It’s been a while since my last posting, but after getting married in June my life has been so full of activity that I haven’t really had a chance. At any rate, feel free to checkout my wedding site and perhaps even visit the registry? Ahem; there are still a few things we are waiting on.

My real purpose for this posting is to comment on the versatility of Linux and the myriad of solutions available courtesy of the open source movement.

Since returning from the wedding, there have been a deluge of digital photos to go through. Virtually all of them require some level of digital enhancement using Gimp and KuickShow has been a fabulous tool for onscreen viewing with others.

Perhaps the most impressive feature was the automated merging of two directories full of images. While copying one directory into another, some filenames presented a conflict at which point Konqueror presented a dialog with both images displayed. You may choose to overwrite or press the automated file renaming button, but in either case you can visually inspect the two image files to determine what your best course of action is going to be.

Meanwhile, a few hundred photos are on film only. Since we have the negatives, I have borred a Minolta photo scanner and am in the process of configuring VueScan to read the photos.

Since this scanner requires SCSI and my only adapter is in an old Pentium 75, it was easier to download Knoppix than to reinstall the current operating system. This is configured as my firewall server so it isn’t a system that I really want to touch.

Surprisingly, Knoppix boots without a hitch. Unfortuantely, the libstdc libraries are slightly outdated so I’m downloading the latest Knoppix distribution. The fact that you can create a bootable floppy for the Knoppix CD image is extremely useful, my server is not capable of booting from CD and so I would be powerless without this feature.

None of this would be possible without open source. It’s amazing how far the revolution has come.

Categories: Technology