[Continued from here.] I’ve gotten to the desktop (GNOME). And things are moving slowly. Very slowly. So slowly that 5-10 seconds pass between the time I click into a field in Mozilla and when the text cursor appears in that field. It’s painting graphics slowly, too. I’ve tried telling it that I have a slightly different graphics card than it thinks I do, but that hasn’t helped. As a rank newbie, I don’t know where to look for diagnostic tools that could help me. I’ll keep poking around.

Meanwhile, I’m trying top open OpenOffice, the free word processor that isn’t MS Word, but it seems to have hung on the splash screen. Am I headed for my first Linux crash and reboot? I think so, but only because I don’t know how to kill a process in Linux on or off the desktop.

The OpenOffice splash screen is still up although clearly nothing’s going on with it. Somehow my random clicking seems to have opened up a view onto my home network. All the computers are visible, although it’s hanging as it tries to see the directories on my main NTFS machine.

Before I reboot, I thought I’d change the desktop image. Might as well focus on the important stuff first. The mouse is laggy, though, and the OpenOffice splash screen insists on being the topmost window, making it a little tough. Logging out…

I put in my old video card (Creative Annihilator – what a terrible product name!) instead of using the on-board video. Starting up again. It’s noticed the hardware change and is installing the drivers. Cool. But now it’s going through the same initial setup steps, asking me to test the sound card, etc. Worrisome. And it just gave me an error while installing the RedHat documentation off the CD; the second time, it works fine.

The system seems more responsive this time. Just for fun, I’m going to download Opera, which I use as my browser on Windows. Unfortunately, the Opera for Linux download screen wants to know which type of Linux I have: deb, rpm or tar.gz. But wait a sec, a tar file is a compressed file, not a type of Linux. I’m confused about my confusion. I’m guessing at the one that says RedHat8.1. Anyway, I seem to have guessed right because it’s installed just fine.

OpenOffice launches this time. Nice. But the system fonts are really and truly ugly. ClearType is a nice thing on XP. The big test for me will be whether it does a better job with tables than Word does. It’s hard to believe how badly Word tables suck given how long tables have been in the project. I frequently have to save my Word document as HTML just so I can regain control of a table. Word tables separate across pages for no known reason, and pity the fool who forgets to leave some empty paragraphs after a table for they can’t be inserted if you forget. The only thing worse than tables in Word are embedded graphics. I’ve been using the product for about 15 years, I count as a power user, and I still can’t figure the little f*ckers out.

Categories: Uncategorized dw