Mint Linux

Since having problems with PCLinuxOS and Suse I thought I would try Mint Linux. I know there is a lot of disagreement on non-free software, but I think if Linux is going to be competitive it needs to be competitive with Windows,in other words it needs to play DVD, MP3s, Apple and WMF our of the box without setting up repositories. Anyway Mint is suppose to do that. I took a chance and installed it to hard drive even though my wireless card would not work with it. After installation I tried to load Windows wireless drivers, which worked well in PCLinuxOS but not in Mint. However, my DLink car worked just fine and the fan on my laptop hardley runs at all. The nice thing about Mint is because it is base in Ubuntu there is tons of support available form the forums.

Suse Really does suck!

I have PCLinuxOS loaded on one of my laptops and I really like it, but I have had some problems with the laptop shutting down. It is working fine in windows so I am assuming there is a problem with acpi and PCLinuxOS. Suse works fine, but I just cannot get internet to work. I tried Linuxant driver loader and that would not even work. I am hoping that PCLinuxOS is going to release their 2007 version soon or Linspire 6.0 will be released soon.

Suse Sucks

I really like the look and feel of Suse Linux, but I have had problems for years with hardware in Suse. I was hoping that Suse 10.2 would be different. I installed it on several of my laptops and I really like the feel of it but I cannot get any of my wireless cards to work and if I do not have internet access it is a deal breaker.
I read earlier that Suse was not going to include any non-free software in their latest release, from a nonprogrammer point of view, this is a big mistake. I know you can add repositories and install proprietary drivers but it just did not work. I even tried ndiswrapper and it would not work. I had PCLinuxOS loaded on the same laptop and I was able to use ndiswrapper to set up the same wireless card that would not work in Suse. I just don't understand why Suse with all of those developers cannot get ndiswrapper to work and PCLinuxOS with apparently only several developers can!
The bottom line is that Suse is a really slick looking distro but I cannot get even one of my five wireless cards to work in it and I can always get at least one in just about every distro that I have tried.
The kicker in is worth mentioning, I really like it at first, that was why I spent so much time scouring the forums trying the get any of my wireless cards working. I though the design with tabs was ingenious, but I was sick of it and ready to go back to the old style kicker by the time I gave up.

PClinuxOS

My newest addiction is PCLinuxOS .93. I am not sure but I think Texstar is the main person at PCLinuxOS. I remember the name from years ago when I was playing with Lycoris, I believe he had his own repositories and I have also seen texstar repositories for Suse, so he is quite active.

I am a big fan of Linspire, but I have had problems running Linspire on some of my equipment and I am not sure if it is me or if Linspire has just become buggy. I have had numerous browser crashes in Linspire, and if there is one program that should work flawlessly, it is the web browser. The crashes have occurred on multiple computers so I don't think it is a hardware problem.

Besides the browser it is nice to have Windows emulation. Codeweavers is good, but I cannot run Dreamweaver MX 2004 (I haven't tried it in the beta yet), among other programs (I am still waiting to run Tombraider in Linux). I tried Win4Lin, and I am still a little pissed that they seem to have dropped support for the old version. I actually bought the new version and tried to use it but is so sloooooow. VMware is darn good free emulation, I wish they would have started giving it a way before I bought Win4Lin. I have tried running Linux (Suse among others) in Windows and it is just to slow. But when running Windows in Linux, Windows seems to be running at almost full speed, after installing VMware tools.

Back to Linspire- it is very hard to get VMware to install in Linspire. I have done it (it take some command line magic) and there is a comprehensive how-to in their forum, but if they wanted to Linspire could make it an easy to install (CNR perhaps) program. Since they don't, I think this is a huge mistake because I now have to find a Linux distro that will run VMware, and I am sure I am not the only Linspire fan in the same boat. Makes you wonder if they might have some sort of contractual obligations or even get a piece of each sale of Win4Lin.

