Linux at last...

Most of my friends know I've been tinkering with different "distros" for quite a few years now. I have used different versions of Red Hat and SuSE in dual-boot setups and installed a few others that didn't stay on my computer for more than a day.

On Saturday my XP box was still nagging me about being low on disk space. It was down to about 200 MB and I had spent hours combing through programs I could remove to free up space -- every session I manage to clean up 50 or 60 megs but it still doesn't keep XP happy, it still nags with the pop-up warnings.

Anyway, Linux has been making leaps and bounds the last couple of years. Red Hat is going strong with their enterprise Linux products, Novell bought SuSE, a German company responsible for the second oldest Linux distribution, and Ubuntu, the new Debian-based sytem, has gained wide acceptance recently. So I decided to take the plunge. No more dual-booting, no more tinkering -- this is for real. I downloaded the latest free version of SuSE Linux 10, burned the CDs, and installed it on my now-former-XP box.

I knew the hardware detection would be a lot better than in the past when I'd played around with it. To my absolute suprise SuSE recognized every peice of hardware in my PC including the wireless network adapter and my TV capture card. Yeah! My biggest hesitation had been over compatibility and the fear I wouldn't be able to watch TV on my computer.

I'm with Novell on their predictions. I think within another year, maybe two, Linux will be easy enough to install and use that it will become much more common-place than in the past. Experts have been arguing over it's adoption for a long time. I think the time is nearly here.

Read Novell still running Windows on ZDNet. It won't be for much longer.