[CS-FSLUG] Another chapter in my transition to Linux saga

[Ruth Marlene Friesen]

Hi again friends,
Thought I would take a couple of minutes to update you on my transition into 
Linux. I seem to have been suddenly thrust into it.

For about a month before Easter I was spending half days in Mandrake, but 
going back to Wind98 to deal with emails in the afternoon. Mainly because I 
was hoping to use Wine to keep using my Pegasus (email client) in Mandrake.
Mostly I could only work on that on Saturdays, stealing time from other 
things. I had got to the point where I could see this was not going to work 
well, so I gave up and decided to set up my emails in KMail and Evolution.

The week before Easter I spent four whole days in Mandrake and never needed 
Windows for anything! Ah-ha. I figured my transition had happened at last.

Then on the Saturday of Easter weekend I thought, I should just tweak that one 
Windows partition I had assigned for placing backups (because I cannot seem 
to access my CD drives properly yet). Maybe just unmount and remount that 
partition, so I could back up the C drive, and be more or less done with it, 
except for my Brothers Keeper program (genealogy).

Oh-oh! when I did that, something happened to the /home partition! I was 
afraid that if I closed the DrakConf window my Mandrake would crash, so I 
switched to another desktop and quickly did a backup to a CD. It looked like 
it was working, and I thought I was so clever. I didn´t want to lose my work 
of the last 4 days.

Sure enough. Mandrake crashed. So I re-installed. (I am getting to be an old 
hand at that; have lost track of how many times I have done it in the last 
year or so). Turns out my backup CD was blank!

Oh well, back to Win98 I went last week. I needed to get work done, and would 
try my MOVE over again on the weekend. Unfortunately, from some site I was 
surfing I picked up some crazy program on Thursday that jumped into my 
computer and wanted to search it for P*r*n . Next thing I knew it had me at a 
site that wanted to be paid for this program!

There was a note about being able to uninstall it from Add/Remove Programs.
So I went there, and could not find this thing called 180 Solutions that was 
in my system tray. But I spied what looked like a stranger, something called 
Side Find. So I deleted that. Oh-oh-BIG time Oh-NO! It messed up something in 
the Explorer.exe file.

Now I just get a pink screen with this error message. ¨This program has 
preformed an illegal operation.... and Explorer caused an invalid page fault 
in Module EXPLORER.EXE....¨ etc.

I have tried all kinds of things, Thurs. all day Friday, and parts of 
Saturday, including re-installing Win98. For a while there it was telling me 
to restore system.ini.  I found various directions online and managed to do 
that. But so far no go. Can not get into Win98!

So now I am praising the Lord for dual boot, and that I can work in Mandrake. 
But I still have a lot of learning to do.

I did download Knoppix and have tried twice to burn it on a CD but my CDs are 
blank. So I have been reading up on mounting CDs, and tried that. Still not 
right.

KMail, which has proved to be most like Pegasus, appears to have a limit to 
the number of identities I can use. Too bad! However, it was able to import 
enormous loads of old Pegasus mail and transform them into plain text files 
so I can actually sort through them. PMail uses mbox and so the emails are 
numbered, but you can´t go through them from your file manager very easily.

However, the whole Mandrake system (this time around) cannot seem to type an 
apostrophe! I have been looking at encoding, and keyboard layouts, and am 
stumped as to how I get to use that one key which I need a lot. (sometimes if 
I tap it several times, I get an accent mark).  Unfortunately, I don t 
understand enough about encoding to tell if I am using the right one. Strange 
that I didn t have this problem with any previous install.

Incidentally, if you are on the Mandrake mailing list, you might have learned 
on Saturday that it has officially changed it´s name to Mandravia.

I have learned a lot in recent months about hunting for info in the 
documentation and by googling, but I still need to get my newer printer to 
work, the sound to work, and figure out how to do backups on CD and to get my 
DVD drive to play for me. Also how to use the console properly.

OH, and how to save my outgoing emails efficiently in KMail. Or maybe to 
tackle learning Mutt??

I don t expect any one person to have ALL the answers, but if you can give me 
one tip - that would be greatly appreciated already!

-- 
Blessings & Thanks, 
Ruth Marlene Friesen 
  
When you meet Ruthe and her Friend - 
You've got Friends! http://www.Ruthes-SecretRoses.com 
                       \o/ 
P.S. Buy it & it's on its way to you within 48 hours! 
http://Ruthes-SecretRoses.com/RSR.html 
or as e-book to download right away - 
http://Ruthes-SecretRoses.com/rsr/Intro.html