Freedom
Posted on 12. Jul, 2006 by Krishnan in Computers
To view my Linux desktop of last night, click on the image below.
After years of trial and error, my Home PC can now be Windows free.
Linux hit me first with Knoppix 3.0. The on-the fly boot CD left me gasping for speech. I’ve tried flavor after flavour, version after version and could never get it all up and running for years.
I hopped from Knoppix 3.0, Knoppix 4.0, PCQLinux2004, PCQLinux2005, Fedora Core 4 each time with varying degrees of success but, the OS somehow didnt seem to offer me every thing I wanted.
Finally, SuSE Linux 10.1 has shown me the way
The time I spent on getting this right was enormous. The media download was a whopping 3.2 GB and took me a week. I had to burn a few extra CD because I kept misplacing them then there were some checksum errors.
It took me 3 trials to get me the reiserfs partioning right without losing data on my NTFS and FAT32 partitions. There were 4 more futile attempts where in tried to install KDE and GNOME and a lot many other packages before I decided to settle for the default KDE install. When many packages are selected, the installation time of each package increases significantly as the set-up progresses. I was so fed up, that I’d even started to download all the 14 CDs of Debian Linux assuming that I’ll never get SuSE working.
I located the bonus CD at http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-10.1/non-oss/SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-Addon-Biarch.iso and this gave me the basics I needed
I was able to connect to the internet using Linux for the first time a couple of hours ago. In order to do that I had to do the following through YaST:
1. Configure the network card for DHCP
2. Configure DHCP server
3. Configure HTTP server
4. Configure DNS server
In each case, the trick is to bypass the firewall while configuring the service. I was quite pleased with myself that I did everything on my own. Finally, I have an OS which can cover all my needs. Needless to say, I picked up two cool apps (kopete and ksnapshot) right away.
This whole blog is being made on Linux, though I’m sure no one is going to be able to tell the difference. After completing the present line-up of windows downloads, I’ll shift to Linux. Windows XP has been around a long long time now and till Vista is out there is perhaps nothing new to learn on the Microsoft OS front. Meanwhile, I intend to spend more time on open source and if possible develop it.
The Penguin looks beautiful, indeed!
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