[Coco] Recommendations & Assistance

[Frank Swygert]

Date: Wed, 29 May 2013 16:17:52 -0700
From: Ed Orbea<ed.orbea at gmail.com>

My Wndows XP system suffered the blue-screen-o-death.

I used it for a DW3 / DW4 Server
I used VCC and the Winimage tool to create .dsk files that we ultimately
used on a real CoCo3
In your opinions, do I (a) re-install WIndows XP (b) an older version of
Windows (i.e. 98) or (c) switch or a Linux distro?
If I switch to Linux, what is the consensus regarding the distro
(ubuntu, mint, suse, etc.)?
================================================

The only fix in most cases is to reinstall Windows -- or another OS. If you're going to try Linux I recommend Mint. It's Ubuntu based, but has all the drivers and codecs (even proprietary but free to use ones) needed. It's the most "install and go" Linux distro available. If you have a dual core processor go wit the latest distro. If you have an older single core machine I'd stick with Mint 9. I'm using the latest on my home machine but use 9 on my shop computer, which is a 3.0 GHz P4, 800 MHz FSB, 1GB ram (older Sony Vaio). I think I'm using Mint 7 on my P3 laptop. You can't tell much difference in the Mint versions (I use MATE on my latest version instead of the Gnome shell -- MATE is an extension of the older shell/desktop, the new one is more Windows 7 ish and I don't like it -- Mint gives you the option of using either easily). The older Ubuntu kernels just work better with older processors. Mint 12 will load and run on the Vaio, but is noticeably slower.

-- 
Frank Swygert
Editor - American Motors Cars Magazine
www.amc-mag.com