Apr 24th, 2007 | Free Software | No Comments
I use free software every day at home and at work, but I’ve never been really big on converting non-technical people to use it. For my purposes it’s clearly superior, but I’m not sure that’s true for my family and friends. Possibly the only exception is Firefox. I do a bit of Windows tech support for friends, and without fail I install the latest Firefox release and issue stern instructions that for security reasons, it’s the only browser they should be using.
This has had mixed results- my little brother is still a dedicated IE user. However it looks like I might get him to start using Lyx, the world’s only What You See Is What You Mean document processor. This year he is doing a thesis for his B.E. in Civil Engineering, and I suggested that he use Lyx rather the ubiquitous Microsoft Word. Once I showed him a printed version of my B.E. thesis he was really keen, as it looks very shmick- more like a journal article than an undergraduate essay.
I find that for a given level of graphic design ability (i.e. none), Latex documents look much better.
The other big selling point of Lyx (and Latex) is stability. In my experience, Word is great for relatively short, simple documents. A 100 page document with many images, footnotes, sections and other features can go pear-shaped. This has happened to my brother, so a solution that doesn’t suffer from this was appealing to him. And, of course, Lyx runs on Windows. I don’t think he’s interested in a Ubuntu install any time soon.
I’m interested to see what his experience will be like, how easy Lyx is to use, and how well it met his needs. Stay tuned for updates on this riveting usability study.
Apr 24th, 2007 | Free Software | No Comments
So I finally finished installing FC6 on my dual-Athlon box (hostname kj) at home. This was more work than it sounds like as I did a test install on an old Celeron 500 I have lying around (thanks mum!) to make sure that none of my mission-critical *cough* apps were broken on FC6. Amazingly, the Fedora graphical installer requires 256MB of RAM- with less than this you can only run the text mode installer! Getting round this hurdle required some hasty PC133 reorganization from the other relics cluttering up my room.
Since I have Wordpress installed on kj, I had to figure out how to install Wordpress and phpMyAdmin again. It turns out that the whole export MySQL database -> import database -> upgrade Wordpress process is pretty easy.
I also tested to make sure that my Canon LiDE 60 scanner and EDIROL UA-25 USB audio interface worked OK. Not that I expected problems. Although I had to do some hairy config file editing when I originally set up the LiDE 60 with Fedora Core 4, this time everything worked out of the box.
The only significant problem I had was getting my monitor recognized. It’s a Dell P991 and has happily been doing 1280 x 1024 at 85Hz for years. I tried using system-config-display, but the modifications it made to /etc/X11/xorg.conf would only give a refresh rate of 60Hz at that resolution. Copying the Monitor section from my old FC4 xorg.conf fixed it.
If you are installing FC6 I strongly recommend having a look at Mauriat Miranda’s guide, it makes things much easier.
It would probably have been quicker to just do an upgrade rather than a full install, but I have never really believed in the whole upgrade thing. Too risky. Much better to get a new drive and install on that. Then, if it turns out the Fedora folks have done something heinous like omitting my fave console font from the release, it’s easy to stage a strategic retreat.
Unfortunately, my joy will be shortlived. Fedora 7 is due for release on the 24th May.