I recently bought a 120 gig hard drive for my laptop so I could easily have three to four Linux distributions on my laptop. I thought Ubuntu/Kubuntu was the next great thing. I had tried it a couple of releases ago and it just required to much tweaking out of the box. With their latest release, 6.10, I thought I would actually run Ubuntu for a while. I had plans of installing a Mac OS X theme, but none of my six, yes six, PCMCIA wireless cards would work with Ubuntu. I am not sure why, but I checked the forums and I could not get anywhere. I went back to OpenSuse 10.1 it would not allow me to access my Windows partition without some editing, of course any closed source programs/drivers are missing from the OpenSuse release. And yes I know I can set up repositiories to download those packages, which I did, but is is just a lot of tweaking to do when Linspire does it out of the box. The deal breaker was a Suse bug, at least I consider it a bug, it does not seem to bother them. Every time you turn off your computer or reboot you have to use their network manager tool (which is a slick little tool) to find your wifi hotspot and connect to it. With other distros it will automatically connect.

After a little searching I decided to try PCLinuxOS. I really do not like Mandriva, which it is based on. And I had tried a previous version of PCLinuxOS which I did not like, but this version is great.


Installation:


Installation is easy. Boot into the program to run it live and click on the install icon. Unlike Linspire, there is a built in partitioner which worked great. I had run into a problem in Ubuntu and Kubuntu, if you did not create the partition with their partitioning tool, it would give you an error saying something about there not being a root partition, even though you just tagged one of the existing partitions as root. I scoured their forums to discover the workaround is to delete the partition and then create the partition, then Ubuntu will install. It is kind of crazy that a polished distro like Ubuntu would let a bug like that go into the released version.

There are three sizes of PCLinuxOS that you can download. I grabbed the smallest one. I prefer to install the base system and then get the programs that I want from the repositories. Unlike Suse, the installation did not take long. I rebooted and entered the system.

The System:


It was great, I love the cursor theme, transparency was enabled in the task bar by default, the icons were great, the icon for the synaptic manager was on the desktop and the repository was listed. I guess what I liked about the feel of the distro is that it felt like I would have done it this way. PCLinuxOS found my wireless card and even though network setup is a little different than what I am use to, it is simple and straight forward. I could access my NTFS partition, even though I could not write to it. I could also access my Windows computer via the network.


Installing Programs:


As I stated before I can install many-many-many programs through Synaptic, so I enabled the repository and grabbed all of my favorites.



Emulation:


I grabbed the latest beta of Crossover Office and installed it. I also installed the free version of VMware server. Compared to Linspire, I was amazed at how easy it installed. I installed XP in VMware and everything is working great.



Complaints:


Not many, I could not get my touchpad to scroll, so I installed synaptics (I hate that this projects name is so close to the synaptic front end program for apt). I still could not get my touchpad to scroll, so I will have to look at the PCLinuxOS forums. My second complaint is not really a complaint, it is more of a preference. There is no network manager in the panel, but you don't really need it because as long as you have the same access point it will connect automatically. Still, I would prefer a network manager like Suse or Linspire's.



Closing Thoughts:


I could be wrong but I am guessing that other than Texstar, there aren't many people involved in the OS. Again, I am not an expert, and I just go by what I read, I would guess that PClinuxOS is structured like Mepis where Warren seems to be the man in charge and I don't think there are many other people helping with the coding.

I need to use PCLinux for a little longer and then if everything continues working as slick as is does now I need to donate to the cause.

Linspire again

I got tired of Linspire a while ago, I had it installed on three computers and it crashed on all three. I went back to Windows for a while on my main computer and since my wife is using my main computer now I will end up staying with Windows until virtualization software gets closer to native speed. Of course I have problems with Windows software, I have a wireless music server and I installed Panda Titanium and it killed the connection, Panda hasn't been able to configure their software to work with the plug and play server so I am going to uninstall Panda and try another firewall. The problem with Windows software is both of those items are expensive and I just wasted money. At least in Linux for the most part the software is free.
I have two laptops that I am trying to load Linux on. The first is a Sony PCG-V505DC2. This works well with all versions of Linux, my other laptop is a HP ZE1250, there are some weird issue with this laptop, I cannot get most versions of Linux to work on it.
I use the Sony for travel and I don't want to connect to unsecure wifi networks when I am using Windows. I have been able to load everything that I want on it, but I have not been able to get my G wifi cards to work, and that is a deal breaker. I thought my wifi cards were working in Suse 10 but I cannot get them working in 10.1. I had Kubuntu loaded but its wifi manager was terrible, I couldn't connect to half of the wifi hotspots when I was traveling. I also could not access my home network via samba or smb4k. Other than that it is a great distro. I was about to give up when I decided to load Linspire again. The last time I loaded it CNR would not work. Not this time everything is working and it is n ice to be able to install of the great CNR programs again.

