They’re here! The snolfs, that is. We had a grand weekend, consisting mostly of feasting, reading, playing, and of course, our belated new year’s celebration. I had to go to a nearby Big City airport to fetch them from Lobo ... Wow. That’s about all I can say about that experience.

Now, on Linux ... Quite some time ago, Kirsten posted a list of easy things one could do to make improvements in one’s life; and I added “switch to Linux” to it. She asked me how easy that really is, and I had to admit that my first attempt years ago wasn’t so easy, and that I’d yet to try it again.

Well, now I have. I did not install Kubuntu on my machine, MAL did; but my understanding is that if one wants a straightforward installation (no extra security features that do make the process a bit more complicated), that’s pretty easy. And if one wants to test Linux before committing to an install, that's easily doable too; Puppy Linux and Ubuntu are two distros that can be run from a disc or other peripheral, enabling one to get a feel for “Pengy Power” (as the snolfs call it) without installing—and I’m sure there are others. If one has a second machine nearby so that online research while working on the install is possible, that makes troubleshooting easy, as there’s loads of support out there now. I’m talking official Linux sites and fora, plus Wikis, and of course, geeky bloggers who wite about their Tux problems and solutions.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been so busy with other projects that I’ve not had time for tweaking my Kubuntu install much. Oh, I did a few things—downloaded a beautiful space shot and set that for my background; got Firefox installed, with bookmarks and some tweaks migrated over from the old machine; tweaked some cosmetics; that kind of thing. But I mostly ran with the basics that MAL had set me up with. And I did just fine. OpenOffice did a splendid job of handling a .doc text that was written in a proprietary MS font, opening it just fine and allowing me to edit it heavily and save it still in .doc format. The client for whom I was working was able to open the resulting file without problems, and reported no difficulties with it. Thunderbird is a solid, if somewhat basic, email client; if I didn’t have some special needs that it apparently can’t handle, I would be quite satisfied with it. I used Krita (I think that’s the name) to handle some basic graphics work, and did just fine with it. Konqueror as an equivalent to MS Explorer is good, so I was able to migrate a lot of files over and retain the original structure. In other words, it is pretty easy to sit down at a basic Kubuntu machine and be able to do fundamental computer work without needing to mod the distro.

Over the weekend we tried to do some tweaks, including installing the proper driver for my video card. It took MAL a while, but he finally got that done, and installed Beryl—a very cool window manager—too. We both forgot to shut down and restart the machine, though, to see what would happen.

So, you guessed it: I tried to start my machine this morning, and it reports that there’s a conflict with my driver and some module(s). It isn’t an uncommon occurrence, however, so I’m sure I’ll find a fix for the problem. The situation is similar to ones I’ve encountered on Windows machines, so I’m not feeling out of my league yet. We’ll see how I fare.

The bad news is that I don’t have access to the email downloaded on that machine—which includes all truffle orders placed last week. I do have webmail access to incoming email, and PGP capabilities also, so if you folks could resend your order and shipping information, I can fill your orders and get them on the way today. I apologize for the inconvenience.