Gavin, 26 November 03
I bought a new 60 gig hard drive a week ago. I have spent the last few evenings getting things the way I like them, I know that five hours seems a bit extreme for setting up a system to some people – but I have been fiddling with things for the past five days.
I have changed to Fedora Core 1 as the default OS, with XP home alongside and have left a partition I can use to play around with. I have also made a reasonable sized Fat partition which is rw in both windows and linux – so Mozilla mail, bookmarks and passwords are shared over the dual boot. All my media files are also on this shared partition.
Until now, EditPlus has been my favourite windows text editor – but I think Jedit is likely to become default. Not only can the settings of this java text editor be shared – but the same executable java file runs under either OS.
Jedit has the features that made me buy EditPlus – a decent find & replace which works across multiple files and a plugin for FTP. The only problem I have found is that the FTP is too secure and will not remember passwords for more than one session – with my passwords being a random ten character string I need some way to work round this.
One final thing I had to do to get my Windows system ‘just right’ is get hold of the icon that I have always used for explorer….
I have used this signpost icon on all my PCs since Windows 95 – but it doesn’t ship in XP home (at least not in the icon library for explorer.exe) – so I have had to grab it from a Windows 95 machine. It’s pathetic – but familiarity is what has kept me from moving to linux permanently, so I don’t know why MS are making it hard to keep things the way I know and like.
