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Chuck installs Linux while watching pigs fly

I never thought I'd be doing this.  As of 9:10am, Tuesday March 2, 2004, I have just started the installation of Linux on my IBM ThinkPad X20 laptop.  Egads!

FYI, for those who don't know me - I'm pretty much a dyed-in-the-wool Windows guy.  Back in early 90's I was the hard core Windows guy in the OS/2 and MacOS wars.  None of my friends where surprised when I started working for Microsoft in 1994.  Heck, the UK magazine “The Guardian“ profiled me in 1995 as a “company man“, spouting the party line - which I believed in now and then.

Because of the type of work I'm doing at Cisco involves a lot of *nix intergration with Active Directory, I figure I better get a test machine up and running.  The current project involves getting Samba services to use AD to authenicate clients.  On the surface, it should work, but it's been slow going asking the Samba admin to try this and that.  Better I have my own machine to try things out in.

Just picking a Linux distribution was interesting.  While I could have opted to download chore.  I'm installing Red Hat's Fedora Core 1.  While I could have downloaded any number for free distributions, I opted for the 3-CD set in the Red Hat Linux Bible book published by Wiley.  Figured I'd also get decent printed documentation as well.  The book is interesting, covers Linux well, but whenever mentioning Windows, it does so in a negative light.  Comments like “Unlike Windows, Linux ... was designed from the ground up to be a multiuser system.“  This statement may apply to Windows 9x, but not to Windows NT.  It's not fair to make selective comparions to older versions of the software.

So, far the installation is going well.  Fedora tries hard to look and feel like Windows.  There is a billboard screen with rotating panels of information - just like Windows has.  In fact, I wrote the text for the Windows 95 and 98 accessibility panels.  I'm installing everything, which includes a tremendous amount of software.

I must say that I'm excited about doing this.  I feel like I'm broading my scope, although at the same time, I feel like I'm going back to the days when I did Xenix installs in the late 1980's.

I'll blog more about this in the coming days.

4 Comments

  • It is good to be a well-rounded deverloper. But, now SCO's coming after you since they have your name ;-) Just kidding. I hope that you enjoy Linux...

  • D00d why not use Gentoo and compile everything from source? I had Gnome compiled after only four days.

  • So, did you use Virtual PC to load your Linux install under your Windows platform OS? :)

  • Chuck, if you select Mepis or Xandros networking is already configured when you start it up. They both make short work of the awful Samba configuation.



    Fedora is so new it may have bugs but the distros I mentioned above are Debian sourced and it is very stable. Mepis is very nice, free and one disk download you can run as a live CD until you decide it you wish to install it.



    Chuck, give me an email address where I can write you about something else.



    Stew

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