[vox-tech] Xterm and terminal types

[Rod Roark]

Well just to bring some closure to this... I'm back from
converting my sister's clinic from Windows to Linux.  Some
points of interest:

1.  The vte experiment failed.  I built it with scoansi
support via the corresponding ./configure parameter, but
the resulting executable gave a totally trashed-up display,
worse than just using the default xterm emulation.  We
ended up using PowerTerm, a commercial terminal emulator of
which there are versions for both Windows and Linux.

2.  I decided to use Ubuntu Linux, which is based on Debian
but without the warts.  I.e., Ubuntu is easy to install,
easy to use, easy to keep up-to-date, has a huge selection
of available packages and includes the excellent Synaptic
GUI package manager.  I rejected Fedora Core 3 mainly due
to its role as a "test bed" distribution.  Mandrake 10.1 CE
was considered but rejected due to very poor upgradability.
Commercial versions of Mandrake and SuSE were considered,
but why pay for it when Ubuntu has it all?  Yoper would have
been a strong contender, but at the time www.yoper.com was
down and seemed to have an uncertain future (looks like
it's back up now).

3.  Resizing NTFS partitions is a major issue in these
conversions, unless you have no qualms about blowing away
Windows completely.  The "System Rescue CD" at
http://www.sysresccd.org/ includes a recent PartEd with
ntfsresize, which does a fine job of this whereas earlier
versions of these programs do not.  I think the latest
Knoppix (3.7) may also have recent enough versions but am
not totally sure (Knoppix 3.6 does not).

Overall things went very well.  They'll need some hand-
holding for the next week or two, and a couple of
machines still need to be able to boot windows for special
needs, but eventually those will be dealt with also.

-- Rod