Another Linux Distribution

As I mentioned yesterday, I was looking for another Linux distribution to recommend to my Windows-centric friends and relations. I found it in PCLinuxOS.

PCLinuxOS (or PCLOS, as its aficionados generally call it) is built upon Mandrake 9.2 (and I apologize in advance to all you propeller-heads out there, but that’s about as technical as I’m gonna get. For the nitty-gritty, see the PCLOS homepage at http://www.pclinuxos.com/news.php Sorry, but I’m trying to gear this towards beginners).

As with most major distributions these days, you download the ISO image and burn it to CD. Once that’s done, leave the CD in its drive and reboot your computer. This way your computer will boot to the LiveCD that you just created. The idea behind the LiveCD is that you can load it up an have a chance to play with Linux and the programs with—without having to install it on your hard drive. That way if you decide it’s not for you, simply remove the LiveCD and reboot your computer. Your original Windows installation hasn’t been touched, and no files have been created on or removed from your system.

But if you decide you like it and want to use it, you still have a few options. You can simply continue running the LiveCD (which is pretty silly, because you won’t be able to save any work you create), you can install PCLOS and tell it to use your entire hard drive, or—and this is what I recommend for Linux beginners—you can install PCLOS as a dual-boot system. In plain English, this means you tell the installation program to only use some, not all, of your hard drive. Once you’ve installed it, whenever you boot your computer you’re given a choice to either use it as a Windows or a Linux system.

Dual-boot is also what I recommend if you have a lot of money invested in high-end Windows programs. While The GIMP is a very powerful graphics and photo-editing program, Adobe Photoshop still has it beat.

But why would anyone even consider Linux? Well, aside from the safety issues—for all practical purposes Linux is virus-free—it’s a great operating system for extending the life of older computers. Windows Vista is about to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, and a lot of users are going to be very disappointed when they learn that their 2-year-old or older computers won’t run it—the hardware’s simply not up to it.

Linux, on the other hand, will run on just about anything with a 386 processor or better. (Again, in plain English, this means that if you have a machine that’s still running, say, Windows 3.1, you can pretty much rest assured that it can handle PCLOS—and probably with better performance than you’re getting from Windows.

So if you’re considering Linux—either as an alternative to Windows, as a way of extending he life of an older computer, or because you just want to see what the fuss is all about—you can’t go wrong with PCLinuxOS.

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…