paulmoreland.com

Today my laptop “bit the dust”.  It simply refused to cooperate.  I couldn’t even get it to boot into “Safe Mode”.  Fortunately I set up an Ubuntu Linux 10.04 USB drive the other day.  I guess the Good Lord was prompting me.  A search on the ‘net produced zilch, nada, zip, diddley as to ways to fix the problem I’d encountered.  The hard drive was accessible so the external hard drive was called into play and a copy of the document folder contents was made. A copy of the desktop was made.  And finally, after much hemming, hawing, dithering and stewing I did it – clicked the “Install Ubuntu” button.  The hard drive was re-partitioned and formatted and Ubuntu 10.04 was installed.  Now?  I’m in the process of setting up e-mail and other vital functions.  Ubuntu 10.04 is a breeze to setup and maintain.  Over the past few months I’ve messed with it quite a bit on the other decrepit, almost moribund laptop.  That one is now doing duty on Sundays as the church’s presentation projector.  It’s hooked up to the video projector and we use Open Office Impress to show the songs and the sermons each Lord’s Day.

And so far I’m tickled.  We’ll see what all can be done to do everything I need to do. Main concerns at this point are Frontpage (I’m going to try running it under Wine) and video editing.  Ubuntu is supposed to have new video editing capabilities – we’ll just have to put them to trial and see what can be done.  The keyboard takes getting used to.  After well over a decade of Mickey$oft Windoze’s US – International keyboard, the Linux equivalent does leave somethings to be desired.  In the Windoze variant an ‘ followed by a t produces ‘t where as the Linux version produces a blank space.  Also the ‘ followed by a c in Windoze produces a c-cedilla (don’t know how to reproduce it here, but it looks like a c with a tail under it) – here it produces a ? ??? Upside down c-cedilla?  (weirder yet – the letter it produces becomes a question mark in WordPress) I’ll have to do some homework to learn how to write portuguese on this machine now.    Still, español works fine, and that is what I type the most, other than english that is.