Well, lunchtime rolled around, made some phone calls, etc., cooked a bite and then…
Aw, heck, why not? Wiped a hard drive on a “play” machine, installed the xfc-enabled KDE-based Xubuntu 6.06.1 (cos I’d already determined that 6.1 didn’t like installing on that box), then used Synaptic Package manager to d/l and install the Edgy Eft (6.1)-based Ichthux Linux distro over the Xubuntu install.
And it took less time overall than an install onto bare metal of XP-Pro.
Then I spent about 30 minutes playing around with the interface, tweaking the thing to my preferences, before I started one of the apps that make this Ichthux “distro” (which, as a 6.1 Edgy Eft distro wouldn’t install on this box, but would upgrade… :-)) a so-called “Christian” Linux.
Sidebar: note the scare quotes. *heh* Things cannot be Christian or unchristian or non-christian or whatever: only people. And I certainly do not claim any “Christ-likeness” for myself, in myself. Still, I was intrigued by the software packages that came as standard in the Ichthux distro, despite the cutesy name and silly claim, so…
Fired up “Bible Time”. Set my preferences for texts, dictionaries/lexicons (only the rather poor Strong’s was a default, and not any really good, more advanced lexicons available for free, so accepted the (weak) default for lexicon), other works (including Pilgrim’s Progress, Calvin’s Institutes–yay! don’t have to hunt for which boxes they’re in any more! :-)) and a few others. Nice search features. I like the inclusion of the Textus Receptus. Yeh, I know they’d have had to pay a licensing fee for the Nestle-Alland, but I’m not fond of it, anyway (too much of Kurt Alland’s personal theology intruded into what he contrafactually claimed were scholarly decisions, IMO), so I don’t really miss it. haven’t seen my dead tree copy for 15 or more years and haven’t missed it.
Looks like there are other apps suggested, but I’ll just play with this one for now, apart from checking the edgy Eft-based Xubuntu interface out some more.
In other areas, Jpilot seems to (sometimes) work under this distro. It’ll (sometimes) synch nicely with my Palm and other times, not. Kpilot works well enough, though, although I really dislike its farming the calendar out to Kontacts. I have to have two separate apps loaded to synch my Palm? *Feh* And some add-in apps aren’t recognized at all by either–just the basic Palm apps. Still, Palm Desktop for Windows has become flaky–not even a reinstall has helped it operate properly in a while, and I can’t seem to discover just exactly what’s going on there. So, looks like I’ll keep my handheld backed up to a Linux box for a while.
Installing flash for Opera was just as big a hassle (which translates as “a minor hassle, but still a hassle”) in this distro. Freespire and Puppy Linux seem to handle that better. But heck, dropping into a terminal session and typing a few command line instructions isn’t all that big a deal.
For some reason, this is the first Linux distro in a while where my sound isn’t working. recognizes and loads drivers for the hardware just fine. Sound’s turned on, etc., but no sound. Fun. (It’s probably an unplugged cable that I’ve so far been to lazy to check out.)
Scroll wheel’s still not fully functional. Oh, it’ll scroll, but it doesn’t work in CLICK mode or “autoscroll” when I want. Yet. I’m sure it’s in an interface setting somewhere.
For the most part, except for those lil quibbles, I like this better than any Windoze version I’ve tried. Some ways (“Gee whiz” graphic factors and “One-Click” installs) Freespire is a tad nicer, but it was a bit of a straighjacket (kinda a lil too Mac-like in that regard). I suspect I can find all the “gee whiz” graphical elements I want to install in Xubuntu, and despite the CNR capability of Freespire, I actually like Adept and the Synaptic package manager better.
Both allow installs in different terminal shells from the command line, but it’s easier, in some ways, using the default “sudo” in Ubuntu, and enabling a Root user in Freespire was a headache, primarily because of the poor documentation.
Anywho, all-in-all a fun way to spend a coupla hours, including exploring new software, tweaking, other playing around. But it’s time to get back on the stick.
Tacked up over at TTWA Wednesday OTA