Been away for a while

I haven't done much in Linux for a while. I decided that I needed to learn Dreamweaver and I also wanted to learn a 3D program. I am not saying that you cannot be productive in Linux but I ran into multiple circumstances that made it to hadr to run the software I needed.
The problems were just to hard to over come so I am using Windows most of the time. I still tried to use Linux when I was traveling and using wifi, Windows is just to scary to use in those circumstances.
Dreamweaver MX 2004 would not work in Codeweavers. I could not load Win4Lin because Netraverse must have decided that they were not going to put to much effort into supporting their old version in hopes that people will upgrade to the new version. I am kind of pissed, this was not cheap software and now it does not work in most new Linux flavors, at least with out a lot of work. I was hooked on Vmware for a while and I still like it but it is just to slow for everyday use.
I have been traveling a lot so I did not get very far with Dreamweaver or the 3D software. I tried Blender, the learning curve is steep and I played with it for a while and decided to move on. I am considering K3D, Realsoft and Maya.
I have gotten the Linux itch in the last several weeks and I have tried loading some new just released flavors of Linux on my redhead stepchild laptop, it is a HP ZE1250. It does not get along with a lot version of Linux. I saw on a web search that there is defective driver for the via hard drive controller. It is so weird because every other kernel release will work. I am able to get Linspire installed but I keep getting DCOP errors and the desktop stops responding. I had Suse 10 installed and working but I thought I would try something newer, I also wanted a Debian distro because of all the programs that I can install with Apt. The end result; no luck. My parameters were that it had to install without any hassle and it had to work with my DLink wireless card. Ubuntu, Kubuntu installed but locked when I tried to boot into it. I could not get my wifi card to work in Suse 10.1. PCLinux OS locked during install. I tried Morphix, but it appears that they haven't updated the kernel and KDE in a while so it did not work with my wifi card.
I still do not have a working version of Linux on the laptop that I have at home. I am not sure what I am going to do, probably stick to Windows. Windows really irritates me, I spent an entire hour last night and another hour tonight trying to load DLink drivers for my wifi cards because I had to swap them between my laptops. The drivers had been loaded on the laptops and Windows should hang onto those drivers and plug and play the drivers when the card is plugged in. Nothing will work the same in Windows twice. I rebooted, I uninstalled drivers, I reinstalled drives, I tried to manually install drivers and nothing worked. I finally reinstalled and it worked. Linux may not have the driver for every card but at least when you plug a card in that is supported it works.
I did load Kubuntu on the laptop I use when I travel, just so I have a safe way to access the internet on the road. I really like it, although there are some problems. When I boot I will do a disk check on my windows partition, very time consuming. The wifi manger is funky, twice it would not find the hotspot that I new it was there. The difference between Kubuntu and Windows, I don't have to pay $350 for my copy of Kubuntu.

Still diggin VMware...(so far)

Per the blog title, I am still diggin VMware. I bought a 512 meg stick of ram to get my computer up to 1 gig. Set the ram for my Suse 10 VM to 700 meg ( I don't plan on doing anything in Windows while running Suse). I am a little disappointed, Suse doesn't seem that much faster with the extra ram.
I am still trying to get VMware tools to work in Linspire. I found instructions posted on the Linsire website to install VMware tools in Linspire. I didn't have the correct compiler installed so it did not installed correctly. I need to uninstall and try it again. Linspire is soooo sloooow without vmware-tools.

I was able to install Vmware tools into Linspire, but I think it broke the OS. I can still boot into Linspire but it is the wrong resolution and it is still slow.

The coolest thing about Vmware are the community built virtual machines. What a great way to try a Linux OS without partitioning and installing.

