Yeah, who knows. Sadly, I don’t assume any machine will be durable anymore… engineered obsolecence and all that. *sigh*

Thanks for the links… I’ll get to them soonish. And again, thanks for the added info on VirtualBox. I’ll try it out and it may well be the solution my girlfriend has been looking for vis a vis switching to Linux while in Korea…

There are other programs that do this, like VMware and QEMU, but I haven’t tried them out.

The Mono and .NET issue would take a lot of text to explain properly, so I’ll just give you some links. One thing, though – the leader of Mono development is Miquel de Icaza, who also leads the Gnome project. What this means is that Mono is going to be integrated into Gnome whatever anyone else thinks about it.

If you wanted to give up Gnome, you could use KDE or Xfce, Ratpoison, or (the best) Ion3.

I’m sure that’s all the tedium you need for one comment. Here’re the links:

Good overview, if old (there’s been no demise of Mono) -

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/tech/0EC99FBB73788FF1CC25723E0007ADDA

The GNU perspective -

http://dotgnu.org/danger.html

Crazed advocacy -

http://boycottnovell.com/2008/03/16/novell-mono-dot-net-internet/

No, the suggestions are quite welcome. I’ve been thinking about using VirtualBox, actually… does it fool the Korean websites into playing nice? That’s the main reason I want Windows anyway — that, and because a few formatting issues in the Linux word processors make it necessary to do edit in word before emailing electronic submissions.

As for the keycodes, I remapped them using a script (nice and not permanent) but I don’t like it exactly… for some reason I want the up arrow and shift switched, but not the down arrow and the right arrow. (I can’t see how it makes sense to anyone to set it up that way, but anyhow.) Thanks for the pointers, it’d like what I’d seen elsewhere. Now if only I could find a spare moment…

As for Mono — which I’d not heard about till you mentioned it — would it cripple Mono if at some point all the Microsoft compatibility were to be abandoned?

If license fees start getting charged for using Gnome, lots of people (especially the ones most into development) will move on to something else, won’t they? Especially if those fees are going where I think they’d be going. I know I’d be willing to move on, assuming something usable was available.

$ man xmodmap

it’s pretty straightforward

also, xev will help you get keycodes

…or rely on the Gnome utility, which I know nothing about

VirtualBox is a lot nicer than dual-boot (Win. programs can work from the Linux desktop, for example). You don’t even need a separate partition. See here:

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Totally different from Wine, and much more reliable.

And since the subject is Linux, there needs to be some snarky advocacy. Here’s mine – those who are very concerned about Open Source need to be aware of the Mono project, it’s increasing integration into Gnome, and how Mono relates to Microsoft’s .NET framework. If Gnome users find themselves paying license fees in the future, it’s going to be because of Mono (though Mono itself is neat).

There, that’s my bit.