For over twenty years I have been a Microsoft fan. I first used MS-DOS (actually PC-DOS then later MS). I played with early release of Windows and was happy to install version 3.1 then 3.11, 2000 and now XP. I haven't done much with Vista yet and we won't talk about ME(ok that wasn't a shining moment). In the technology world there are plenty of people that don't like Microsoft. They always told me that Mac was better and easy. I have also hear a lot of hype about Linux. Linux is supposed to be the best thing out there and it's free or cheap.
A couple of years ago I thought I would load Linux on an old laptop I had. I had always heard that it ran great even on older equipment and that was one of the beautiful things about it. You didn't have to buy the latest expensive computer. So I figured why not. So I went looking at the specs for a graphical version of Linux and you know what...it wouldn't run on my computer. This was a computer that I was able to run Windows 2000 on so I was a little shocked that it wouldn't work.
So finally this last December I got a new computer and I had an old computer that had sufficient specs to run a version of Linux. I went looking around for the right version. I considered many but finally found OpenSUSE by Novell. Novell was the first network I installed so I figured that this was a good name to have behind the version I installed. It was a big company that would probably keep their product up to date. Bonus, I could download it for free.
So I got it downloaded and a little over a week ago I finally decided to install.
Installation, I didn't easily see the option to wipe out my drive and install a clean copy. It tried to shrink my existing Windows XP partition and install on the remaining space. I went ahead and said yes. The attempt to shrink failed and then I saw the option to wipe out the drive and do a fresh install. I did and the Linux was now installed on my drive. I couldn't get my wireless card to make a good connection so I decided to plug in to the network directly. That seemed to work.
So I'm off to a decent start but I wouldn't call the installation at all easy. I have installed numerous copies of Windows operating systems and even a few times installed Mac OS X. So I had enough experience to survive the ordeal. But now it's on my computer. On to bigger and better things... (to be continued)
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