I recently went into my attic and dug out my old desktop computer. It's an Advent QC8003. It was originally for playing the Sims but it's probably a little dated now. Here's a spec list: http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/advent/pc/QC8003.htm I've been thinking perhaps its time to put it to work and I'd quite like to install Linux Mint on it. Most likely the cinnamon spin as I want to go default at first so when looking for help it's easier to follow. Is there anything there that is going to be a horrifying compatibility issue that sticks out like a sore thumb for you? Thanks!
I consider myself a Linux novice in some regards but intermediate in others. It's a strange mix, there are basic things I have absolutely no idea how to do but on the other hand I know how to SSH into a server from my mobile phone. I've been using Linux off and on for quite a few years now. When I was in my early 20s I had dreams about working in a creative IT field and I had an Ubuntu webserver running LAMP and I was getting quite involved with that part of it but during the recession when needs must I became a check out girl instead and I got rid of the server. My website was never getting any hits anyway and I decided that a tumblr blog would probably be a far more sensible solution and that's what I've been using ever since. Between then and now I bought a cheap £150 netbook that came with windows 7 pre-installed...was NEVER going to work, I switched to Xubuntu and I thoroughly enjoyed using it. I was thinking either that or XP but being modern seemed much better. I mostly used it just for very simple things, checking email, facebook, youtube that was about it. If the screen hadn't completely bled out I'd probably still be happily using it for those reasons. I've always really preferred using a physical keyboard to a tablet touch screen. I tried to keep myself in practice with the CLI side of things but really all I did was use apt-get. Still I guess that's better than nothing. If I am to be a Linux user I don't want to be someone who is terrified of the console. Edit: my reasoning behind choosing Mint is because it's at the top of distrowatch and I was hoping that most popular = most support
It was my thinking when I picked Ubuntu years ago!So I've found myself getting interested in technology again and I really want to keep this up as much as I can and I think getting back into the creative sphere is probably the best way of facilitating this. When I started reading up about it again though I found that all the stories about what people are doing with linux are just so much...I hesitate to use the word "cooler" because it doesn't seem grand enough...but the ISS, Cern, Android, Google, Twitter, Facebook, beowulf clusters. It's hard not to feel enthusiastic when you really think about what is out there using it. However something I have noticed is that in these instances they are running Linux for a very laser pointer focused reason, I'm just some random woman who's going to be using it probably like a desktop pc and there isn't really a huge amount of people out there like that. However, this is why I wanted to create a discussion about your personal usage reasons, something you feel that you could do significantly easier on Linux than windows or even something that you do that is impossible on windows! That would be really interesting. I'd like to get inspired as for what I could use it for
. Right now my main plan with it is to do a lot of word processing and that's about it. The word processing is important and I want to try and boost my productivity by putting this computer in a different room with a lot of my social networking stuff disabled so I'm not constantly being distracted, and I'd honestly probably be extremely happy just doing that and only using my PC for that but I think in the back of my mind I'd know that I'm only using 0.01% of what it can do, I mean it's on the freaking ISS! hehehe. Something else I'd like to ask about, I've noticed that if you go to specialist hardware shops for linux you can just keep adding more and more processing power and its similar for the clusters as well, far more than people tend to do this for Windows. Is this mainly for webservers when you just have more and more users so you need more processing to handle them all or is it for very specialist pieces of homebrew software? I'm guessing as a home user there's little need to ever do this other than for nerdy blogging cred.I'd also like to read some books to brush up on my skills. I'd like to read at least one linux book that's written for the absolute complete novice, you know the kind of level I mean, the one written with grandma in mind, just so I can feel absolutely confident that I have the absolute basics down. I think that would be a good starting point. After that I think I'd quite like to read the Linux Cookbook and Linux in a nutshell as I've heard they're both really useful and it goes mostly into terminal stuff although I'm just slightly concerned that the book might be a little bit out of date now, although I suspect that the terminal doesn't change too much. I also need to get used to reading man pages again, they're a little confusing at first but I do remember getting used to their style after a while, I'm just rusty I guess.
Thank you very much, I realise I'm asking a lot here and I'm really excited to becoming a Linux user again.
Casey x
