wish-list meme

[cellio]

I find it difficult to ask for gifts -- which is different from asking for things I think I'm entitled to -- but this one seemed interesting and there aren't any actual expectations or anything, so what the heck.

Step One:

* Make a post (public, friendslocked, filtered...whatever you're comfortable with) to your LJ. The post should contain your list of ten holiday wishes [focus seems to be on yourself]. The wishes can be anything at all, from simple and fandom-related ("I'd love a Jenny/Giles icon that's just for me") to medium ("I wish for _____ on DVD") to really big ("All I want for $HOLIDAY is a new car/computer/house/TV.")

* If you wish for real-world things (not fics or icons), make sure you include some sort of contact info in your post, whether it's your address or just your email address where Santa (or one of his elves) could get in touch with you. [My email address is in my profile. My physical address is in the phone directory in the city given in the profile.]

* Also, make sure you post some version of these guidelines in your LJ, or link to this post (it'll be public) so that the holiday joy will spread. [N.B. The link to the original post has long since been lost, so I don't know whose this is.]

Step Two:

* Surf around your friendslist (or friendsfriends, or just random journals) to see who has posted their list. And now here's the important part:

* If you see a wish you can grant, and it's in your heart to do so, make someone's wish come true. Sometimes someone's trash is another's treasure, and if you have a leather jacket you don't want or a gift certificate you won't use -- or even know where you could get someone's dream purebred Basset Hound for free -- do it.

You needn't spend money on these wishes unless you want to. The point isn't to put people out, it's to provide everyone a chance to be someone else's holiday elf and to spread the joy. Gifts can be made anonymously or not -- it's your call.

There are no rules with this project, no guarantees, and no strings attached. Just...wish, and it might come true. Give, and you might receive. And you'll have the joy of knowing you made someone's holiday special.

---

Not in any particular order:

1. A copy of Wizards and Warriors on DVD.
2. Ginger bread or cookies or similar with lots of ginger.
3. A miniature (25mm scale) for my current D&D character, colored/painted. (The character is a sorceress with a particular affinity for fire who does not think a bikini is appropriate adventurer garb. Sword ok due to a couple levels of paladin. A real bonus would be also representing the owl familiar.)
4. A copy of The Little Prince in Hebrew.
5. A long, thorough massage.
6. For someone to come over, partition the hard drive, install Linux on the other partition, and make it work with all the peripherals, so this wouldn't be a Windows-only box.
7. For a dear friend to have a healthy baby in a couple months.
8. To meet more of my online friends.
9. For my husband to be more fond of cats.
10. Normal vision. (Ok, there had to be one impossible thing here. :-) )

Comments

[cellio]

We have a copy of Red Hat (no longer current, I'm sure) that we've tried setting up on a scratch machine without much luck. I looked at the instructions and am not confident that I could install it on a "live" drive without doing damage. So I may try this experiment on my next machine before I've loaded anything onto it, when the cost of failure is lower, but I'm still a little too intimidated by OS-level mucking-about to be eager to try it myself. Hence the unrealistic wish. :-)

But all that said, I'd be happy to hear recommendations for Linux versions; there are several out there and I have no basis for choosing among them. What are the relevant factors to consider?

[profane-stencil.livejournal.com]

For starters, you should consider what you want to do on the Linux partition, and what sort of hardware you have.
When I installed SuSe 8.something on my main box, it did the partitioning for me. Most distros do that now. I have a laptop partitioned for Windows98 and whatever Linux distro I feel like testing, and I have never had a problem with repartitioning when necessary. (If you try to install Windows after Linux, Linux is gone. If you install Windows first, Linux doesn't touch it unless you tell it to.)
You might want to try a live cd- it boots from the disk and never affects what's on your hard drive. It's a great way to test out a distro. I'd be glad to send you some.
(Disclaimer: Distros vary. Your experience may be unique.)

[cellio]

I want to explore the question of whether I really need Windows on the home machine, or whether I can do everything I want to do under Linux. I assume all the standard peripherals are solved problems -- scanner, digital camera, printer, CD burner, etc -- but would like to see it all work before committing. That leaves software -- web browser (certainly a solved problem), emacs (ditto, given its origins), SSH and FTP clients (I assume...), pine (?), Open Office or equivalent (?), image-editing software (?), music-editing software (?? particularly, Encore), and a slew of programs that probably only run under Windows but might run ok under a Windows emulator running on Linux. (Most of this last are somewhat obscure -- a Hebrew tutor, Trope Trainer, a virtual sound recorder, and stuff like that.) I rarely play games and never the real-time graphics-intensive ones, so no issues there.

When I installed SuSe 8.something on my main box, it did the partitioning for me. Most distros do that now.

That's handy. The RedHat distribution we have says "first you have to partition your drive, but if you have NT that's dangerous" and I have Win2k, so since they didn't give enough information for me to figure out what the issues are, I stopped there.

You might want to try a live cd- it boots from the disk and never affects what's on your hard drive. It's a great way to test out a distro. I'd be glad to send you some.

I didn't realize you could run from a CD without actually installing. I'd love to try one out!

I have a 1.7 GHz machine with 256M memory -- not current but not ancient and venerable either.