Meet Artemis

Artemis, goddess of the hunt and of ferility and a PIV/3.0/256/80 hp desktop running debian etch. She’s my pc at the office.

At home, I’m fully debianized and I’d been toying around with the idea of doing the same at the office for quite some time now but didn’t have the psyche, the umfff, of going through with it. After three weeks of almost being driven to the point of busting up my screen, the psyche came. Its amazing the kind of stress a slow machine can create, esp. when there is work to be done and the support department is sloooooooooooow(feel pity for support guys though, they get ridiculous calls most of the time).

Where it took 10+ minutes to bootup and login (I would just lock it in the evening), it takes < 1min. Where it took minutes to open my programs or do anything in them, now it takes seconds. Everything is comfortably fast now and to top it off, she looks good too.

For the typical Kenyan business, unless you’re in design/publishing, its beyond me why you would fork out 11k+ per machine for licenses from micro$oft when everything they is freely available. All they need is a word, excel, powerpoint, outlook and a media player alternative.

For word and excel, there the openoffice.org suite. It can open and save in the microsoft formats or directly into a pdf.

For outlook, there is evolution. Apart from the standard protocols, it can also access an exchange server if you have outlook web access.

Totem media player can handle those mp3s, mpegs, dvds etc. However, I’m yet to find a good media player for linux that has a media library.

When you need to administer that windows server, tsclient works well.

 

It took me two days, about 12 hrs, straight to bring artemis to working condition and I’ve done this 50+ times in the past seven years. Until setting up linux gets as easy as next -> next -> next -> finish, its useless to the average user; it remains the developer’s os.

Well there is ubuntu. Its dead much easier to install and manage (read: idiot proof) but the whole ubuntu thing, debian is a subject for another post.

Most of the apps in Linux have windows versions, give ‘em a try, you might be suprised.

Artemis, thou maid divine, Diktynna, huntress, fair to see, O bring that keen-nosed pack of thine, and hunt through all the house with me.
- Aristophanes, Frogs