On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 03:26 -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:
Listmates,
Had to share this somewhat comical but painfully fun event. Long ago I retired my mandrake 7.2 (odyssey) server and the box had gone through a number of changes since I yanked the 40G IBM Deskstar drive out of it after (??) 4 years of continual service. The network card was new, the video card was new, but despite the changes, when I put the drive back into the box - 7.2 fired right up! Remember linuxconf? Remember when you were not even presented with a list of potential modules to load, but instead had to look in /lib/modules/<kernel> just to find something that looked close like the 3c90x.ko module to get a 3c950 card running? Recall the old drakes - XFdrake, menudrake, etc.? Man what a trip down memory lane and talk about cobweb filled memories.
The entire ordeal was prompted by a new lady that I hired today needing a box put together on the quick. I wasn't going to sacrifice the raid array in the box or the spare 250G drive in there that I still had not had time to parse through to make sure I wasn't throwing anything important away. Thus, the old 40G was enlisted to pull another tour of duty, and... for the first time in its 8 year life, it was spoon fed -- windows.... yuk!
So we bid a fair adieu to mandy 7.2, and 12 hours later had a fully updated XP install, complete with a slew of the little utilities I can't live without (fileMenuTools, FMview, mysql gui tools, etc...) and topped off with a full MS Office, OpenOffice, Gimp, PaintShop Pro, and imagemagick install with all updates through SP3 to current installed. (What a painful process)
The more you have to go back a tinker with windows, the more you appreciate the elegance of Linux and the distribution Novell has put together. The trip down memory lane with mandy 7.2 and KDE 2 also showed just how far KDE3 had come since the early days. We can only hope that KDE4 can achieve as much.
(P.S. Next time I'm just buying a preloaded box at Staples, this install and configure from scratch stuff with windows is just too damn painful...)
Seeing as you have killer skills with openSuSE, I'm kinda wondering why you did the 'doze. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org