[Glastonbury] New to it

[mauricemail]

You must forgive me. I'd got an obviously erroneous impression that
Glastonbury Linux Types were remote unapproachable egg heads and what is the
expression used now-a-days, technies? An expression, one feels, often used
with derision by those who find difficulty in summing 2 with 2.

Thank you anyway.

Ian Dickinson mentioned the Migration Handbook. I have it now in pdf. And I
guess it will be useful for home users too. I also have a couple of Linux
text books, one heavy the other light. However, my objective is to use
applications not spend half the rest of my life tweaking the OS and having
to learn 2000 command line variations on the way:-)

Martin Wheeler said "how can we hap" and suggested I might bring my PC to a
meeting. Thank you for the offer. However, I don't want to disentangle the
birds nest and screw the case back on at the present time. There must be an
easier way?

Kelvin McNulty introduced the topic of disk partitioning. After several
years of costly mistakes I do seem to have sorted that problem. Until the
next mess-up, of course. I decided to install a Linux distro on a separate
hard drive partitioning the drive in such a way that I had some fat32 space
for temporary m$ backup from the other drive. I unplugged the other drive
for belt and braces security. Now I use a bios facility to select the boot
drive from a menu which comes up if  you press F8 at boot up time.

So I have the 10.1 Mandrake distro successfully installed. Now here begineth
the real head-aches!

We have a broadband router/modem. Has four network connections plus one usb.
One of us connects using an Ethernet cable, I use the usb. I also have an
Ethernet card and for Linux thought it better to connect that to the router
too. M$ has always performed perfectly through the usb (honest). Mandrake
didn't connect. After lots of tweaking it did and then after a period of
time (5 to 15 minutes) disconnects all by itself. Will often work again if I
re-boot. The Ethernet connection is being used. Any thoughts on what may be
causing this problem would be welcomed.

And hurrah. The connection was maintained just long enough to download the
Firefox browser. I used Ark without knowing why. Happily Firefox  installed
itself without a problem and launched automatically at the end of the set-up
process. By that time, of course, the internet connection had gone down.
Re-booted to see if the connection would re-establish and couldn't find
Firefox. I've found a Firefox folder but cannot discover an executable file.
Any assistance would be welcomed.

Once again, thank you to all who responded to my cry for help.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ian Dickinson" <ian_j_dickinson at yahoo.co.uk>
To: "The Linux User Group of Glastonbury (LUGOG)"
<glastonbury at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, 17, December 2004 10:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Glastonbury] New to it


> In case anyone doesn't follow the discussion at
> Slashdot [1], IBM have posted a free pdf guide [2] to
> migrating from Windows desktops to Linux.
> Particularly aimed at business users, I think, but I
> expect there's useful stuff in there for home users
> too.
>
> The abstract:
>
> """
> The goal of this IBM Redbook is to provide a technical
> planning reference for IT organizations large or small
> that are now considering a migration to Linux-based
> personal computers. For Linux, there is a tremendous
> amount of "how to" information available online that
> addresses specific and very technical operating system
> configuration issues, platform-specific installation
> methods, user interface customizations, etc. This book
> includes some technical "how to" as well, but the
> overall focus of the content in this book is to walk
> the reader through some of the important
> considerations and planning issues you could encounter
> during a migration project. Within the context of a
> pre-existing Microsoft Windows-based environment, we
> attempt to present a more holistic, end-to-end view of
> the technical challenges and methods necessary to
> complete a successful migration to Linux-based
> clients.
> """
>
> Ian
>
> [1] for those that don't know it, it's a very busy
> tech-oriented discussion board with a wide range of
> topics and a highly variable quality of discussion!
>
> http://slashdot.org
>
>
> [2] "Linux client migration cookbook"
> http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246380.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
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