Since I started playing with VMware they have released a free version of EXP server. This is great! At one time I actually did pay $100 for VMware, I was disappointed, it was limited as to which Linux you could easily install it into, and while it was cool to run XP in Linux, it was much slower than Win4Lin (Win 98). At this point many of the newer programs will not run in Windows 98 so Win4Lin is less and less of an option. Anyway it's nice to get a free version of Vmware to play with. While I am excited about able to easily run multiple virtual machines I am not sure this is the be all end all road to Linux. The performance hit is a big issue. Surfing the net in Suse VM is just slow enough to be annoying. I could install a low resource version of Linux like DSL, I would thing surfing the web would be faster.

The Problem with Windows

Per my previous post, I have been using VMware to run Linux. This means that my main OS is Windows and I am running Linux as the guest OS. This is very cool because once I am into both OSes I can jump back and forth between OSes (without having to reboot of course). I decided to go with Windows as my main OS because of Photoshop and Dreamweaver, both programs will work in Linux but they run a little bit better in their native OS. I actually feel a little guilty using Windows as my main OS.
The XP partition on my desktop computer was only about a month old when I loaded VMware on it. Unfortunately, I had not yet loaded anti-spyware or anti-virus programs on it. I did have the Windows firewall turned on, but I picked up some nasty viruses and spyware. I thought I was going to have to reloaded Windows. I eventually got rid of them, but it took some doing. This just reminded me how vounerable Windows is. I have used Linux for years and I have also ran virus checks and never found one virus in Linux.
The other problem I have is with a Windows program, Music Match Jukebox. They are really a sleazy company, years ago they tricked me into buying a lifetime upgrade. I have not used it for years, but I need the program to work with the server on my SMC music beamer. I had temporarily set up Music Match on my laptop to act as a server for my SMC box. Of course, as soon as you start the program, they want you to buy an upgrade, but I thought- no problem, I have a lifetime upgrade. I entered my upgrade serial number and the program kicked it out. I had to email Music Match and they reactivated the serial number, but never explained why my "lifetime upgrade" serial number did not work. I had problems again today, I entered my serial number and supposedly I have the full version, but I don't have the features that I am suppose to have. The other problem that I have is I ripped a CD to my hard disk, and Music Match would not play any of the songs after it finished ripping and there is now a folder on my hard drive that I cannot delete. I tried rebooting and I still cannot delete the folder. What a great program!! The other problem I have with Music Match is how it looks up the CD information. I like Lsongs, a free program, it's CD look up is light years ahead of Music Match.

Loving VMWare

I like Vmware so much that I shrunk my Linux partition, grew may Windows partition, and installed several Linux virtual machines. I created a Suse 10 VM, I downloaded Kanotix VM, and it took several tries but I created a Linspire VM. I also downloaded a Mac OS X VM from somewhere on the internet. Amazingly it works! Accept for the internet connection, I haven't been able to get that going yet. The only other problem that I had with OS X was I had my XP partition formatted FAT 32 and the OS X had a file that was over 6 gig. You need NTFS to handle a file that big, so I used Partition Magic to convert the partition to NTFS.
Of course, the guest OS is a little slow, but it is very usable.

Linux in Windows

I had played with VMWare before. The Windows host did not run the Linux versions that I wanted, and the Linux host would not install in most versions of Linux. I was able to get it to install once and it was very slow, especially compared to Win4Lin. I have been pretty discouraged with Linux lately, there are a lot of great things about it, but is is a pain in the butt to have to dual boot to use Windows programs. I have emulation software (Win4Lin and Codeweavers), but it is not perfect. I have Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver MX loaded in Win4Lin, I was using Photoshop to edit some photos, for the most part it was working fine, but the mouse was jumpy (not what you want to have happen when editing photos). I have been using Dreamweaver and it is just slow.

Enter option two- I discovered VMWare player. It is a free program that will run VMWare images. The cool thing is that there are free community supported images that you can download. So to recap, you can get a free VMWare player to access images and then download a community image. So it is like getting $200 in software for free. I was reading in the forum that you can download the beta create an image, uninstall VMWare, install the player, and it works. I have not tried this to verify it, but I do have an image of Suse 10 ready to test with VMplayer.

