YouDesigns

Sometime around 1996 I started fiddling with Linux. In order to install my Slackware one-point-something I needed to download countless 1.4 diskette images, burn them and proceed to spend most of the night next to my PC, accepting prompts for installing such or such package and switching diskettes on command.

When all this was done, it came the never-ending chore of finding, compiling and installing the drivers for my devices. My hardware was rather far from mainstream; computing was back then not my work, but my hobby; the main pc - an IBM PS/2, with a 486SX33 processor an a glorious 4 megs of memory - was my son's, so I was limited to the spoils of my garage sale purchases and my scavenging of the free bins in the computer stores.

I owned a number of XTs, 286s and finally this 386 I could use for Linux. It had 2 megs of memory, a plain VGA card and a RLL hard drive of 35 megs that weighted 2 tons and took up most of the case.

And a 9600 modem… Configuring it and the script to dial-up my connection was the single biggest chore in the process. Once I even got banned from my ISP because my letters were leaving the server addressed as "root" from their domain. They never even told me about it - they just cut me off; I had to phone them and find out. They are out of business now; go figure...

Of course I learned by running myself smack against the wall over and over again - not because I was unwilling to stop and ask for directions, but because I somehow enjoyed learning that way. I learned much about computers and computing from those early installations. I'd never do it another way.

Throughout the years I kept informed about the developments in the Linux world. Most of the time I had one system or another going - I abandoned slack when they jumped like 3 numbers at once in their nomenclature -not for that reason, though - I poked RedHat but never got to like it, flirted with Debian and settled finally with Suse.

The problem was, I always depended in very specific Windows apps to do my job, and so Linux remained confined to the playground. And I don't do games, so there is very little to do in a PC when you cannot work or play in it. So I tested distros, re-installed, configured desktops to my taste, setup servers ... in general, I tinkered.

Knoppix was the last step down: I didn't even needed to install anymore; I just booted from a CD an voila! - I had a system going. Linux became a file saver, pc restore utility for me, and no more.

But now my new PC was ready. A monstrosity of power, speed and memory for someone like me, that has always lived a bit on the trailing tail of technology. An AMD64 dual core processor. 2 gigs of DDR2 memory, 512 of video memory in a PCI express card! - A long way to come from my XTs, eh?

Here was a dilemma. I could install Win XP - a 32 bits home edition I own; I can spend a lot of money in getting a copy of XP64 or I can get me a copy of Vista. I downloaded and tested trial versions of these last two and the performance was poor. In particular Vista, seemed to use all the extra processing room and memory I gained by upgrading just to be able to get more toys in my desktop.

To make it even worse my windows applications I so needed to work were buggy or downright incompatible with the new platforms. Time to give good ole' Linux a new test ride...

I got hold of a copy of Kubuntu; a single DVD installation. In about 25 minutes I was all installed and ready to go. All my peripherals detected in the process and handily connected to the LAN.

My PC is faster and more solid than it ever was with any Windows flavour and my system resources are available TO ME, to use them and dispose of them as I see fit. No more a slave to anonymous dlls or unidentified services (svchost.exe, anyone?). If a service is running there is because I wanted it there.

Sure, I keep my older box with XP home, because if a client uses FrontPage extensions I *need* to be able to upload via FrontPage, or a couple of other such cases; but the bulk of my work it is now proudly being done in an ideologically coherent open source environment!

I’ll keep you up to date.