Trolls' Purpose 13468 plus 1

wd

About the only thing that keeps me from using Open Office for now are 2 defective CD units on my 1,700 MHz Pentium. My Verbatim CD-R-W unit now doesn't recognise CD's, stopped working a week ago. Six months ago, my Creative DVD-Rom bit the dust. Seems nowadays few make quality CD units. I remember my first CD-Rom unit, a Sony 2x worked 4 years later, replaced it with a faster CD unit. I should have my HP Miniscribe DVD-R-W up and running soon.

With the DVD-Rom toast, I could could not install Debian Sergeant. I installed a Debian variant that was on CD instead of DVD, but their open circulation version lacks some basic admin tools in X and in shell mode, probably due to the limited space on one CD. They seemed to have done an impressive job though on the desktop. Since I have a 42K modem connection, use of their on-line update feature to install the rest has been somewhat impractical.

Without being able to load Debian modules on DVD has left me dead in the water. I might opt for SuSE 10.1 when it is out next Spring, since it comes with the manual, an invaluable resource and I am most familiar with SuSE. Meanwhile when I get the HP DVD up and running, I will replace that open circulation version with undiluted Debian. Replacing the WinXP unit with Linux as server on a home network will be an easy task once the DVD unit is working again.

-- HPT