Saturday, September 08, 2007

Finally updated our last machine

Last week I finally got around to updating my wife's machine to PCLinuxOS 2007. The process when smoothly like the two other machines and took about an hour (including time for the patches). My wife did notice a slowdown in the machine, but, her machine is the slowest in the house (1 Ghz). I did tweak the settings for services and KDE and the response is acceptable to her now (but still slow). It looks like this machine will be repurposed as a file/print server the next time I do an upgrade and buy a newer and faster machine for her.

I have a large amount of photos and I tried digiKam to handle my library. It is a nice package, but, it does take time to learn. I like the burning options and one of my first projects was to create a CD that autolaunched a slide show. My second project was to take a few pictures and make a MPG show out of that. One word of warning, the MPG creation takes a very long time. I did a show with five pictures that lasted about 1 minute and it took about 30 minutes to create the show. I will be playing with the options a lot in the coming weeks as our oldest is getting married and I am one of the wedding photographers.

I bought a new digital camera, a Canon A630. When you do connect the machine up to the PC for file transfer be sure to set the camera to preview mode (shows your photos and not the current view) as the camera/PC will not connect. Once I figured that out I transferred over 850 megs of images and movies without a problem into digiKam.