Fast Linux

I continued to get my home Linux set up last night.

One thing that's been surprising me is that for the couple of things that I am running Windows software for (Grabit and Picture Information Extractor (PIE)), the software runs faster and better(*) under WINE/Linux than it does on Windows 7. I mean, significantly faster in one case.

It took me a couple of tries to get the non-free version of VirtualBox installed correctly; I need the non-free one because that's the one with the USB filtering support. With that in place, I'm able to run my Epson scanner and Photoshop totally smoothly under a guest copy of XP. The scanner and the cheap webcam that also didn't have any Windows 7 drivers so far are the only real snags. For the scanner, the forums all say "no driver, and there probably never will be, because Epson refuses to release either specs or drivers."

(*)GrabIt has a couple of owner-draw (custom appearance) controls, and they don't always render correctly under Windows 7. I haven't noticed any problems at all under WINE running under Linux.

Foglio early work

At Windycon, Phil mentioned that he'd drawn the original Unix daemons, from which the BSD daemon was derived. I hunted about on Wikipedia and confirmed the story, and found a copy of the artwork.
( A couple of largish images behind the cut )

Windows-Linux migration

Some pointers:

MP3Tag -> EasyTag
PIE -> MAYBE DigiKam or ShowFoto