when I need it. It may still have a role to play.

On my old Dell Latitude D600, I finally put in Zorin OS, which is another variation of Linux. It was the more friendly flavor of the few releases that was able to run on the hardware. As it was, I still had to jump through a few hoops to get it to "see" the wireless adapter, but I did it finally. It also works well. I configured it to be useful out in the woodworking shop with copies of most of our patterns, PDF files of many of the different manuals and how-to books we have, and it also has CAD on it. There is a good possibility that we may also use it for music in the shop, but I haven't set that part up yet. For the time being it lives in its own drawer in a workbench until needed, to keep it out of the dust, etc. It also has it's own little desk, a cute and perfect for the site item I found at Goodwill the other day for $10. Just like this one!

For my use it will sit on a designated area of my workbench. I'm already wishing I had another one for the house! Just to be clear, I'm referring to the desk here!







Cat Dancing is still using my more recent Dell, the Vista laptop for her activities. Nothing changed there, except I left myself on as a user and added her so we could both use the iTunes/iPhone linkup capabilities. That's one thing that's missing in Linux, the capability to update iPhones with iTunes, etc.

The older Dell 620 that Michael has, Cat's previous machine that I converted to Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon, blew the video card not long after he started using it. We tossed around getting a new card for it, at a minimum of $60 or so, or just getting another used laptop for him. In the end he found another D620 at the Goodwill Computer Store for $10, on the off chance the mother board and video card was still good. They call it a "scraptop" since Goodwill salvages whatever is easily removable, like the battery and hard drive, etc. and sells the remainder as a parts machine. We lucked out! We swapped over the missing parts from the old D620, our hard drive, battery, and nothing at first. Then I figured that the power switch was bad, it is part of the keyboard. We swapped that out and voila! it worked! Michael is online again!

So, that's where it all stands! Come see us again!