Club Linux Coffs Harbour

A friend of a friend offered to pay me to set up broadband internet on his old computer. Money shmoney, I foolishly thought, I'll do it for free. So I bought a $30 modem off ebay and set it all up with a reputable ISP, the computer was running Windows 98 but I didn't have to use it so that's fine. An hour to set it all up and provide a quick lesson in how to use the net and I'm done.

A bit of free help randomly thrown out into the world, leaving behind a warm fuzzy glow.

No. I was a fool. Windows 98 choked two weeks later, infested with viruses and trojans. No chance of a reinstall, I don't do Win98, besides he had no original disk (phew!). 'Fine', I thought, 'I'll whack Ubuntu on it'. However the computer was far too ancient to handle the graphical installer.

So I text installed Xubuntu 7.04. Unfortunately there was some odd glitches with the graphics - it turned out to be the poorly supported savage video card. As the owner of this machine will not be using it for 3d games or fancy desktop apps I decided vesa would do the trick. By this stage I decided I did not want to support Xubuntu, not that there is anything wrong with it - nor is it very different. I am just lazy when it comes to providing tech support. So I grabbed a copy of the Ubuntu alt. text installer and whacked that on it.

Now it is zipping along, looking much more slick than Win98. Nice and simple too two big icons on the screen, one for Firefox and one for Thunderbird (Evolution seemed to have problems connecting to Gmail's servers)

I just delivered the newly built computer this morning (on my bicycle trailer - even the delivery was open-source. It is embarrassing how hippy I can be). Happy people all round, especially when it imported all the photos off the new digital camera - easy as pie.  Oh, and he insisted on paying me... :)