Robert Kingston's Website

Back in 1995 I bought a four CD set of Slackware while I was visiting my son in Boston and tried to get it up and running. The thought of a 'community' based operating system was very attractive and I tried hard to get it set up for ordinary everyday office use but without much success. I remember a friend of mine in Tallaght who worked with computers saying that life was too short for using Linux.

But the hankering to use Linux rather than anything else has never left and although I have no expertise in Computers I have on and off tried to move over totally to Linux. I made very determined attempts to get Suse 10, Mandriva and various other releases to work properly on my Acer 3003WLMI but while they nearly worked the Sound Card (AC97), modem and Wireless LAN have always stuck me.

Having tried Ubuntu 6.06 and Fedora 7 recently and having nearly got them to work I tried PCLinuxOS and was amazed to find that virtually everything except MIDI and the Wireless works perfectly. The sound card works fine with Audacity and Timidity but I cannot get JACK to work properly with MusE or Rosegarden. I downloaded qjackctl and have tried configuring things every which way but cannot get any noise out of it. It will link to and control MusE fine but no sound comes to the output plug.

In time I hope to get Cinelerra up and running but haven't yet had the time to try and understand it properly.

All in all though I think Linux is nearly at the point of being ready for the non-techie like myself. There are a few rough edges, mainly caused, I think, by hardware being so much orientated towards a particular operating system, as in e.g. the winmodem but I feel much more confident now about moving over totally. The experience of having a query I put on the web being answered by some youngster in Russia gives me a real buzz and underlines the idea of 'community'. I hope it all comes together and avoids the legal problems that lurk in the wings.