Posted by Jim at March 29th, 2004

I’ve got my Linux box online again. Actually, it wasn’t so much offline as painful to use by anyone who doesn’t enjoy the command line. As somcone who uses command line almost exclusively at work (for system administration, anyway. Not web page design.), this doesn’t bother me too much.

That being said, I do like a gui for certain things (cd burning, for example).

Currently, I’m running Mandrake Linux. I’m not sure how long this will last, but it has been good overall. One of my pet peeves with Unix has been having to mount cd’s and floppies. Mandrake just detects them. I like that.

On the other hand, I still don’t have sound and it didn’t automatically detect my thumb drive. In that sense, it’s no better than any other flavor of Linux/BSD. And of course, it doesn’t have the same ease of upgrade as Debian (if you’re not willing to pay).

So, I guess I’ll evaluate it for a few weeks and then see if I want to switch to something else. Of course, if I put lots of master’s project related material on it, I may want to just stick with it rather than move my files around.

We’ll see.

Oh… For what it’s worth… My master’s project appears likely to be a peer to peer based search engine. I’ll explain it later.