Over the past three weeks since a slightly traumatic installation (see blogs passim), more software has been installed and new possibilities have been identified. After the silliness of not installing kdetheme by default, there have in fact been few problems; the latency of the Internet interface has largely evaporated, although I find that after a recent "update", there are suddenly more interfaces (namely "nr0-nr3" and the various "rose"s), the functions of which remain unknown to me. I had a large print job this afternoon and only once did I have the kind of sudden halt to printing (always in the middle of a page, never when the page is finished) so typical of the previous 10.x distros. These two factors make a hell of a difference to the usefulness of this distro, meaning that I am not forced to re-enter into that certain "other" so-called OS to get any printing done.

I have still not been able to get Adobe Reader 7.0 to work, although it was fine under 2005 LE, and I have no idea why this is the case. So I have been using Konqueror and xpdf and they work fine, although I have not tried printing from the latter yet. I also installed Webmin and earlier, tried to install the "new" version of iPodder (which had to be renamed after some disagreement with Apple), but this did not work and so I returned to the version on the distro CDs, which again worked perfectly. This was because I have been interested in podcasting as an alternative to blogging, and in the name of creating audio files, I perused the menus and discovered "Sound Recorder" which didn't work at first and I had to install some files from the CDs to cover any dependencies before finally I had it up and running and was able to record streamed audio from BBC Radio 3 in London.

I also found an interesting little text editor called Leafpad at freshmeat.net which fulfils the function of Notepad, also in that "certain" other so-called OS. It was originally intended, apparently, for coders but turns out to be a nifty little thing and even more amazing, it was possible to input Korean characters alongside Latin using scim-hangul, which worked perfectly with Leafpad but not with either OpenOffice 1.x.x or 2.0.0. I have not tried this with KOffice yet. Using this combination, it is possible to combine English, Korean, Chinese and Japanese.

So I am quite happy with Mandriva, as always since version 10.0, and I am even seriously thinking of removing Windoze altogether; its burgeoning and pointless involvement with DRM, the cost of additional anti-virus and other software (and all the daily scanning effort required under my severe security regime), plus the fact that it's Microsoft, all count heavily against it. And you can't get a Sony rootkit installed by mistake, either! ^_^

fukudasan