There are two cool things about using VMWare, first is that I don't have to reboot to use some of my Windows programs that don't work so well in Linux. Second, I can backup my entire Suse 10 image, in case I break it, the really cool thing is that I can created the perfectly tweaked Suse 10 configuration, back it up and install the image and VMplayer and any of my other computers. The downside is that I have to use Windows more than I want.
I discovered a good reason not to use Windows, again. When I was installing VMWare it asked me for a serial number. I did not realize that it had been sent to me via email, so I searched the warez sites for serial numbers. a dangerous thing to do, I picked up spyware that locked up my computer. I installed Microsoft spyware beta, it found the spyware and attempted to remove it, but that killed my computer, it would not boot. I had to reset Windows to the last restore point.

Kanoix again

Ok, I blew away my Linspire beta partition and loaded Kanotix. I really want to use it because it is 100% Debian compliant. The bad news is I have not been able to get my Microsoft wifi card to work. I don't have time to mess with it so I will let it go until I have more time.

Try again and again

I wiped out my Linux partition again because of the Linspire dcopserver problem. It actually wasn't that bad but I wanted to try Mandriva (didn't like it). I also wanted to carve out a 5 gig partition to load OSes that I wanted to experiment with. I currently have Linspire beta on that partition. I had to reload 5-0 several times because once sound didn't work and other time-- I just don't remember, I have loaded Linux too many times. I loaded a bunch of programs through CNR and had multiple dcopserver crashes. I uninstalled all of the programs, accept for OpenOffice 2.0 and then disabled CNR and the update client. I have had no dcopserver problems for the last two days. I cannot help but think CNR or one of the problems is causing the crashes. I will use the computer for several days and if it is still error free I will enable CNR and see if I have problems. I am also having problems with Linspire Internet suite, it crashes when I try to log onto blogger.com. No fear, I installed Firefox. I have Win4Lin, Photoshop, Dreamweaver MX, and some games loaded. I had a pleasant surprise, I was able to get The Sims for Linux installed and working. I am amazed because it did not work in Mandriva 2006 and it does in Linspire. I bought the game several years ago and have not played it. I can now.

Mepis, Kubuntu, Xandros, Knoppix and Kanoix

Per my previous blogs, I spent a lot of time over Christmas trying to get any version of Linux to work on my laptop. I had Suse 10 loaded on it, I really liked Suse. There were two reasons that I dumped it. I wanted to run Windows programs on Win4Lin and I wanted to get my G wireless cards working. Suse 10 does not have a Win4Lin enabled kernel, I did a little googling and found a procedure to patch the kernel but it did not work. I also tried ndiswrapper and the Linuxant driver to get any of my wireless cards working, but no luck. Suse had one other irrating flaw, it would dump the wireless settings when the computer was shut off.
So I decided to try some different distros. I wanted to stay with Debian so I would have the entire Debian repositories to choose programs from.
One of my favorites distros use to be Xandros (Corel). I had a Xandros 3.0 disk so I installed it. I could not get any of my wireless cards to work and the wireless tools available in Xandros are not nearly as good as Linspire or Suse 10.
Knoppix and Kanoix are two cool distros. I could not get my wireless cards to work in either distros. I installed Kanoix to my hard drive (by using the Kanoix-installer script), hoping to get wireless working once installed, but no luck. I gave Kubuntu a half hearted try and again no luck. I installed Mepis and had everything working when I broke it by doing an upgrade.

Merry Christmas!!

OK, after I installed Mepis and loaded Win4Lin, Photoshop, games and struggled trying to load Flash in Win4Lin, and tweaked the interface,I had the bright idea that I would update everything through synaptic. Bad idea!! It downloaded 700 Meg of updates and after it finished sound did not work and even though my screen resolution was suppose to be 1024 x 768 it looked more like 800 x 600. That was the bad news.
Since I trashed Mepis, I decided that I would give Linspire another chance. I loaded it, Win4Lin, Photoshop etcetera... Previously, the DCOP server was dieing so none of the programs would work when I clicked on the icons. Something that their support said made me think the problem may lie with CNR. After I got everything up and running I used CNR to update the system (only 4 programs), then I disabled CNR. I let the computer run most of the day, clicking on program icons from time to time, and all is well so far. This is a record for Linspire on this computer. Anyway, Linspire is my OS of choice, so to appear to have Linspire 5-0 up and running on the computer that I use the most, when I have had no luck previously, it is like a Christmas present.
I need to let the computer run several more days, then make my usual interface tweaks and see if it is still stable. I am hoping because if not, I just may go back to Windows. There is no real reason for me to run Linux, other than I like it and I also like all of the free programs. Most of what I use it for can also be done in Windows.

