[Techtalk] Random: MS problem, Linux solution and an experiment

[Carla Schroder]

On Tuesday 22 January 2002 06:15 pm, James wrote:
> I have a ghetto Compaq laptop.  It has one of those ridiculous touchpads
> (I use a USB mouse), which I hate, as my hands always accidentally touch
> it while typing and I delete half a page of work.  I tried disabling it
> in XP and it refused to disable.  There was also no way to disable it
> through BIOS.
>
> I installed Mandrake on it (as an experiment, I'll mention that later)
> and got an idea.
>
> sudo cat /dev/psaux > /dev/null &
>
> And it worked =)
>
> College experiment:
>
> A lot of people use my laptop to type papers, do work, etc.  Last
> semester it had WinXP on it.  This semester I installed Mandrake 8.1 w/
> KDE2.2.2 and w/StarOffice 6 Beta.  I want to see how many people don't
> even notice the difference beyond mentioning that the interface is
> slightly different.  Bets on that?  I seriously doubt I will win any
> converts, but it would be interesting to see how a previously pure MS
> Windows9x user fairs on Linux.
>
> - James

Nice going, thanks for sharing.

As long as you're cranking out paper docs, no one will notice anything 
different. The problems are in sharing digital files. SO 6 is pretty slick, 
the only thing that peeves me about is the lack of cut-n-paste compatibility 
with other Linux apps. It handles MS Office files quite nicely.




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Carla Schroder, ace PC goddess
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