oti0sus

It's been almost a month since the first (and last) time I mentioned Linux. It's time for an update. But before I begin, a note on my hardware:
old pentium 3 with 64MB RAM and old BIOS
20 gig master HDD (system files)
60 gig slave HDD (data files)
old Crystal Codec sound card
new Nvidia Geforce 4 MX440SE video card
There is other stuff too, but not really relevant to this post.

About a month ago I had Windows XP installed and was using the Knoppix 3.6 Live CD. I was happy with Linux and wanted to install it for real. Via Bittorrent, I downloaded the 3 CD Mandrakelinux 10.1. I installed it over Windows XP on the C: drive. The installation worked well, but there was no sound. The system didn't recognize my sound card. I could still use the Knoppix 3.6 Live CD - the sound worked fine on that. I decided to install the Knoppix 3.6 over the Mandrakelinux.

I found that I could use the installed Knoppix well, and I spent a week reading through various documentation, notably Debian's intro to Linux. Using Linux is a little more demanding than Windows. You'll notice that as soon as you see that plugins don't necessarily plug themselves in. To some extent you have to be prepared to open up the hood and get your hands dirty. So I went through the manual above and familiarized myself with the Linux command line. I have used MS DOS before Windows came out and UNIX for a little while at school so it was not so alien. However, Knoppix is not really meant for installation on HDD and I noticed as I worked through the tutorial that discrepencies were arising between the manual and my own output. When I came to the point of installing new software, namely a Bittorrent client, I found that there were errors. I also noticed that the Open Office word processor, which worked so nicely from the Live CD, was in German only, and there didn't appear to be any way to change it back to English.

So I re-installed the soundless Mandrakelinux 10.1. I was able to install a Bittorrent client easily via the RPM packages. Using these packages is just about as easy as Windows. With the Bittorrent up and working, I chose a few more Linux distributions to download and burn: Mepis2004.04, and Suse 9.1. Mepis was another Live CD, designed to run with or without installation. But like Mandrakelinux, the sound didn't work. I then installed Suse 9.1 and was relieved to see that everything was (and still is) fine. Suse incidentally is owned by Novell, briefly owners of Wordperfect, and in the news these days. Wordperfect is an old favourite of mine and still in use on a rusty old IBM Thinkpad 510cs laptop. In fact it's the only thing that's still in use on that machine.