Merry Christmas??

It has been a good Christmas, but there have been some downsides (Linux and non-Linux related). Besides Christmas presents I had two large unexpected cash layouts. I had to stick $500 into my car and on Christmas eve day I got a $350 doctor bill for my knee surgery that I had done last July.

I have spent most of my spare time that I have had off of work trying to get any Linux disrto to work on my HP laptop. If you have read previous posts there must be weird hardware problem with the Linux 2.6 kernel and the ZE1250. Linspire would be the OS of choice, but I get DCOP server errors. I have done some research on the Linspire forums and some other people have the same problem and they seem to think that the error is caused by the sound server. I tried disabling it and I still had problems. I thought I got a hint from the Linspire support people that the problem was cause by CNR. I disable it, but I also had other problems, Mozilla would not work on a new install for some reason. My wireless cards were not working. I loaded and reloaded and could not get everything to work at the same time so I gave up. I was hoping to load Kanoatix, and I did but I could not get wireless working. I tried their ndiswrapper gui, but it did not work with the driver that I have for my DWL-G650 card. I tried madwifi-same thing. I think there is an issue with wep because I could not get any of my cards to work. I tried iwconfig commands to no avail. I had Suse 10 installed but Suse does not have a Win4Lin enabled kernel and I wanted to run Photoshop and several other Windows programs. I also could not get a G wifi card to work.
I finally out of desperation decided to try Mepis again. I figuered out a mistake I had made configuring the wireless cards, you have to go back to the first tab to actuvate the configuration. I have win4Lin installed and working. I also have a wireless G card functioning in Mepis. The only possibility of a crash and burn is that I am upgrading the OS as I type. I am hoping it works.
I almost gave up, as much as I like Linux I am tired if dicking around to get everything to work. If Mepis does not work, I was going to leave Linux alone (on this computer). This actually drives me crazy. Linux works great on my other computers, just not on this one.

Suse 10 on HP ZE1250

I went back and forth with Linspire support for over a week and they were not able to cure the DCOP server error problem. It has to be something specific to the ZE1250 hardware because I have Linspire loaded on several other computers and I do not have a similar problem.
I finally gave up on Linspire (at least on the HP) and loaded Suse 10. I really like Suse, it is a very polished distro, the problem I have had with it in the past is hardware detection and configuration. I am still haunted by that in Suse 10. I have about five wireless cards, all but one works in Linspire (it's a Microsoft wireless card, go figure). I can get only one of them to work in Suse 10. I can get two G wireless cards to work in Linspire and none in Suse. I have tried ndiswrapper and it did not work. I checked forums and I only found one post where someone got ndiswrapper working and he did not post how he actually did it. I was actually going to buy the Linuxant driver, but the demo would not work. I do have a B wireless card that works in Suse and that is good enough for now. I plan on messing with ndiswrapper in the future.
The second headache I have is the touchpad, it is so erratic in both Suse and Linspire. Linspire is usable, in Suse it is almost a deal breaker. I use to have instructions for editing the /etc/fstab file, like I said "use to". The instructions were for an older version of Suse and probable will not work with 10. I finally found a post that helped me. I can install ksynaptic and use it to fine tune my touch pad. I did it and it worked. The touchpad is almost perfect now, it is a little glitchy in Firefox, but not bad.
The really irritating thing is I cannot get any emulation software to work in Suse 10. Win4Lin 4.5 needs the kernel patched, I did it and it did not work. I cannot believe that Suse does not have a Win4Lin kernel. I could upgrade to the newest version of Win4Lin, but I would have to install Windows 2000 and I do not own a copy. VMware does not work, there is an issue vmmon. I haven't found a fix and I am not sure that I will. It is irritating that I have expensive emulation software that is no longer usable. I do have the newest version of Crossover Office, but it is not working with Suse 10, of course. I have a ticket in and will probably hear back Monday. I really do not need to run Windows software on Linux so I am going to take a deep breath, relax and use my Suse install as is.

