I was very pleased to find out that I was allowed to make a choice between two operating systems when I started in my new job. Of course, the choice was to be made between OS X and Windows. At the moment, Linux is used only on our development servers.
I have been quite happy with OS X, even if it lacks some of the command line tools I would like to use for getting things done. After installing some additional tools like Aquamacs, the OS X is more than adequate desktop system for an internet marketing consultant. In addition, using a Mac laptop is probably something that my clients expect from a marketing consultant.
At home, I'm mostly using OpenSUSE on my main desktop. This box is probably about 6-7 years old. A year or two ago I upgraded it with a new memory chip. 1 GB seems to be more than enough for my needs.
A week ago I decided to wipe out the Zenwalk from the harddrive of my old eVectra box. I installed Debian stable on it, and now the venerable 1 GHz box serves my as a development server running Wordpress and some other content management systems. It is a lot more convenient to develop small web sites using a dedicated development server than to hack the site either on my desktop or
In the autumn, I hope to be able to finish my studies of economics and finance. Even if the degree is probably not very useful for my current career, one never knows what the my future will be like.
In any case, I want to be ready for as many different possible futures as possible.
During the last year, I've been slower than ever in creating new content for this blog. First I needed the time for my studies, and since two months I work as SEO and Internet marketing consultant in an online marketing company. Thus I never seem to have enough time for my extracurricular activities.
Today I just wanted to inform you that from now on the blog is optimized also for mobile devices. Thus all happy owners of iPhone should be able to read the archives easily :)
Even dedicated Linux users should not forget the existence of BSD family of Unix operating systems. For example, Arch users might consider testing NetBSD for a few weeks, Debian users might like FreeBSD and *buntu people could well find themselves comfortable using PC-BSD.
And in case you really don't want to try living on the other side of the fence, you should in any case read the free BSD Magazine. Very often the articles are equally useful for Linux and BSD users -- and the magazine is freely downloadable!
I suppose most of my readers know that it is pretty easy to get usable computer hardware for free. If the hardware is not fast enough for the latest incarnation of MS Windows, OS X or the some of the recent shoot-em-ups most people are willing to update their hardware to something more recent. If their old hardware happens to be more than, for example, five to seven years old, it is probably impossible to sell at any reasonable price. For people like me, those computers are still more than usable.
Unfortunately, I've not been able to find any real use for hardware that is about 20 years old. Of course, I still could write my text files using WordPerfect 5.1 if I just could find somewhere installation floppies still functioning. Or I could use the computer for playing some classic MS DOS games. Just being geekier than the people around me might be a reason for doing that instead of playing the games using a DOS emulator running under Linux. Or I could use a 386 as a terminal for ssh sessions on some of my more recent computers.
Books, on the other hand, do not lose their value as fast as the computers do. I still enjoy reading books printed decades ago. I enjoy reading Roman and Greek classics in translation and sometimes even in the original language -- if I have some extra time to spend with Latin grammar and old dictionaries.
Even computer books can be useful for decades. I found in the local university library a few old books about AWK, Perl and Emacs that are still very helpful for a semi-computer-illiterate like me. Unfortunately, it is a lot more difficult to find classic O'Reilly books for free than it is to get free hardware. But I'll continue my search for them...
Of course, there are some interesting books that can be downloaded for free, for example the Unix Text Processing by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly. The book was originally published in 1987 but you can still learn a lot from it if you are just learning to use the GNU command line tools.
I have something to confess.
During the last weeks and months I have alarmingly often thought about buying a new computer. That in itself should not be too worrying, but the fact that I have in fact enjoyed using the Windows 7 at school causes me some headache.
Furthermore, I have started to think about the advantages of having a MS Office license for my small business. Being able to check the compatibility of my text files using the globally most popular word processor might make my life a bit easier.
Unfortunately, the license for MS Office would be more expensive than a new desktop computer. I could, of course, buy a student license for the office package but then I wouldn't be able to use the software legally for my small business. At the moment, the about 50 euros per month needed for a new PC and MS Office are too much for my budget.
Life is full of choices and sometimes it is difficult to make the right decision. Everything seemed to be much simpler when I didn't need to work with clients...
During the last months, I've been busy creating my own start-up business as web copywriter. Starting a business and studying at the same time has demanded a lot of my time which means I have had few moments available for non-profitable blogging.
Today I found something I wanted to share with you: fvwm-crystal. For years I've wanted to use fvwm but I have never had the time to tweak the settings in order to have a good-looking desktop. Today I noticed the Debian package fvwm-crystal which immediately gave me a usable and nice-looking desktop. Unfortunately, the package came with quite a few dependencies.
Anyway, fvwm seems to function very nicely on my 600 MHz iBook. After a few months jumping between framebuffer and openbox, fvwm is a very refreshing window manager.
Having just finished my B.Sc. thesis the short Eastern vacation was more than welcome for me. At the end of the day, I was able to do all the writing and typesetting needed using a text only Debian system. LaTeX, Koma Script and Emacs were fully adequate tools for all of my needs.
As usual, the BibTeX caused some headache but most of the problems were solved by Shiro Takeda's econ.bst. Martin J. Osborne's te.bst was another good candidate for building the bibliography. After this experience I'm pretty confident I can use the same combination of software for even bigger writing projects. If my supervisor accepts the slight differences between the final version and the official Word template of the school I will no doubt continue using this system for all the homework I have to write during my final year at the business school.
Today, I've been building a Linux box for my wife to be used mainly for serious writing (she's a humanities PhD) and Impress presentations. The hardware is probably old enough to be considered old hardware by most of my readers: 1.7 GHz processor and 256 MB RAM. Unfortunately, none of the distro's tried seem to be able to connect to the internet using the network card built on the motherboard. At the moment I don't have any extra network cards so I cannot build the system using only the spare parts I have. I just hope the motherboard stays alive for a year or two as at the moment we are living on a rather tight budget.
This time I decided to install Zenwalk 6.2 on the box. It is pretty lightweight, easy to configure and provides everything my wife needs out of the box and not too much software she would never need. Furthermore, Xfce provides all the desktop functionality she expects to find in her desktop system and she should be able to use the system confortably without my help.
