[Gloucs] Andy's rant.

[David Corking]

On Sun, GEOFF BAGLEY wrote:

>> > He  has a Kodak digital camera that is NOT Linux
>> friendly -
> It is a Kodak M380.  I am now searching for a suitable interface
> to Debian.

What I do is take the memory card out of the camera and plug it into a
card reader.  As far as I know all card readers support the USB Mass
Storage standard, which is well supported by the Linux kernel (and
other free kernels.)  I never care about camera drivers.

>> ...... anything up to £130 for AV for three years,
> (please what is AV ? )

AntiVirus :)

No-charge anti-virus services available from Avira and AVG (for
personal non-business use.  Frequently nag you to upgrade to a more
comprehensive security suite at about the price mentioned above.)

Avira:  http://www.free-av.com/

> £70-400 for Microsoft Office depending on whether you have a prior version   ( that could be Open Office )

OpenOffice works fine on Windows, if I recall correctly.

>> £70 per hour at > PC World or Curry's to fix it :)

(I charge less, but not much less, and I don't guarantee results.  My
new tagline: "Use Linux, or I'll come round your house and fix your
computer"
)

But please, please stick with Linux - even if you need to top it up
with some proprietary codecs, or open source software that is cavalier
with motion compression patents.

For proprietary codecs, these guys are very friendly to Linux:

http://www.fluendo.com/

DownloadHelper is a fairly nice, and mature, Firefox extension for
transcoding videos from Flash websites.