Detente

I bought my first computer in 1981, a few months before IBM launched its PC. My Kaypro ran the CP/M operating system. It served me well for a couple of years before I moved to a MS-DOS machine.

My third PC came with Windows 3.1, and that lasted me for a few more years. Then I moved to Windows 95, which was followed (at my job) by Windows NT and Windows 2000.

My next two systems—both of them laptops—came with Windows XP. With this incarnation, I finally started to think that Microsoft had finally got it right.

Somewhere along the line I started to experiment with Linux. I had an older Toshiba laptop I had bought second-hand, and it came with a copy of Windows 3.1. Upgrading was out of the question—it simply didn’t have the resources. So I decided to install Linux on it.

The only distribution I could find in stores was Red Hat. O, I could have downloaded Slackware, but my iternet connection in those days was slow dialup, and it would have taken days. So I shelled out the $35 or so and bought Red Hat, took it home, installed it, and played with it for a bit.

It was still more of a techie’s operating system, and I didn’t have the time or energy to fool around with. So I put Linux on the shelf for a few years.

Then in July of 2005, I decided to test the waters to check the state of Linux again. This time I had newer hardware and a DSL connection. My wife had just left me, so I had a lot of time on my hands. Enough time to spend a lot of time on the Internet researching Linux, reading reviews of various distributions. I also bought several Linux magazines, since these came with free CDs of various distributions.

I tried several of the major flavors, but none of them worked on either of my two machines. Oh, they worked sort of, but one of them didn’t detect my modem (not Linux’s fault—it was a Winmodem), another didn’t work with my network card. I even downloaded several flavors of BSD Unix, but none of them worked, either.

Then I came across Ubuntu Linux. I had never heard of it, but I figured I had nothing to lose. So I downloaded the ISO image, burned it to CD, and installed it on my Toshiba Satellite laptop.

Success! It worked perfectly. Detected all of my hardware—even my Hewlett-Packard 1315 All-in-One printer/copier/scanner! I used it for a couple of weeks, but wasn’t really happy with Gnome, the GUI Ubuntu uses. So I went back online and downloaded Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with KDE instead of Gnome.

I liked it so well, that I used it for almost a year and a half. I even installed it on my Compaq Presario laptop. No problem there, either. I was then, and still am, very pleased with Kubuntu.

But I’m the computer tech support guy for friends and family, and several of them had expressed an interest in possibly moving to Linux. They asked me for recommendations.

Although I had no problems with Ubuntu/Kubuntu, I decided to see if perhaps there weren’t an even better distribution specifically geared towards Windows users.

Once more it was back to the Internet, where I found an article entitled “PCLinuxOS – perfect halfway house.”

But more on that tomorrow…