Linux Day 6

Well, it's been interesting getting things working. Right now, I have Fedora 9 installed in a dual boot environment on my main Asus F8SA notebook and Ubuntu 8.04 on this old Dell C600 notebook. I must also mention that I am using a Verizon Broadband PC5750 card to access the internet. Yup, there's ways to get virtually everything working in Linux. Hardware is hardly an issue nowaday, unless you have some weird proprietary piece of hardware that no one else even uses. Frankly, I was surprised that the Linux community had gotten these Broadband Cards (PCMCIA, USB, Express) to even work but I'm doing it right now. Fedora on the Asus is running swimmingly, Bluetooth pretty much worked out of the box as well as wireless. Not so on my Dell running Ubuntu, but I think that has something to do with my wireless card (PCMCIA) and not having the drivers yet.

But there are some downsides so far, if you can call it that.
1) You NEED the Internet
2) You NEED to know HOW to search for answers.
3) You NEED patience to get things set up.

It will be interesting to see how much tweeking will be needed once everything is set up and working. But regardless, installing programs and such can be easy and hard at the same time. Most distributions include a sudo Add/Remove programs that let's you search their (meaning the distributions {Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc}) compatible program database. The downside to this is that new versions of programs don't automatically show up on these lists. For most things I don't see much a problem, but I have already run into an issue where I wanted the latest release, in this case the program Wine, and I couldn't get it via the Add/Remove Programs(Packages) system. Here's where the INTERNET and KNOWING HOW TO SEARCH comes into play. In a few minutes, I found answers on how to install the latest version of the programs directly from the source.

So far, I am liking what I am seeing coming out of the Linux scene. It's come a long way and it is solid. Would I recommend it to a client? Right now, no way. But I think after setting up these systems and seeing how much tweeking or troubleshooting is needed after the fact I might be persuaded to change my mind. So far my experience has been pretty positive. I'll keep you posted.

Alex

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The Great (Linux) Experiment

Well, I've been thinking about doing this for, well, forever. See if I can survive using Linux. Now, I can't (or can I?) realistically use this all the time as I have specific work situations that may prevent me from soley working from a linux derived platform, but we'll see. The following are my specific goals:

Use Linux exclusively for an extended period of time. Probably something around 30 days.
-Try to exhaust every possible avenue, to get things to work.
-Take into account extreme measures, before recommending certain procedures to pass on.
-Be able to setup a computer in such a way as to be able to recommend the install and software package to clients. <-the supreme goal, actually as it could potentially save LOTS of money.

Pretty simple.

I'm going to start out using Ubuntu 8 then on to Fedora 9 (if I'm that ambitious, that is.) Now I don't have internet at home, so we'll see how this goes, but I think it's past time I dive into this and get as acquainted with the Linux platform as I am with Windows. I'll try to post my progress every couple of days, Starting with the install and ending with my conclusions. We shall see how it goes.

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