Koha on the HP 6000

This morning i decided as an experiment to change the old windows xp laptop, an hp 6000 into a dual-boot machine with one half being linux running the koha library system. The laptop sits in the corner unused 90% of the time anyway. I no longer have any interest in windows, xp is useful occasionally for legacy applications but using vista or vista 2, er windows 7 would be huge steps backward in functionality and usability from my macpro labtop or the ubunutu laptop.

The first step was to divide the hard drive into a windows NTFS partition and an Linux ext3 partition. There are commercial programs to do this, i used Partition Magic for years and found it a good, reliable application but it's not installed and the version i own is old. So we download a bootable Gparted cd image and boot it from the optical drive.

The Gparted live CD contains a ultra minimal Linux environment, complete with a sparse GUI. The gparted tool runs and shows you the existing hard drive(s) and their partitions. The first step is to shrink the existing NTFS partition to 60 gig. Plenty of space for XP as I'm not likely to add any new windows apps. Are there new windows apps? Name a 'killer' application that you would purchase windows for. No one buys a OS to run an OS, it's a platform to run applications that you use to do things. The OS is an enabler that should just work. I can't think of anything i want to run on windows besides the occasional use of Microsoft office for work.

Anything i used to do on windows i now do in Linux, at a lot less cost. I bought DOS 2.2, 3.0, 4, 5, 6.22 etc and Windows 2.11, 3.0, 3.11, 95,98,2000, xp, vista and many, many applications over the years. The only software purchases i've done lately are OSX 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 that came with various macs, and iLife/iWork that did not (and some small online purchases from app store, and web sites like Tversity).

So now about 90% of the things i do are done in open source applications or on a mac. The last reason for using windows is that workplaces are still windows-centric. One would think Microsoft would concentrate on making those things work better (think Sharepoint) instead of trying to dominate the 'youth market' with zune, xin?, xbox etc. It's like your dad trying to be cool by growing a ponytail and wearing a Hawaiian shirt...let's face it, Windows is your Dad's operating system and Microsoft is the Dad 'n Lad brand of OS, and no stupid marketing campaign can change that fact so Microsoft - stop trying to be cool and accept you are a middle aged geezer in a white shirt and tie who works in big government and industry.

Anyway, now that i think about it why do i need a windows laptop anyway? The machine is too slow to run Vista (1.8 ghz dual core, 2 gig of ram) acceptably and there is no windows programs i really need on a laptop. So we decide to go the whole hog and boot up with the Koha Live CD and install, using the entire 120gig hd and wiping out Windows. Bye bye. We are now down to one lonely windows desktop which will probably go this year.

The install goes fine, and it picks up the wired connection and offers to install the proprietary drivers for the broadcom wireless and nvidia graphics. Next we want to upgrade from 9 to 10.4 but that does a fair bit of downloading so to save the internet bills we might hump the machine to school tomorrow. This would give us a fairly decent linux box with a fully functioning version of Koha. Sweet. There are a ton of apps on the dual xeon box so we want those too! But for now we grab the ubuntu-resticted-extras from the synaptic package manager. At a download rate of 1003kb/sec this does not take long.