thanks for the nice comment. And yes, that’s a very good and informative article.

I am slowly making my way through your excellent blog. On the question of film vs. digital, I found Roger Clark’s summary of the situation be very useful and informative. I haven’t seen links to him from you, but you both occasionally link to Luminous Landscape.

Puppy sounds like a good choice for a machine like your laptop – and since this OS is so small that you can boot it from almost anything (like USB sticks), you don’t even have to install it to try it out (and see how well it plays together with the hardware).

I don’t know much about Puppy tho – but its Wikipedia entry points to its homepage and community pages – I’m sure that the guys and gals over there can help you.

Oh, and for books – yes there are still some good sources and publishers, like O’Reilly and the like. I’d visit any good bookstore close to a university, where you can usually find tons of them.

One tip for partitioning, since you’ve mentioned it: try creating only a small root partition (/), and a bigger one for user data (/home). That way, you can install dozens of different small distributions (onto /) without destroying/overwriting your data (on /home) – something all those pre-installed Windows machines almost never had.

But any good Linux quick-start (or like you said “for dummies”) guide should tell you that, and much more.

Hope that helped, and that you’ll enjoy your Linux experience! (Just looked, and Puppy is currently ranked #10 in the most popular distributions at Distrowatch…)

My problem is a combination of computer illiteracy and the wild overabundance of Linux programs with either fragmentary how-to instructions or the assumption of a fair amount of prior knowledge on the part of the would-be user.

What I need is a step-by-step guide to installation which doesn’t assume I know how to partition a hard drive. Back in the 80′s DOS era I knew just enough to occasionally edit a line of code to modify the behavior of a bit of simple program, but 25 years of reliance on graphical interfaces has caused even that most rudimentary understanding to disappear.

My goal is to resurrect a late-90s Gateway laptop equipped with a Pentium III processor and, I think, 640 mb of what may be called system RAM. It has at least a couple gigabytes of total RAM and a 12 gigabyte hard drive. All of this sounds OK for the time of its manufacture, but it never did run the OEM-provided Windows 98 properly. My insistence on making it work rather than land-filling it is sheer self-destructive stubbornness.

My thought was that a lightweight Linux OS such as Puppy Linux should work — and provide a combination of speed, flexibility and a GUI needed for today’s conventional use.

So, with apologies for cluttering your blog with this off-topic query, what I’m looking for is direction to a website or a book (remember those?) which will explain in drop-dead simple language how to acquire and install a program appropriate for that equipment.

“Linux For Idiots” would be a good working title.

Thanks for your indulgence.

Michael

I’m looking at my E-PL1, and I’m thinking that I really prefer electronic viewfinders by now. But an E-P5 or an E-M5 is currently out of question here – too many other things I have to pay for. But when I compare my wife’s E-PL5 to mine, then I have to admit that those two extra stops of dynamic range are some really strong point indeed. The premium build of these higher-end cameras would just be the icing on the cake.

And sure you can ask questions about Linux, tho other pages (like the one from Debian, which I’m using) could probably tell you more.