Friday 24 October 2003

Some ideas for content for this site...

I've been thinking for a while about something to write upon that would be of use to me an to many other people as well... I'm thinking something along the lines of a FAQ, but a topic-less FAQ... just questions I have asked myself many a time and searched the Internet for and not been able to find an immediate answer for. I'll take on board any suggestions any has, and even some question you may want to post. Just send them to the usual e-mail address.

On another topic of interest, I'm thinking of obtaining a notebook shortly. The one I currently have is a Toshiba Tecra 500CDT. It's about 7 years old, and is running a Intel Pentium I 120Mhz Chip, a broken (dry joint) CD ROM, 1.2 GB Hard Drive, and with Windows95 installed. I once tried loading Red Hat Linux 7.0 onto it, but due to my limited hard-drive, low memory (32MB), and then lack of knowledge, I got it up and running, but was frustrated at how slow everything ran in GNOME. This lead me to re-install Windows95. I know now I could have optimized it by switching off some services, and also choosing a lighter desktop. The laptop was good in it's day, but I think 7 years in IT changes many things. Saying that I'm thinking of upgrading to a Toshiba P20 (Clicking on this text will either trigger a download, or load a PDF into your browser. The PDF is originally from Toshiba Australia's Website. It comes with a Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz Chip with HT, 80GB Hard Drive, DVD-RW/CD-RW, 17" wide screen, and many more features (but they're the main ones I'm interested in). What has all this got to do with content? Well I plan on documenting my installation of Linux on it. My strategy will consist of first restricting the WindowsXP partition of the hard drive to about 15GB, and dedicating the rest of it to Linux. I'll be attempting the following distributions in the following order: Knoppix (to get a feel of what's going on), followed by Red Hat / Fedora or Mandrake, then finally Gentoo. Wish me luck. I should be able to document my steps in a clear, understandable manner allowing those after me wanting to install Linux to find my information useful.