I was recently gifted a Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop. The poor thing had been replaced, and was living in the back of a closet for the last year or so. I think that's unfortunate, since it was quite the machine when it was new in January of 2003. With the installation of Fedora 8, I think it can still be quite the machine.
As shipped, it has:
- 1.7 GHz, 512K, Pentium 4
- 256 Megs of memory
- Read only DVD drive
- Floppy drive
- 20 GB Hard drive
- ethernet port, modem port, two USB1 ports
- Dell TrueMobile 11Mbps wireless card
Not a bad machine at all, and certainly more than enough power for what I want to do with it.
At this point, other than being too slow for it's former owner, the only thing wrong with it is that the battery is no longer any good. It refuses to hold a charge, so the laptop shuts down immediately when the power cord is unplugged.
This weekend, I'll be wiping the hard drive for a fresh installation of Fedora 8 from the Fedora KDE Live CD. I've been using Fedora and Redhat Enterprise Linux for a number of years. I'm familiar with the file structure, updates, etc. And between GNOME and KDE, I just like KDE better. I think that using the CD to install a "Live" version, rather than the DVD to install a full version, I'll save a bit of file space. I can always use YUM to add any package that I want later on.
I know Ubuntu is the current darling of the distros, I'm just an old die-hard Fedora fan.
My short term goals are to:
- Be able to watch and listen to a video on YouTube.
- Be able to listen to streaming Jazz from www.kplu.org
- Play an mp3 audio file.
- Play a commercial audio CD *
- Play a commercial movie DVD
- Connect to a network with the wireless card
If I manage to get that all done, perhaps I'll work on being able to edit photographs from my Nikon dSLR.
* Both Amarok and Kaffeine will play a commercial CD as installed in Fedora. Both are included in the Live KDE installation.
YouTubeRobot.com today
YouTubeRobot.com today announces YouTube Robot 2.0, a tool that enables you to download video from YouTube.com onto your PC, convert it to various formats to watch it when you are on the road on mobile devices like mobile phone, iPod, iPhone, Pocket PC, PSP, or Zune.
YouTube Robot allows you to search for videos using keywords or browse video by category, author, channel, language, tags, etc. When you find something noteworthy, you can preview the video right in YouTube Robot and then download it onto the hard disk drive. The speed, at which you will be downloading, is very high: up to 5 times faster than other software when you download a single file and up to 4 times faster when you download multiple files at a time.
Manual download is not the only option with YouTube Robot. You may as well schedule the download and conversion tasks to be executed automatically, even when you are not around. Downloading is followed by conversion to the format of your choice and uploading videos to a mobile device (if needed). For example, you can plug in iPod, select the video, go to bed, and when you wake up next morning, your iPod will be ready to play new YouTube videos.
Product page: www.youtuberobot.com
Direct download link: www.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe
Company web-site: www.youtuberobot.com
E-mail: support@youtuberobot.com