Technologists Notes

I’ve not used my XO nearly as much as I anticipated:

1. The keyboard is even more a “fatal flaw” than I thought at first.
2. The LCD panel failed (right side went blank) just before I was going to take it to Nicaragua. (A free under warranty replacement machine was shipped promptly, but not promptly enough.)
3. Miscellaneous software annoyances, most notably the WiFi limitations and the power management deficiencies, also limited applicability.

Obviously, the keyboard is not going to get better, the LCD failure is history, but there is good news about #3.

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About twenty 4 to 6 year-old computers were recently donated to Red Arco Iris (en Inglés, Rainbow Network). The disk drives had been reformatted to remove prior content, presumably both for licensing integrity and privacy. Now the question is how to transport/transform them into productive machines in the Network offices in Nicaragua. Likely transportation is from Springfield to Austin in a truck, and then from Austin to Managua in a shipping container.

Inertia would lead to sending the computers, without software, to Nicaragua. Then Spanish packagings of Windows, Office, et al would need to be installed with Spanish settings.

However:

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The Fedora Project (and for that matter Ubuntu) seem to have settled into semi-annual, roughly May (April) and November (October), release cycles, with Fedora 10 general availability just over two weeks ago. As usual I felt obligated to explore the new edition, and assuming it was acceptable, quickly put it into production.

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My primary desktop computer, a 4+ year-old VAIO, had been flaky for months. I’d replaced the power supply, re-glued the north bridge heat sink to the chip, re-installed XP, and so forth. So I happily replaced it with a Vostro 200. It was time to try Vista (Home Premium) seriously. But not without a safety net, the ability to multi-boot to XP if/when necessary.

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Supposedly there are still zillions of us running NT4 Server. Windows Server 2008 might almost be attractive enough to make us want to upgrade and get back in the realm of software supported by Microsoft. I would think Microsoft would want to make that easy to do, to upgrade directly from NT4 to the newest edition. But somewhere, it appears that some decision maker thought out loud “We could do it, but it would be wrong.”

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