The Old Tin Shed

Hi all, warning this may end up long.   Then again that seems to be theme with me of late.  I was trolling through my past posts and noticed with great pride that my most popular posts were about my struggle with mental illness.   It seems that others have been reading and in the end that is exactly why I bear my soul here. http://theoldtinshed.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/to-see-into-darkness.html  Above is one of my favorite posts and, has been read a lot by others.  Some of the themes in there I wanted to elaborate on today.  You see the darkness I talk about is not a quantitative thing.  To others it would be a nice place.  But to me its a place that scares me, where the insecurities and evil intent live. Its never a nice place to go or to see.  I have stared at myself in the mirror and what I saw churning beneath the blue eyes really scares me.  If I let it run, if I gave in the fight the outcome for me would not be goo...

As you have probably gathered from my previous posts I have been doing a lot of investigating into the current Linux distributions and building 3 servers based around them. The server editions of Centos 6, have been stable and secure the way I expected them to.  To be honest now that we have the servers installed at the proprietary software running, I feel one hell of a lot less stressed about being hacked and viruses.  I have also been looking at a desktop distribution of Linux that I could replace my windows desktop with.  Therefore removing yet another entry point for hackers and or spy ware etc.  I mentioned BSD and it ran great as did quite a few others.  But I learnt some things you need to take into consideration before diving in. Do you have another machine for windows or can you dual boot for the programs that don't have a Linux version Are you prepared to try new programs What desktop do you want to run, as there are several out there. Try ...

Now I dont know if i should be complaining about linux or the proprietary software I am trying to install on it. Have been through every major distro, but is seems the later the version of the software the more unlikely it is to install with no issues.   For example I can install the software on version 5.6 of CentOS no worries but try to use version 6 and it crashes out with the mysql install.  The proprietary software installs its own version of all the needed MYSQL, and has major issues with the way that works on the newer distro's.  I can only assume that, that is the reason for my issues. Lots of people ask if Linux is a real alternative to windows.  The answer is both yes and no. Windows out of the box is ready to install apps and runs full multimedia devices no issues at all.  Its primary issues are based around the fact that it is realitvely insecure and you need lots of extra software to make it do what you want it to.  For exanple to ...