Without Windows (Segment 2)

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While I'm transfering my Hacker's sound track from my server to my PC here, I thought I'd update on my situation. I think I'm on day 3 of going without Windows. And to be honest, I have to admit I'm starting to feel some pangs of ..  well, some slight discomfort once in a while.

Complaint 1: For instance there's this trouble of trying to figure out how to "map a network" drive that I can't seem to resolve. That I've been told is probably because I'm using a "pretend" OS (FC6) instead of something more stable like Debian. Well..   sure. Maybe. But still, no flavor of linux has a "share my folder" option like windows, or at least nothing that is as easy to setup as that. And the "client" side of it is just about as badly screwed up from what I can see. My work around for now is to just copy music to my local harddrive to play. Which really all considering isn't all that bad.

Complaint 2: Printer setup, at least printer setup for a printer that is connected to a Windoze box and shared from that seems to cause some weird issues as well. Admittedly this might be the same complaint as 1, but two totally different areas of impact for me. 

Complaint 3:  Adobe Reader! Man. This seriously was enough for me to almost scrap this idea all together. The only thing that really saved it was another attempt at using KPDF which turns out was what I needed to get the job done. My issue with this is that upon being launched, it proceeds to spawn 3 child processes that take up 100% of the CPU with no end in sight. Only way to gain control back is to SIGTERM them. 

Some other things that I haven't tackled yet:

- Palm Pilot

I have a LifeDrive as anyone who's looked around my site for more than 30 seconds knows, and unfortunately it's doesn't use  just the standard Hotsync software to connect. It also uses the "LifeDrive Manager" to manipulate media files. So for now, my LifeDrive is essentially disconnected from my computers. 

-  Burning CD's/DVDs

Got two new DVD burners for Christmas, and not sure how I can use them on here at the moment. Kind of a bummer.

- Camera/Pictures

My Olympus camera doesn't have any software with it, or at least I never installed any, which is nice actually. It simply acts as a USB drive, which brings me to my next challenge...

 - USB "Thumb" drive

I know there is a way to mount this somehow in linux, but I haven't tried. I need to backup all my stuff that's on there and try plugging it in to see what happens.

 That's a list of stuff. It really is. And some of it may or may not have any kind of solution or work around. A few of the things are pretty big items. But all in all, if that's all I have to accomplish to mostly push Windows out of my life, not too bad.

I'll post some screen shots of my "effeciently" modified desktop environment some point later. Definitely has come in handy for flipping back and forth between applications and such.