Following the advice from yesterday, I've installed Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office. There were some other pieces of software on the Ubuntu CD that I didn't get round to installing - noteably GIMP that I'll do this evening.
Next task is getting hold of VMware - I've emailed to find out how much it costs with a student discount (yes, I still have a valid student card). Then I'm going to install Ubuntu and/or Debian as guest Operating Systems and see which one I get on with best.
#keble seems to use Debian and that's where I tend to take my technical questions. Other people seem to use Ubuntu so it's worth trying too - since I've got a live CD I'm going to have a play with that and see what I think of it. I've ordered Debian from http://www.cheeplinux.com/ because it's only £10 and it means I'll have proper CDs in case it all goes wrong and I want to reinstall it.
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topbit if you can bring me a copy of MySQL on Tuesday that'd be great (Debian comes with PostgreSQL installed, but given that there's disagreement over which one is better I'd like to try them both).
Next question - I've now downloaded all my email/set up appropriate filters etc in Thunderbird and that's fine (have yet to try sending email from one account and am not sure if the smtp server works 'cos Thunderbird sucks at smtp servers). My problems now aren't going to be easily fixable - I've lost a whole load of email addresses from non-LiveJournal/mailing list people. How do I stop this happening next time round? ('take backups' is not a satisfactory answer - what kind of backups and where do I store them?). I've lost my entire email archive from January 2003 to date (stuff from March 2001-January 2003 was mostly already lost after some virus deletion went wrong) and this is somewhat unsettling (though I don't feel anywhere near as bad about it as I did in January 2003). A fair amount of that stuff had sentimental value/was stuff I'd look back on for an ego boost. I can hardly ask everyone who has ever had an email conversation with me to resend the entire contents of our conversations because I'm not supposed to feel this attached to words on a screen. How about all the LJ Comments I've left/other people have left me? - particularly where people have subsequently removed me from their friends' list - now I can't see various comments I've written. But anyway, I can't fix that now - what can I use as a secondary mail storage device - do I want to try to use a server (no idea how) or something else?
I'm not in the mood for being told that I'm an idiot for not creating backups (as it happens I do have a backup CD containing a lot of Word docs - but I'm fairly certain it's got a virus or two on it, so I don't want to open it on my new machine). My old computer could not write to CD and the quantity of stuff on there was such that doing it with floppies would have taken days. It was also full of viruses I couldn't get rid of, which made creating clean backups fairly difficult. And for all its continual crashing it never actually lost saved data on me, until now.
Next task is getting hold of VMware - I've emailed to find out how much it costs with a student discount (yes, I still have a valid student card). Then I'm going to install Ubuntu and/or Debian as guest Operating Systems and see which one I get on with best.
#keble seems to use Debian and that's where I tend to take my technical questions. Other people seem to use Ubuntu so it's worth trying too - since I've got a live CD I'm going to have a play with that and see what I think of it. I've ordered Debian from http://www.cheeplinux.com/ because it's only £10 and it means I'll have proper CDs in case it all goes wrong and I want to reinstall it.
topbit if you can bring me a copy of MySQL on Tuesday that'd be great (Debian comes with PostgreSQL installed, but given that there's disagreement over which one is better I'd like to try them both). Next question - I've now downloaded all my email/set up appropriate filters etc in Thunderbird and that's fine (have yet to try sending email from one account and am not sure if the smtp server works 'cos Thunderbird sucks at smtp servers). My problems now aren't going to be easily fixable - I've lost a whole load of email addresses from non-LiveJournal/mailing list people. How do I stop this happening next time round? ('take backups' is not a satisfactory answer - what kind of backups and where do I store them?). I've lost my entire email archive from January 2003 to date (stuff from March 2001-January 2003 was mostly already lost after some virus deletion went wrong) and this is somewhat unsettling (though I don't feel anywhere near as bad about it as I did in January 2003). A fair amount of that stuff had sentimental value/was stuff I'd look back on for an ego boost. I can hardly ask everyone who has ever had an email conversation with me to resend the entire contents of our conversations because I'm not supposed to feel this attached to words on a screen. How about all the LJ Comments I've left/other people have left me? - particularly where people have subsequently removed me from their friends' list - now I can't see various comments I've written. But anyway, I can't fix that now - what can I use as a secondary mail storage device - do I want to try to use a server (no idea how) or something else?
I'm not in the mood for being told that I'm an idiot for not creating backups (as it happens I do have a backup CD containing a lot of Word docs - but I'm fairly certain it's got a virus or two on it, so I don't want to open it on my new machine). My old computer could not write to CD and the quantity of stuff on there was such that doing it with floppies would have taken days. It was also full of viruses I couldn't get rid of, which made creating clean backups fairly difficult. And for all its continual crashing it never actually lost saved data on me, until now.
