Browsers: January 2007 Archives

I've now tried Iceweasel/Firefox, and while the fonts
aren't quite as crisp as the Windows equivalent in
some cases, in others there's really no difference at
all. And I suspect that tweaking the monitor settings will take care of all of this. (For those of you know or care about such things, Knoppix used the KDE graphical interface.)

And let me tell you, the speed of this system, even
running off of a CD, is amazing. I'm imagining now how
fast this would be if everything was installed on the
hard drive.

And it's all so ... free ... and Microsoft and Apple
have absolutely nothing to do with it. All upgrades
are free. There are tons of applications. Security is
excellent (it's Unix, for God's sake).

Go back a few posts and TRY THIS YOURSELF. It's the
easiest bit of geek nirvana I've experienced in the
past year, and if that isn't a ringing endorsement, I
sure as f'n hell don't know what is.

Not that any of you have noticed, but I seem to be doing on geek project a month. First it was This Old PC, then This Old Mac. After that, it was the Palm handheld. And now I'm moving on to Knoppix, the Linux you can run from the CD-ROM drive.

I start with a problem/project, get to the level where it's working as well as it can, and then ... I move on.

For the moment, I'm geeking it up with Linux. I've always wanted to do it but never had a spare PC whose hard drive I could wipe or partition for the free, open-source OS. But Knoppix gets around that, since you boot from CD and continue running in that fashion. It's a great way to get your feet wet in Linux. And that CD also runs applications, including Open Office, Firefox (renamed Iceweasel, for reasons that elude me), the Gimp (which I'm already using on Windows to replace the Photoshop program I don't have) and much more. And there's even more available on the Knoppix DVD, should you have a DVD burner and the bandwidth to download a 4 GB file.