Maxtor Personal Storage 3100

Having recently graduated from the University of Waterloo's Rhetoric & Professional Writing major (Honours B.A.) I decided to go out and splurge a little. I bought myself the second most-expensive school ring, and a Maxtor Personal Storage 3100 80GB USB hard drive. I asked the Best Buy guy if he knew anyone that had used Linux with it. He didn't have a clue, but he did mention I could bring it back within 14 days with receipt. The response was less than I was expecting. Normally I don't like to promote big box stores. Best Buy was across from work, the only reason I bought there. I am going to mention the Staples off Ottawa Street because the last time I was there the person I was talking to actually had a clue about Linux. He didn't say he ran Linux, but stated that the USB wireless mouse I was going to buy should work if I'm using the 2.6 kernel.

The PS3100 has behaved quite well. I packed it up the other day, along with my notebook. No data loss because of transportation. While transporting the drive I couldn't help but think back in horror about the first hard drive I ever bought, a MFM hard drive. If you're not familiar with MFM drives, they had to be "parked" before transportation. Under the belly of the drive there was usually a little knob you pushed up to park the drive heads. Being relatively green to PC's I didn't know this and got home with a useless hard drive - and no refunds.

With the rise of large USB keys, iPods, you might ask "why buy an external hard drive, let alone one that cannot be removed and inserted into something else?" Stability. While this drive may go, it's so inexpensive that replacing it won't be a big chore. And it's really handy for hosting Linux isos, or using as a base for a Linux install fest.

Considering reinventing the New Linux User blog.

I started this web log with the hope that it would be useful to people, but from what I can see, very few people are actually reading this blog. I've been toying around with some ideas and I've latched on to something that I think would be fun to do, and useful. Now that I'm using blogging software, it should be easier to post more regularly. As some of you may know, I'm still on dialup, so I tend to post less often. I can hear a few snickers, but hey, I was once the guy who said I'd never take down my BBS (Bulletin Board System) to join the Internet revolution.

SuSE to Mandriva to SuSE & Chronicle Lite

I suppose I understand some of the frustration people use to Windows feel when moving to Linux, after all, old habits really do die hard. But if you don't try new things you never know when you might be missing out on something terrific.

So last night I wiped off SuSE 9.2 and installed Mandriva 10.2. I spent much of the night learning about urpmi, and urpmf, the apt and apt-cache like software for Mandriva. Unfortunately Mandrake/Mandriva just doesn't have the software that comes with the SuSE 9.2 DVD, and while 10.2 is probably one of the best versions of Mandrake in a long time for stability, at least on my systems, I tossed it after a few hours of trying to get different blogging software to compile and run under it.

Which leads me to mentioning Chronicle Lite, blogging software I'm using to create this post. The blogger.com interface is fine for posts, but by using an interface to blogger.com I can compose posts offline. Over the next few days I'm planning on trying a few interfaces until I find something that works right. I like Chronicle Lite, it works, and the web/java-based installer made installation a snap, but it seems to lack some basic features, such as the ability to post a title.