Now It’s Your Turn

Back in the spring, I wrote about the travails of installing the free operating system Linux. Since then, I’ve got e-mail daily from folks who want to know how it’s going; in their way, Linux’s adherents are as evangelical as any member of the orthodox Macintosh religion. Others–who, I guess, didn’t read between my lines–wanted to know if they should use Linux instead of Windows or the Mac’s operating system. That second question is far easier to answer than the first: for most of the laypeople who read this column, if you have to ask, don’t install Linux. It’s not for you.

Linux and the open-source movement that spawned it are among the most exciting and important things going on in the software world today. But the setup is just too complex for the average person. A few weeks after my column ran, I had to swap the PC I was using for another one that didn’t have Linux, and I still couldn’t install the version from Red Hat without tech support.

So I tried another flavor of the operating system, Open Linux 2.2, sold by Caldera Systems ($69). It comes with an application called Partition Magic, which is supposed to make it easier to run both Linux and Windows on the same hard drive. I was up and running in half an hour–but when I rebooted my system, I was unable to launch Linux, apparently because my hard drive is too big. (Don’t ask. I consulted a long-time Linux user for help, and even he couldn’t figure it out.) Since Caldera doesn’t offer free phone support, I sent e-mail to the help desk; weeks went by with no answer. I have since given up. That’s a shame, because once it was running, Linux lived up to its hype. It never crashed, though it did look at me funny once or twice.

So did a number of TIME readers after my July 5 column about PictureCD, a Kodak service that converts 35-mm and APS film to images that come on a CD-ROM, complete with easy-to-use editing software. I got mail from lots of people who want to know whether PictureCD also does slides. Not yet, I’m told. For now, Kodak fans can try PhotoCD, a more expensive service that requires the user to supply his or her own editing software.

Here’s another solution that I should have mentioned: Seattle Filmworks www.seattlefilmworks.com) which provides a relatively inexpensive way to digitize your film. It too will put pictures on a disc and, even cooler, will post them on a private website whose address you can share with friends and family. Some might object to a mail-only (at least, outside the West Coast) operation–you have to send in your film, and the company returns it a week or so later. But the prices are competitive, and friends who’ve used the service swear by it. Best of all, Seattle Filmworks will digitize slide film–$15, plus shipping, for 36 exposures.

Finally, in the Oh-Bonehead-Me Department: in a column about “burning” your own CDs, I said you could compress CDs to the MP3 format (roughly a tenth the original size), then record the songs to a CD-R disc. But how would you play it? Answer: only on your computer. If you want to play MP3s in your CD player, you need to convert the tunes to .wav files–MusicMatch and Real.com’s software will do that–then burn them. The files, of course, will expand tenfold. So forget about squeezing 10 albums onto one CD.

You can read Josh’s past columns at timedigital.com Questions for Quittner? You can e-mail him at jquit@well.com