Some minor changes

I haven't really changed my system, but I have changed a few apps. I've added back Memoleaf. The new upgrade has some very nice features for tagging memos. You can now search for creation date & modification date (as long as you do this through Memoleaf.) And it was time to decide if I wanted to update pTools, as Paul has moved it all up to version 8. It made more sense to upgrade pedit and get the free updates for ptools & laptophack. I own all of them and do still have a Palm I could use laptophack on. So I've gone back to using pedit for my memos. All it takes to convince me is the first time I want to capitalize an entire word. It's so easy to do this in pedit.

I'm also going to be doing a few upgrades to the Mac. I'm going to bump up the vram and add a microphone. I've also got a usb keyboard for it, and am just looking for a usb mouse to go with it. Someone has been dropping off some tasty mac stuff at the local Goodwill, so I keep buying it. I did pick up an HP scanjet but don't have the power supply. (This is why I didn't get the HP external CD burner. It's hard to get the power supplies.) I'm trying to set up a scanner on something so that I can scan our photos and burn to CDs. I really think I am going to have to update the PC and add some memory to it.

Mac software

I suppose this is GTD related. I've finally found my Mac based finance software. I'd registered Budget awhile back but really don't use it. I installed Moneydance this week. It's exactly what I wanted. It's close to the way Quicken worked but doesn't seem to have the irritating problems. It is a bit slow, since it's java based. It still works well enough that I'll register it.

I considered trying to sync it with Splash Money. I've had to give up on that because once again, I find that I just don't like Splash Money. So I'll keep using ANL and just try and keep the balances consistent between the two programs.

Yellow Dog Linux on a Mac G3

I wanted to give Linux a shot on my G3 and decided to tackle it on my vacation. It mirrors a lot of my experiences with Linux on a PC, with a few new twists. For a start, you can't do a Live CD on a Mac and you can't install it without a Mac OS install first. The G3 is an old world machine, which means that yaboot won't work and you have to use bootx. This requires OS 9, since it uses an extension and control panel to work. So I fired up OS 9 on the 4GB drive I had then started the Linux install. It would get to a point in the install and stall, every time. And it wasn't the same spot, so you couldn't predict it. The only way I managed to get it installed was to cut down to absolutely the most basic install I could do, figuring that I could install the other packages later. I know it installs the Red Hat package manager, but they sure don't bother to add that to the programs anywhere. Could not try a Ubuntu install, since that version of Linux uses yaboot exclusively. So I took at look at what I had and decided to try it on my main G3. Rinse and repeat, except that I couldn't get Gnome desktop to install and had to just use KDE. I've never liked KDE, even though it has a lot of stuff built into it. Tried to give up that night and put my regular disk back in. But since I'd installed OS 9 last, it wouldn't read an OS X disk. This particular Mac has had a problem with any other hard drive except the 6GB disk it came with. I have two different 10 GB disks and it doesn't like either.

So, I finally got something installed the next day. Tried using the modem, which is an external Supra 28.8. KDE would recognize the modem enough to talk to it. When I tried to use it, it would show kppd trying to load and then fail. Couldn't get it to connect. More of the same stuff. Couldn't install any of the packages I wanted to look at. So I wiped the disk and started to install 10.2 on it, since it was the 10GB disk I'd been using on the other G3. It installed the first disk, then never ran the second disk. I would start to go through the setup and the keyboard wouldn't work. I've seen this before so I wasn't surprised. Usually it clears up after a few reboots. Not this time. It started hanging before it loaded the set up screen. Put the 6GB disk back in. At last, it recognized it, so I had all my old stuff in place and could finally check my email again.

Linux has gotten so much better than when I first played with Slackware 1.0. The thing is, I don't want to have to do a bunch of geeky things to get my computer to work. If a program can find and talk to my modem, then I expect to be able to connect to the internet. If I can't connect, then it doesn't matter how cool the rest of it looks. My problems on the PC have always been modem related but I didn't expect the same thing on the Mac. Yellow Dog has a nice graphical install program and I became very good at clicking my way through it. I've read that there have been problems with the older CD players on the Mac and I wasn't using the official Yellow Dog disks (or even the most recent version). I just think that all the development is being focused on the newer Macs. And that's something I do resent. The reason for trying Linux is that I'm tired of having Microsoft and Apple decide that perfectly good hardware is obsolete. I expected to be able to use my old hardware and have it work reasonably well. Didn't work out that way this time.

And as far as trying Ubuntu on this PC, well it seems that I need a RAM update first. I can run Win95 with 64MB of RAM but not their version of Linux. It won't even run the Live CD. So I don't know where I go from here. Maybe it's time to dump computers all together.