Suse 10.2, part 9: Getting real work done
The youngest is going off to college as an incoming freshman in just a few days. She got a new iMac for Christmas as her college PC. We'd picked it up at a local Circuit City, along with a Canon printer/copier/scanner, a copy of Microsoft Office Student for OS X, and a year's subscription to .mac. We also picked up a 50-disk spindle of blank DVDs and a 50-disk spindle of blank CDROMs. She was going to back up her collection of MP3s and images she's collected and created over the past two years to the iMac. The Windows box had developed a problem with its burner, and she didn't want any more money spent to make the Windows system work. Over time she's grown to despise Windows, and the iMac was her big switch.
Turns out that in spite of the superiority of the iMac and OS X over Wintel (and yes, they are superior), she still needed Dad and his Linux box to actually back up her Windows box and then burn that to DVD. Seems that there's a small learning curve to OS X and she didn't have enough time to figure it all and and make the backups herself. So I backed up her files from her older Windows box to europa, across the home network, and then used K3B on europa to burn the now-local files to DVDs.
The total amount to backup was over 8GB. I organized and configured her Windows box to make it easier to mount the shares on europa, then mounted everything automatically, from europa's desktop, and started the copies with a simple drag-and-drop. Mounting the shares was easy; I clicked on My Computer, which opened Konqueror, clicked Network Folders, then SMB Shares, then Workgroup, then the icon representing her machine. At that point I had access to the folders and files I'd prepped earlier. Then I split the file view vertically on Kong, selected the right for local file access, and opened a view into my home directory. From there it was simply dragging and dropping from the Windows folders to a new empty folder on my machine. Since we're talking 8GB plus, I let it run for a while and went off to do something else.
When it was finished copying I fired up K3B, created a new DVD data project (three would be needed eventually), and then dragged-and-dropped the local files into the K3B project to be burned. K3B is a dream to use, and compares (in my not-so-humble-opinion) to Windows burning tools such as Nero 6 (which I own). I burned 6 DVDs (one set of three for her to take, one to keep here as backup) without creating any coasters.
I have to admit updating my system from packman added considerable polished capability to europa, and it showed during this exercise. K3B was one of the applications that was updated. I've been using the Linux side of europa almost continuously for the past two weeks. I've left the system running continuously as well, whether I'm at the keyboard or not. Everything I care about has settled down and is working smoothly and correctly. Almost as good as a Mac :)
Turns out that in spite of the superiority of the iMac and OS X over Wintel (and yes, they are superior), she still needed Dad and his Linux box to actually back up her Windows box and then burn that to DVD. Seems that there's a small learning curve to OS X and she didn't have enough time to figure it all and and make the backups herself. So I backed up her files from her older Windows box to europa, across the home network, and then used K3B on europa to burn the now-local files to DVDs.
The total amount to backup was over 8GB. I organized and configured her Windows box to make it easier to mount the shares on europa, then mounted everything automatically, from europa's desktop, and started the copies with a simple drag-and-drop. Mounting the shares was easy; I clicked on My Computer, which opened Konqueror, clicked Network Folders, then SMB Shares, then Workgroup, then the icon representing her machine. At that point I had access to the folders and files I'd prepped earlier. Then I split the file view vertically on Kong, selected the right for local file access, and opened a view into my home directory. From there it was simply dragging and dropping from the Windows folders to a new empty folder on my machine. Since we're talking 8GB plus, I let it run for a while and went off to do something else.
When it was finished copying I fired up K3B, created a new DVD data project (three would be needed eventually), and then dragged-and-dropped the local files into the K3B project to be burned. K3B is a dream to use, and compares (in my not-so-humble-opinion) to Windows burning tools such as Nero 6 (which I own). I burned 6 DVDs (one set of three for her to take, one to keep here as backup) without creating any coasters.
I have to admit updating my system from packman added considerable polished capability to europa, and it showed during this exercise. K3B was one of the applications that was updated. I've been using the Linux side of europa almost continuously for the past two weeks. I've left the system running continuously as well, whether I'm at the keyboard or not. Everything I care about has settled down and is working smoothly and correctly. Almost as good as a Mac :)
Thanks a lot for your Suse 10.2 reviews. They proved to be very helpful: I installed Linux on my laptop and running only SUSE since last week!
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ReplyDeleteThe next trick is to get Suse up and running on an intel iMac.
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