Do You Ubuntu?

Richmond Mathewson geradamas at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 21 07:27:29 EDT 2007


Sorry, Peter, it is Bob Warren who finds Puppy
impressive.

I played around with Puppy about 2 years ago when I
"went for Linux" and downloaded about 25 different
distros and put an old Pentium 3 through a weekly
reformat until it choked! At the time I was not
particulalrly taken with Puppy - but, as we are all
aware; a week is a long time in the software world,
and 2 years is a hell of a long time.

When I have to use internet cafes (like the last time
I popped down to Istanbul) I boot the machine up with
"Wanderer" so none of the pimply Herberts who
generally run internet cafes can "suck" out my
passwords and so forth after I have left. I carry a
CDR of Wanderer around in my pocket; it is also useful
for testing out clients' internet connexions without
having to muck up their settings before it is clear
what the problem is.

I, also, follow Damn Small Linux quite closely,
although it is a bit of a coterie distro.

As I stated before, I rather like Flux-box (hence DSL)
and XFCE ( so, at present fooling around with Ubuntu
with XFCE slapped on top - which, to my mind is better
than Xubuntu straight off the disk ).

I noticed several remarks about Red Hat, Slackware and
so forth - however, my focus (and, it should always be
remembered that everybody's opinion about Linux is
going to be heavily coloured by what they want to do
with it) is small businesses who run 1 to 5 PCs and
their workers who no nothing about PCs and just want
"a box with 'Office' and an internet browser".

Having said the above I should also like to make a
point which has wasted a lot of my time in the past:

I always ask a client what s/he wants their PC to do -
and they give me a fairly basic list - I then install
the system - they then tell me they want digital
certificates for banking,card readers, blah, blah,
blah - and, why didn't I install all this at the start
- I shout at them - they shout at me - I spend 3 more
days poodling around shoving WINE and IE for Linux on
their system, 57 more code libraries - and they don't
feel they have to pay me for the extra work - I shout
at them - they shout at me - and so on . . .

So my new policy is to spend 2 - 3 hours 'playing'
with their existing Windows system (i.e. the one I am
about to replace) and seeing what is there - because
clients are rather like patients who go to the doctor
and say they have a pain in the back - but have
something else, somewhere else, which causes that
symptom.

Oh, My God, its that time of the month again, I'm up
on my soap-box!

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson

____________________________________________________________

A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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