I'm BACK!!!

[Doug MacFarlane <madmac63@gmail.com>]

Well, about 4 years ago I had to give up Debian for professional reasons.  After
suffering through Red Hat, CentOS and Suse/SLED/SLES and the abominable package
management, I'm BACK!!!  

Boy did I miss you guys . . . 

So I ran the 4.0 r3 netinst, and just for giggles ran an apt-get update and
apt-get upgrade.  Nothing needed, but cool.

Looking at sources.list, it appears we now use distribution names, such as etch,
instead of stable and testing and unstable to name the hierarchies?  Is this
correct?

The Debian Installed didn't pickup the built-in sound card on my Dell XPS 200. 
No surprise there - neither did Suse/SLED.

I'm on a jihad to rid my life of Windows.  I converted my laptop some time ago,
and then deleted the windows vista partition about a month ago.  Now it's time
for my desktop.  I need some guidance:

1.  Who would like to help me with the Sound Card issue?  We can do it via email
offline from this list.  I've never been really good with loading modules and
drivers . . . 

2.  What to do about sync'ing with my Treo 750 (running windows mobile 6).  I'd
like for gmail/google calendar to be my authority, and use imap on my laptop and
desktop (evolution - any other suggestions?), but how do we deal with sync'ing,
especially contacts, to the Treo/WinMobile?

3.  Windows emulation.  My parents will visit in 2.5 weeks and will want Pretty
Good Solitaire because it has a game called Thirteen Packs in it that is an old
family favorite.

4.  I'm going to run VMware Workstation or Server - I use Dragon Naturally
Speaking to do speech to text conversion of meetings that I record on my Olympus
pocket recorder.  Unless you have a better idea . . . 

Thanks in advance - I'm so glad to be back.

Doug
madmac63@gmail.com