Fedora for Friends

A friend, who works in a local cafe, has been having major problems with an Acer laptop running Windows. The description of the problems was, unsurprisingly something to the effect of “It seems to have been infected by dozens of viruses. Using the laptop feels sluggish and annoying when it is not outright unacceptable.”

Friends don’t let their friends use Windows, so I prepared a Fedora 10 installation this afternoon, on a brand new 2.5″ hard disk, to replace the Windows installation:

One of the upcoming days, when we both have some spare time, we will sit down in front of my own laptop, running the new and freshly updated Fedora installation to try Linux for the first time.

Wish me luck in my Linux advocacy attempt. I hope all goes well :-)

Short summary and photos: Athens Digital Week 2008

I just came back from “Athens Digital Week 2008” and finished uploading some of the pictures I took while in Athens:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/athensdigitalweek

The talks at “Technopolis” were amazing. There were people coming and going all the time; I am very glad I saw many of the “usual gang“; the talks about security and wireless networking were quite intriguing; and our own talks seem to have attracted quite a few questions about free software, open source, the way Linux and the BSDs work, and so on.

HP3I: or “HP’s Insanely Idiotic Installers”

After my Canon i320 printer died earlier this week, I purchased a new HP D2460 this afternoon.

One of the computers which has to use this printer is a Windows machine, which is mostly used by the people who stubbornly refuse to stop using Microsoft Office at home. Unfortunately, the onus of “supporting” the idiotic joke from Redmond which pretends to be an operating system, falls on me.