View from the Potting Shed

Last week I was on holiday. It was always my intention to blog as the week went along but I got too involved in other stuff, away from the computer.
I know! How weird. Anyway, here’s how the week went:
Sunday: Deacon Blue

Deacon Blue in concert, looking more like Deacon Purple.
Sunday was my birthday. I was […]

Digg last week had an article entitled Why Every Windows User Needs a Linux Live CD.
Regular blog readers will remember that on 12 September my PC went down in a spectacular fashion, and that I managed to update my blog, check my email and surf the web using a combination of my Psion 7Book and […]

Now, as most of you know, I’m not really one for geeky toys … but here’s a great little application that my friend James pointed me to.
VMWare Workstation 5 allows you to run another operating system within a window (or Virtual Machine) under your current machine’s operating system. If that sounds complicated: it is, […]

I’m typing this from within the Linspire 5 Live Linux distro, which (of course) uses a customized Mozilla browser called “Linspire Internet Suite 1.6″.
I appear to have the tiniest display setting ever. It is ludicrously small, and for some reason I also can’t see the whole screen — the “Launch” button is […]

Last night, I left the PC on overnight and downloaded the SUSE Linux 9.3 Professional LiveDVD ISO file, all 1.4 GB of it. This morning I burned the ISO to DVD and booted it up.
(For those who don’t know, an ISO file is an image of all the files on a CD or DVD, […]

I’ve just begun reading this book, Linux Bible 2005 Edition by Christopher Negus (Wiley, 2005). It claims to help me:

Understand what Linux is and where it comes from
Sort through the various incarnations of Linux to choose one (or more) that is right for me
Try out Linux as a desktop computer, server computer, or programmer’s […]

I’m posting this from Firefox running under the Ubuntu Live Linux installation. Here’s a screenshot, which I’ll tidy up later.

… and I’ve just reduced the file size using The GIMP 2, also in Linux. (You can also see the fullsize 1024 x 768 pixel screenshot.)