Turning the corner

Thus it was, that my “quest for a daytime Linux system” became my principal hobby — one which I pursued relentlessly during evenings and weekends (just ask my wife!). And for the better part of a year, that was my status quo: “Windows guy” by day; “Linux guy” by night. A sort of Penguin version of Dr. Jekel and Mr. Hyde.

Eventually, Red Hat released their version 7.0, and I got a copy of it as quickly as possible, in breathless anticipation of the latest Linux enhancements. “Surely my motherboard (which by now was nine months old and nearly obsolete) would be fully supported,” I thought, hoping for an improvement in video display and font rendering.

And sure enough, it was. Now my video worked as well in Linux as in Windows. No flicker. Clean images. But no improvement to the ugly fonts in Netscape.

Around this time, a company called Eazel announced the availability of the beta version of a new user interface (Nautilus) that promised to raise the Linux browsing experience — both on the local machine and on the Internet — to new heights. So I downloaded and installed it as soon as I could. But though it offered a beautiful display, nice fonts, and some really cool file browsing features, it really didn't accomplish what I needed.

So I settled back to my routine and patiently waited for whatever would come next.

Meanwhile, I downloaded StarOffice 5.2 from Sun Microsystems' website and verified its ability to handle Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files — knowing this would be a key requirement once I solved my Web browsing and email problems. I found StarOffice to be quite sluggish but decided that, unlike Mozilla, it wasn't so slow as be unusable. “This will work,” I thought.

I also determined that KEDIT and GEDIT (KDE and GNOME text editors, respectively) worked nicely for simple text editing purposes, and Abiword could handle rtf and doc files capably (in addition to plain text). Since I spend much of my time writing and editing text, I decided that I would use these programs for the bulk of my word processing, to avoid the slower performance of StarOffice, and save StarOffice for viewing or editing Excel-compatible spreadsheets and PowerPoint-compatible presentations.

Locating the instant messaging software I needed was easy: Yahoo and AOL IM compatibility are both readily available in both KDE and GNOME variants. My image manipulation requirements, two, were easily satisfied: GIMP does everything I'll ever need.

Happily programs like Abiword and GIMP work equally well with both KDE and GNOME.

Slowly but surely, everything seemed to be falling into place. Now, if only I could come up with an acceptable browser/email solution . . .

• Part 1: The vacation
  
• Part 2: Early scorecard
  
• Part 3: Turning the corner
  
• Part 4: The light at the end of the tunnel
  
• Part 5: Look ma: no Windows!

 
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