Ok...Hopefully anybody that reads this read the last post, because I can't see why I would rehash. Here is a link...if you can't find the last post for some reason. Anyways, I was/am using XP and pretty much love it. I have nice boxes that are shiny and fast so I have few issues. I help friends and family with tech issues and have managed to stay out of too much trouble. My license is even a proper and real license on the box I am typing this on. My old box has a valid license for XP as well....I think I may be running proper and genuine operating systems on all of my machines for the first time ever!!
Ah, I am getting old I guess. I used to think "Stick it to the man for charging so much" Now I see all these free market things and supply and demand, so be it. I still think XP is too much money, but I bought a copy via OEM in November for $135 or so. Better then $300. I have much windows experience as I stated earlier. I have been braking windows since 3.0. Linux not so much until lately, but I try to make up for lost time by having much Linux around.
I loved Knoppix, but it seems unpractical to me for a system....not what its designed for etc. I found Ubuntu to be fantastic, sort of. I do like the XP style interface so I went over to Kubuntu. It is the tool I used until a few months ago to preach to the masses of the uninitated. Good tool, polished and nice, but a little high in system requirements. I somehow decided to make a digital picture frame after reading a ton about them online. So I found this thing called Damn Small Linux. It was smooth. I loved its idea from the jump. It had great hardware detection and worked well. I will not call it anything it is not, as it is not for total beginners or those afraid to screw up.
I knew live Cd's were around before I had one for my PC. I had worked at a casino and seen that the new slot machines were all run like PCs. They had a cdrom and a tamper seal over it to keep the disc unfettered with, but they ran from CD and were more or less not hackable( lets not argue about that, I am sure there is a way around anything if you want it badly enough). I saw that if there was a machine issue you just turned it off and back on and it was as good as new most of the time. DSL is like that; bulletproof and rock solid 99% of the time.
So I built a DPF and had a ton of fun doing it. It was a great learning tool. It has wifi and a frugal style hard drive install so it remains read only while in operation. It has a vnc server and samba shares mounted at boot to get pictures from via the network and is really neat. It does need some tweaking, but I have since done 4-5 more and each one gets easier to do...I did one for my son that is CD only, no LAN or remote admin. It is easier to do changes to from another machine. Just remaster and burn. Replace the disk and reboot the frame to get new pics.
So parts 2 - 4 will detail my personal observations with Linux vs XP. I make no claims as to my expertise, I am just one man with lots of computers and a fussy wife. I will toss her 2 cents in fro m time to time.
Lets begin
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