Updating my machine

For the last couple of months I have been looking at the various distros that are out there and how they work on my machine here.  The one I really wanted updated was PCLINUXOS so that all of the machines at home run with the same distro.  The 2009.2 version still won't boot on my machine so I had to look elsewhere.  My current distro was Mint 5.

Mandriva just came out with their latest and I downloaded and burned the ISO and gave it a shot.  It looks very nice visually and it detected most of my hardware without a problem.  The only two things were my palm pilot and the TV card which it didn't detect (like every other distro so far).  I then downloaded Mint 7 KDE and gave it a shot.  It was as visually appealing to me as Mandriva and had the same issues with the palm pilot and TV card.  The area it was ahead was that Java was installed automatically (I have to install that on Mandriva) and the ATI card driver was there for me.  I opted to keep with Mint so far and I upgraded to version 7.

One of the bonuses of this is now I have two more CDs that I can then pass out to friends and family when they have more problems with windows. 

It will take a bit of time to get used to KDE 4, but, so far it has not caused me any problems.  Firefox with Java still plays Runescape in HD mode without a problem.  Digikam works fine along with Thunderbird and XSANE.

When I get some time I will try to dig and see if I can get the palm pilot to work.  I thought I saw something about 'VISOR'.  If that doesn't work I really want to get my TV card to work.  I have a lot of home videos I would like to hook up to the input and make into MPG files and have them transferred to DVD for the family.

Update 2009/11/08:

I have moved off of Mint over to Mandriva.  I have been using Mint for a day and I have noticed a few things that make it a bit less usable for me.

1. Runescape log in flickers wildy and it cannot be stopped unless I take HD mode off.
2. The shutdown function at times (about 50%) does not work and the system locks.
3. I cannot access system services to manually define what I want to run.  This is a critical one for me as I want complete control over what is running.  Mandriva allows me to do this.

The first two items may be something that I did when I configured the system, but, so far Mandriva is not doing those things and I will use that for now.

In Mandriva it didn't auto-detect my printer (SAMSUNG ML-2010), but, after going to WWW.SAMSUNG.COM I found the driver, downloaded it and installed.  It wasn't as smooth as Mint, but, it worked and I now have a printer.

It is mostly Plug and Play

I have been doing a lot of playing around with my new Canon digital camera. I bought a new toy to go with it. It takes the SD card and makes it into a USB memory stick. I took out the photos from the wedding and plugged it into my Linux box. Within several seconds it recognized the new hardware and I had a window open in DigiKam and transferring over 800 megs of photos. I like the new hardware as it allows me to show people the photos without plugging in the camera to their machine (I normally don't bring the USB cable when taking pictures). The other nice thing is that I don't have to use the camera and wear out the batteries while viewing the photos.

DigiKam is a nice package and I have been using it for about a month. I have been moving my pictures into it and making suitable backups. Burning CDs is a simple option and it simplifies my task rather than using several programs for the tasks.

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.