no I'm not a geek, honest

[eor]

A couple of times I've idly thought that it would be "a good thing" to stop using windows entirely and switch to using FreeBSD for everything. It's a good idle thought, but for someone who's used windows for years and got a slew of different programs for specific tasks it's not easy. Not only do I not want to pay Microsoft for lousy product anymore, but I also want to be able to continue to use my old (and good) accessories (D30 camera, iriver mp3 player).

I decided to go with Gnome for an X window system because I was comfortable with the look and feel.

A couple of weeks ago I moved the easy things over to BSD: email, LJ, browsing, chat, text editing. I spent Thursday and Friday evening playing around with various MUD clients trying to find one I was comfortable.

Yesterday I decided I had to take on some of the harder things. Amazingly enough, if you just pound your head on the keyboard for long enough, things get done. The printer works, for my machine and shared with derien's windows box. The digital camera connects and I wrote a little script to automagicly move the pictures to an appropriate directory. The scanner is working. I also learned how the new devfs system works, and got suidperl installed and working (which fixed one part of the mp3 player and broke several million others). Overall, it was like climbing a very tall mountain and actually making it to the top.

Now there are only a few major bits that I haven't got converted from Windows. The worst is the ebook file creator. There is no alternative on unix for that. If I want to do it, I'll have to write it from scratch, which means reverse engineering the file format and the formatting techniques. I think I can do the file format with determination. The formatting will be much harder. In all, it could take a winter of methodical picking away.

It's a hobby. Okay, obsession.