I recently got handed a nice Presario 2600 notebook by a friend. Apparently it was too slow to be usable, took 15 minutes to boot and was pretty much as useful as a stuffed rabbit with too many holes in it to contain its sandy filling. I booted up Knoppix and ran F-Prot over it, but apart from a couple of cookies no malware or rootkits. The machine had a Pentium 4 and 256 MB of Ram on board, so not particularly speedy compared to today’s machines, but still enough to run Windows XP comfortably. There were the usual unnecessary background applications, but even after switching these off, the machine only crawled along. Then it dawned o me: somebody thoughtful had installed the whole Symantec security suite. This would even slow a modern machine to a grinding halt, so after a quick save of the most important data I reformatted the drive, divided the partitions and reinstalled windows and (of course) Linux. The machine is now very happy to run XP again with the lovely free Avira suite guarding against malware (and of course Spybot S&D) and the owner is happy to use firefox, Opera and Openoffice. And as soon as the user is comfy with those applications on windows, the switch to Linux will be a doddle.

It doesn’t always to have to be a Linux with a sledgehammer: sometimes little steps are easier and less frustrating for the user.

This morning, due to the increasingly hostile temperatures at night, our little rabit family was kept indoors. While Karl and Friedhelm were allowed to tear up the pantry, the less smelly Clara made herself comfortable in the living room. At 6:50 in the morning, as it is suppoosed to, my Nabaztag suddenly started to kick into life, bathing the living room in its characteristic purple ‘wake up’ lights when the best girlfriend ever suddenly yanked out the AV adaptor, saying ‘the rabbit will be scared senselessly and probably thinks she’ll get visited by little rabbit shaped aliens’.

Which raises the qustion: do rabbits think that aliens should be rabbit shaped?

Or are they far too busy contemplating the state of America’s involvement in Iraq?

G’day.

The moon is in it’s most beautiful full and fat outfit, just starting to rise over the trees of my garden.

It’s been a perfect Saturday, full of unmentionable joys, wonderful calm weather and I have half an hour to check out what’s new out in the world. BBC and KSTA serve me with the usual mix of problems and news that are happening around this planet, but E2 as usual serves me on it’s front page with much more soothing fare: kyle’s biography of Ellis Regina makes me so curious that I get to check her out on LastFM and discover a new Brasilian singer apart from Joao Gilberto and Gilberto Gil. Then there is a beautiful diary entry, a discussion of an elizabethan novel and some rude remarks about the south of the U.S.

I mean, apart from Kuro5hin, were else will you find art and anarchy so close together?

For over 7 years, E2 continues to be the best place on the web.

Stuff the rest.

Excellent summary of the operating system that are hovering on the fringe of the more mainstream Linux/*BSD’s by David Chisnall. If you for instance ever wanted to run an operating system on the hardware equivalent of a dead badger, Contiki seems to be your thing.

Check it out