I bought a new PC recently and thanks to an increased awareness of piracy (and moreover since I work at Microsoft), the dealer gave it to me without even a formatted hard disk. Not having bought a PC in the 21st century yet, I faced quite a daunting challenge – how do I get the damn thing up? Every tool depends on every other tool until you don’t know what to do.
I wanted a system up and running in minutes without hassle and get a basic browser working (I’m going out of town for a couple of weeks vacation), and didn’t want to bother with elaborate setup.
My mind turned to Damn Small Linux – I had used it once before to extricate myself from a major problem. It has a fairly simple process to put itself on a USB drive. However, I found Pendrive Linux which has an even yet simpler process – just extract the zip onto your drive, run a batch file, and it’s ready!
Yes, even though I work at Microsoft – I prefer a small commandline system at home – takes a record five seconds to boot, I use Lynx for most of my browsing, which is downloading e-books from gutenberg, and can play music in the background. When absolutely necessary, X + Xfce (no Gnome/KDE for me, thank you very much), serves very well for movies/tv-programs. (My friends don’t take very kindly to spending a night due to the unreasonably complex nature of every task they have to perform.) But I love it! I’m planning to try a FreeDOS + Arachne combo sometime – if only my videos could be played – then I’d be a complete individual!
My only complaint is that Sify is such a horrible broadband provider – and so very presumptous that I can’t run it on my config – it’s client on Linux (and Windows) positively sucks:
1. It is obsessed with “your safety” and forces you to install an A/V on Windows.
2. It somehow links tracks the firefox process it starts with it’s ads – which if you close, the client crashes.
3. There is no way to automate the damn thing.
4. Requires gtk libraries to run (and links to specific .so files so you have to add some symlinks in /usr/lib to get it working) – no commandline support.
4. Looks plain ugly! Nags me a lot! Windows won’t automatically shut down because the highly concerned Sify client wants you to confirm whether you *really* want to quit – it probably assumes you’ve got a monkey punching keys who might have asked windows to shutdown accidentally.
