Thursday, September 10, 2009

At least one of them works...or how I learned to love the penguin

Thanks to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds I was able to resurrect one of my dear departed numbery boxes taking up space. I have my computer, lets call it Eh and I was given a computer that we will call Bea. Eh is sick, opinions vary as to what the illness is but suffice to say if it goes within one hundred feet of the internet police are called and it gets ugly. Perhaps it's a chemical imbalance or maybe it was dropped as a child, like I said, opinions vary. I decided I would configure Bea to walk and talk like Eh without all the random violence and what have you. I was not aware that you could not do a full system restore with the discs from a numbery box from a different manufacturer. I have zero legacy info on Bea. She was an orphan and had no papers, you see. It turns out that when you put the discs in from Eh and try to restore Bea with them you basically lobotomize the numbery box. Oops, sorry Bea.
Linus to the rescue. On a whim I did a google search for Linux. "Hello, what's this?" I remarked, "Linux is a complete operating system with a suite of software and is totally free, you say?". One of our IT guys at work is a Linux fan (I know, right?) and he literally had a disc lying within arms reach. Presto, I was running Bea and on the interwebs in minutes. I don't even hate Bill Gates and I'm starting to dig the OS. I sort of stumbling around in the dark with it and it won't do everything I want it to without learning another programming langauge but it's really cool learning about new things and for the general purpose checking the email and surfing box I'm sticking with it for a while. Maybe I can make time to actually blog a bit more now that I can do it from home. Insert hysterical ironic laughter here.

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