Developer Rants

I maintain a website that is used to rehome unwanted cats.
Normally I would have used windows:

• Paintshop Pro
• AceFTP
• Firefox

in my course of updting pictures and text to the site.

Due to a recent hard drive failure I have yet to reinstall Paintshop pro and decided to give Knoppix a go.

The stack:

• GIMP
• FTP
• Mozilla

was perfectly adequate for the job. It took a while to get used to using GIMP, but it is far more powerful than PSP 5 that I had been using.

I thought that I had a problem with accessing the photos from my camara until I found that the USB cable was not plugged into the PC.

I am amazed with how well Knoppix configures a basic PC.
It recognises and configures my soundcard automatically - something that Windows 2000 cannot do.

Knoppix has saved my machine again. I have suffered a minor hard drive failure, which left windows unable to boot. Given that I am unwilling to reformat my C: drive given that knoppix can read it, I have had a very slow windows 2000 reinstall - it insists on checking bad drives at reboot. Windows 2000 does so love it's reboots. Knoppix on the other hand reboots in a min or less and can read all of the data drives. I was impressed that it had sound support from startup and was quite haapy about me plugging in USB devices. I am just finishing the restore of my emails from a drive windows describes as corrupt.