Laptop
April 11, 2002
Last night, we bought Kim a used laptop from a friend of ours so that next year when she is constantly driving back and forth from South Bend to Champaign, she'll be able to take her homework with her. Also, it lets her work in the library, where there are less distractions. In case you are wondering, its a Dell Inspiron 7000 at 366 MHz. I think its pretty nice.
After getting it home, I installed Mandrake Linux 8.2 on it, which was unbelievably easy. One of the advantages of the Inspiron line is that Linux works very well on them. Also, I finally discovered the magic that is urpmi. In case you don't know, its basically Debian's apt for rpms. I didn't realize Mandrake had this feature until a few weeks ago, but I'm in absolute ecstasy over it. After my brief jaunt through dependency hell, being able to install openoffice by simply typing "urpmi openoffice" is a godsend. I set up Kim's machine exactly as she wanted it in only a few hours. Now, if only I could figure out the username/password combination for the Mandrake Cooker ftps, then I could urpmi for the newest stuff, like KDE 3.
One last bit of good news: Eric finally received an assistantship offer from UIUC which means he is going there, and which means I have a roommate next year for sure. I was starting to get worried about that.