My log of doing work with Mandrake 9.2

2 May 2004
     Working with Open Office, transposing hymns for my work as a music minister.
Went to add an image to my Writer document,namely guitar chord sheet for some
diminished chords (freestyled).  Opened GIMP, but didn't find any tools for making my
own lines and circles and such.  I thought to myself, "you've GOT to be kidding!"
After using the GIMP for a while, loving how I can transform and change images, this
was an upset.  Tried KPaint, and found no eraser tool.  Another "you've GOT to be
kidding me!" moment.  Installed XFig, and it was rather nice in terms of putting
guitar chords, but I wondered if the saved file could be inserted into my Writer
document.  In Insert > Graphics, the file format wasn't listed, and manually typing
in the file I had created in XFig and pressing the enter key was ignored.  The GIMP
couldn't open the XFig file either ("unknown file format").  In desperation, went
back to try to install a different graphics program, and didn't find any.  Remember,
I'm on my own right now, as I have no IRC or email or newsgroup access.  In a final
act of desperation, I went into GIMP and took a screenshot of my XFig project, then
cut my project out of the screenshot, saved it to a PNG, and imported it into my
document.
     At this point, my opinion of The GIMP went down a little, but I convinced
myself that I could go online and figure out how to use the stuff.  My opinion of
KPaint was already horrible -- in my mind it was a sad emulation of Microsoft
Paint, and without an eraser tool (or so it seemed).  I had never used XFig
before, and so I was very happy with it, except that I couldn't export into PNG or
some other format.  However, it was so logically (should I say, "like an engineer
designed it"?) that all I had to do was look at the tools and use them.  Nice
program, just needs some sort of "export this as a flat image" plugin.
     On a side note, I call for a ban on the JPEG format.  If they are going to
get grumpy about patent infringement on their format, then I'll use PNG or some
format that's patented in such a way that no one will mind if I use it.  Granted,
PNG can't really be made as small as a JPEG file, but at least the quality isn't
lost like in JPEG.  Even then, something as simple as a two-color guitar chord
illustration is easily less than one kilobyte in size....
     At this point, my laptop (400mhz i686 Pentium II MMX Celeron, 160MB RAM) fans
are running.  Gee, I wish that there was a way to tell Mandrake upon startup that
you want to switch to a "no networking" configuration.  I bet I've got at least 5
to 10 unnecessary services running.
     Ran through GConfEditor and tried to find and shut off all animations.
Searching for the list of which ones are where on the internet did no good at all.
Then I figured, "Oh well, might as well click the help icon", and believe it or
not, that's where the documentation was "hiding."  After going through the
settings and doing like it said, my box ran a little better in terms of latency
and memory usage.  Goodbye Mandrake themes and background, hello
"old-school-looking" gnome gradient blue background and extremely simple window
decorations.  Left font anti-aliasing on so I didn't get a headache looking at
text and/or get depressed.
     Ok, got a complete CD ripped without network-based ID3, using GRIP, and using
the Ogg file type.  Remember, hardly any configuration was done.  GRIP worked
great -- editing track names was easy, and much more convenient than Windows Media
Player / Musicmatch / RealPlayer.  Ripping went totally without a noticeable hitch
or hiccup.  I paused to kill a cockroach (I'm at work).  Playback through XMMS was
excellent, and also required no configuration.  This is the way things should be
for a home or work user -- it's not about what you do with Linux, but what you
don't have to do with it.  Computers exist to make our lives better and simpler.
When they take up too much of our time (this excludes hackers and programmers),
they cease to be a benefit and become a burden.
     Finally got sick of the auto-complete in Open Office, so I went to the help
menu to find how to do so, and the help for Open Office works like it should.  I
found what I needed.
     It impresses me that I can be using Gnome, writing sheet music in Open Office
Writer, listening to Oggs with XMMS, and writing this in GEdit all at the same
time.  Not bad for an old piece of krap machine like this.
     Left my machine on all night, so far very stable, and everything works like
it should, as far as I know.