Republican Club of Davie/Cooper City, Broward County, Florida

Web Site Info

Republican Club of Davie/Cooper City

Email the web site administrator >>> WebMaster@DavieGOP.org

Tools and Stuff used to make the pages you're lookin' at:

Hardware:

HP Pavilion N5295 laptop hulk

850 MHz Intel Space Heater
256 Meg RAM (this now seems to be the bare minimum required to make Windows useful)
40 Gig hard drive (upgraded from factory 20 Gig)
CD-R/W and DVD (the DVD is the only really cool thing I like)
Polk Audio
blah, blah blah
Windoze ME (a pox on humanity) Just used for watching DVDs
SuSE Linux 8.1 Professional (used for everything else)

Amiga 2000 kermit

50 MHz 68060
128 Meg RAM (gross overkill, even 16 Meg is overkill)
2 Gig hard drive (about 50% used after 10 years of programs are installed on it.)
CD-Rom
Picasso II graphics card
blah, blah blah
Amiga OS 3.x, Workbench 3.9

Walmart-Without-OS Microtel 509 and later upgraded PC wolverine

2.5 GHz Amd Athlon
1 Gig RAM
120 Gig hard drive (about 25% filled after installing every program included in the SuSE distribution, plus my own many years of data) (There's 330 Gig on a separate network file server, too.)
8x DVD-ROM
52x CD-RW
Nvidia GeForce 5500
6 USB connectors
dual NIC
SuSE Linux 9.2 Professional

The laptop is my drag around development box where most web site changes and other software development occur. When it is plugged into the home network, the files are backed up to the main machine (wolverine). Currently, WinMe is used for nothing. I stopped dual-booting the laptop at the beginning of 2004. The PC software is listed below just for historical purposes, sine none of it is installed.

Software:

PC Stuff when WinMe was used
Notepad (yes, really)	99.5% of everything was just plain typed from a keyboard. No bloated FrontPage meta-symbol nonsense.
Visual C++	There are about five or so utilities I wrote to make maintaining the web pages easier. Everything has since been ported to Linux and no more maintenace has been done to the Windoze versions of the tools.
Ulead Cool 3D 3.0	Used for most of the 3D graphics text. Also good for making Windows crash and reboot the PC.
Ulead PhotoImpact 6.0	General image manipulation and also cropping, converting, and optimizing the less than ideal GIF files made by Cool 3D
SoftLogik's PageStream 4.0	Real DTP software. Did the club's membership form in PDF.
Some Commercial Font Collection	I have so many clip art and font CDs I really don't remember where the western style font (called AllNight) came from.

I also have about a dozen other graphics and web things on the PC that I haven't yet had the need to use, so they're not worthy of mention. Not much PC software is worthy of mention, anyway.

Amiga Stuff
CygnusEd Pro	Like notepad, only it lets you edit huge files, search and replace quickly, program complex macros... ok, maybe it's not much like Notepad
Imagine 5.x	Miscellaneous 3D work that hasn't appeared on the web site yet. I also have this on the PC, but it works better here.
Art Department Professional	Why do PC programs have to make it so difficult to do something simple precisely? Cropping to exact pixel dimensions for one.
SoftLogik's PageStream 4.0	Yeah, it's available for the Amiga, too. And it prints better to PostScript than the Windows version.
Personal Paint and Deluxe Paint IV	PC programs are pathetic when working with low-color/palette-based GIF images. Try to remove one stinkin, stray pixel in a full-blown, multi-layered, pressure-sensitive, photo-imaging paint mostrosity on the PC. I dare ya.

As of Feb 2003 everything formerly done on Windows is now done in GNU/Linux:

GNU/Linux (SuSE 9.2 Professional) Stuff
vim	I use vi at work. This is much nicer, including cool features such as syntax hiliting even for HTML.
OpenOffice.org	The spreadsheets and PDF forms on the web site are done using this full-featured, stable, and powerful office suite. It also runs on Windows if you're interested. When SoftLogik ports PageStream to Linux then I may buy that to do the desktop publishing parts of the web site.
ps2pdf	In some cases PDF files were converted from the original PostScript documents using this tool that comes with SuSE Linux.
GIMP	Most of the new photos on the News page were processed and converted using this. Very spiffy and fast. Very free, too.
KDevelop	The programs that generate web paqes and automate some of the mundane chores were developed with this very nice Integrated Development Environment.
Konqueror and Mozilla	The web pages are viewed with these programs to check for errors and judge consistency.

Why GNU/Linux?

I've been abused by Micro$oft products one too many times and I've become totally fed up and disgusted with Windows. As a programmer I am always discovering new reasons to be horrified by the bloated inefficiencies, waste, and inconsistent user and administration experience provided by Windows.

While I whole-heartedly recommend Norton SystemWorks for anyone who must use Windows, the fact is this program is not really an optional extra, since third-party tools such as this are REQUIRED to keep Windows running, virus-resistant, and reasonably secure. Ultimately, because Windows is such a woefully pathetic system, I was being held ransom by Symantec to keep my subscriptions updated to Norton Systemworks and AntiVirus each year. (I really do recommend Norton SystemWorks/AntiVirus. If you must use Windows I believe you must also have these programs to help preserve your sanity.)

So, I've transitioned everything I have including the web site maintenance to GNU/Linux. All my personal computing work has been moved over, too. The only things I need Windows for is watching DVDs on the laptop, since it looks like playing DVDs on Linux is only partly successful. Time will change this. The only things I miss in PC software is the ULead Cool 3D program for making 3D text, and some of the cool bells and whistles in PhotoImpact. Maybe ULead will release these for Linux someday.

Where Windows always requires the newest, fastest, most expensive hardware to run acceptably, GNU/Linux runs briskly on older PCs that the current versions of Windows can no longer be installed on. This means you may only need to buy a new PC for Linux every 10 years or so where Windows demands new hardware every three years. After installing GNU/Linux on my circa 2001 laptop everything is so much faster than WinME that it seems like I have a brand new computer.

Where the list of viruses, hacks, worms, and other security problems are numbered by the tens of thousands in Windows and Micro$oft expends the least effort it can get away with to repair problems months after they're discovered, there is an army of developers solving bugs and security problems in GNU/Linux, often before security alerts are issued. To date, I have read about only one deployment of a virus "in the wild" for Linux.

So, as of Feb 2003 I've been converted to GNU/Linux for a short time and my blood pressure is already lower.

Did I forget to mention the GNU/Linux is for all practical purposes, free?