Linspire Woes

I have Linspire intalled on four computers and it is either completely toast or partialy crashed on three. In a way this is OK because they have just released the latest version, so I migtht have been updating my compters anyway. On the other hand this is just an incremental upgrade so it is probably not worth wiping and installing. It is kind of strange, I have an old Ipaq desktop computer that I use for a music server along with a SMC music streamer. This computer is on most of the time and this is the computer that has no problems.
It is a little scarry that Linspire has performed so poorly. I mean Linux is suppose to be stable, but it has crashed like a big dog an three out of four computers. I tried thinking back to see if it was possibley something that I may have done and I don't think so. Could it be some nonCNR software that I loaded, possibly, because I have OpenOffice and Crossover Office loaded on all three computers, not to mention Win4Lin.
One of the computers that it crashed on is my HP Laptop. I have had problems with multiple Distros on this machine. I have the newest Linspire loaded and it is mostly working, but from time to time the desktop quits responding and I get a Klauncher cannt be reached via DCOP error message. I emailed Linspire support and got a reply that I don't think will work, but I will try it anyway. They want me to uninstall and then reinstall CNR, what the heck, it's worth a shot.
Reguardless I don't want to give up on Linspire, it is more than just an OS. I am really hooked on CNR, they have it well organized, you can peruse software by catagory, most popular, newest, and they even have software you can buy. I am sure that if I had Debian installed I would be able to find most of the programs in the Debian repositories, but CNR makes it so much easier to find the newers and best software.
CNR is probably the main reason that I have not installed another distro on that laptop. If I was to load Mandrake of Suse on the laptop I would not have the access to all of the extra programs that I have with Linspire. Sure, they come with five CDs, but that pales in comparison to CNR. If I wanted to be really radical I could install Synaptic and enable the Debian repositories, that would give me even more software to choose from. Of course I don't use most of the programs that I have, so that would be sort of rediculious.
Linspire has CNR and Mandrake has Club Mandrake, since I have paid for CNR I don't want to shell out more to for Mandrake. I have loaded Open Suse on the laptop but there are some serious shortcomings that I don't want to take to time to overcome. Such as no MP3 support, no 3D drivers for my video card, no playing encripted DVD, and so on and so on... There are workarounds for all of this but I am spoiled and if I can find a distro that includes all the above out of the box, that is the distro that I am going to go for.
I do like Kubuntu a lot, but it is the same story as Open Suse when it comes to getting all of the functionality that I need. I did try Ubuntu, a very nice distro, but I just do not like Gnome. It is not as mature as KDE.
I just bought the full version of Suse and I am expecting it to arrive this week, the timing is beautiful because I have Thanksgiving week off so I will have plenty of time to tinker.
If I cannot get Linspire to function normally on my HP laptop, then I will throw Suse 10 on and I should be able to find most ot the programs that I find in CNR by using Yast or Apt for RPM. It woun't be the same as Linspire, but I will have to live with it.

New find

I just discovered autopackage. This is a great alternative to synaptic or Kpackage. I cannot believe how easy it is. You just download the package, make it executable, click on it and autopackage does the rest. There aren't thousands of packages available yet, but this is so easy I think it will catch on fast.

Blogger for Word??

Google had a great idea, they created a plugin for Word so you can creat and edit posts whenever you want. Word?? I don't want to go back to Word, I am hoping they are working on a version for OpenOffice.

Linspire let down

I know I have been raving about Linspire, but I have had several problems with it lately. I was using LSomgs to tag MP3s and Linspire did a couple of strange things. It has problems with partitions. It originally found and mounted several different partitions, then for some reason it dumped them. I manually edited the fsab to mount my Windows partition. In the middle of tagging MP3s I shutdown the computer and turned it on the next day, for some reason most of the the songe I tagged were not tagged and I had to redo them.
There are some well documentated sound problems with Linspire 5-0 and I am experinecing them on my desktop, LSongs works, but none of the desktop sounds work. I have also noticed a Window like glitch, you click on "turn off" computer and the computer does nothing. This happens fairly oftern on my Windows machines and it is very irritating.
The next version of Linspire is almost ready, I am going to install it on all of my computers when it is, that should fix all of my little OS glitches. I am a little worries that Linspire is turning into Windows and I have to do an OS reload every year.