I would really love to be able to face the people that fill my inbox daily with garbage and smack them in the face.  Hard.  Repeatedly.  They try to sell me medication I don’t need or want.  They try to get me to believe I can have an iPod or an X-Box for free.  They try to fool me into thinking I have a 1st 3rd bank account that needs validation.  Or that I had a filthy rich long lost relative in Nigeria that was killed in a car accident.  It’s a strange internet culture out there.  Stee Range.  So this toon is just a fantasy.  Sigh.

I’ve been messing around with Linux on my home computer.  I wanted to see what Gimp could do for my cartoons since I won’t be able to buy Photoshop until I can get that Nigerian bank account freed up.  And dang am I impressed.  I tried Mandrake around 2000 and it was cool, but it wasn’t quite ready for my home computer.  This time I tried Mandriva 2007.  VERY very cool.  Linux has come a long way.  There’s still no official support for things like iTunes, Quicktime, Windows Media - the latter two of which are neccessary plugins for a good browsing experience.  I did finally get the Flash plugin installed, but that was a battle.  That’s one thing about Linux.  You download something, try to install it, it fails, you figure out why it failed, try it again, it fails for a completely different reason, you figure that out, you try again and then it says the current package doesn’t support your x86_64 installation.  Then you find a forum post and finally get it to work. 

Last night I figured I would need a Windows installation as well as a Linux one to really get my full digital cartooning support.  So I dug out my green XP Home folder with the CD and the key.  Ran the install and wanted to put it on my secondary 120 GB drive that’s already NTFS. It wouldn’t install with the other drive being all Linux.  It wanted part of the 60 GB drive to be a windows partition to install.  When I was booting off the CD and installing to a 120 GB drive.  I have NEVER seen a Windows install with 2 hard drives need to use both drives before.  And I install Windows all the time at work on test clients.  Maybe it’s just that when I do it at work, both drives are already NTFS, but that just seemed REALLY unreasonable to me.  But I figured Windows wouldn’t play well with Linux.  It has to have the “scum” removed before it will even think of moving in.

So I get it installed and guess what.  I can’t activate it.  It’s totally legit.  I bought it probably 4 years ago and I’ve formatted and reinstalled a few times.  And a couple of times I had to call in to MS to get them to activate it.  But last time I formatted it activated no problem.  Not this time.  I have to call MS to activate my completely legit, purchased copy of MS.  Man I hate being punished for buying software.  Just another reason to test the reliability of Linux.

So now I have to reinstall Mandriva on the 60 GB drive.  And this time I’m going to see if I can do it in 32-bit mode.  Too many unsupported software packages for x86_64 mode.  So we’ll see how that goes.  Can’t wait.  Love The Gimp!

Well Happy Wednesday!  (Wednesdays are cool cuz they’re comic book days.  :D  New Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man today!!  Yes, I know, I’m a geek…)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 10:10 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.