Wanting to discover what this LINUX thing is all about, I’ve undertaken a learning project. I tried RedHat Linux 6.0 a couple of years ago by purchasing their boxed installation. The technical support, which was what I actually bought (since LINUX by all standards is open source and therefore freely obtainable) lasted for 30 days or so. I found that my WINmodem hardware was not compatible with anything but Windows (surprise) and thus my LINUX OS, as cool as it would be couldn’t go online. A computer these days that can’t connect to the internet is crippled. Later, I resurrected the idea thinking that I could network RedHat 6 using my LAN. The network card however, was too complicated to locate drivers for and not supported. I bailed again. These attempts were abandoned, the disc partitions removed and WINDOWS back in full control.

Now I have the idea to try again only this time, instead of a dual boot machine, I will use a dedicated platform. S’man has traded up and his old box will have new purpose.

Starting with a fresh space from scratch, the first event was to wipe the C drive (and that felt good). I used format.exe on a DOS boot floppy disc. After researching the various distributions that are out there (i.e. SuSe, Debian, Knoppix, etc…) I picked FEDORA. Without buying some books on LINUX my only recourse is to learn what I can from Internet websites and most of that info is hit or miss, schetchy. For instance, the procedure calls for downloading 3 huge files (called iso images) that neatly fit 3 CDs. That’s a 1.9 gigabyte transfer BTW. I found a mirror site (Duke edu) which was reasonably fast at ~580 KB/sec., luckily, which is reasonably good for a home cable connection. The errata that I read said to burn these downloads to CDs and install from those. This failed. Back to the Internet to find out why, I dug deeper to find that not just any cd burner would do. Sure, I could copy the files to CDs, but that it would take more $ophi$ticated $oftware to handle things.

Maybe I’m just being thrifty but I am loath to spend money for an operating system that is supposed to be free. After all, after you buy a big fat computer book ($49.95), an at-cost CD set for shipping ($9.95) vs CD burning shareware ($29.95) you could have bought the shrink wrapped Windows XP. I poked around and found a freeware CD utility (well hidden) that did the deed. I also need a boot floppy disc and this effort required finding the Image file and downloading a DOS utility called RawWrite to convert it. The first floppy that I made failed. The second one too. The third one, after trying newer media worked a bit longer but then bombed out. I downloaded a different image from another site thinking that I just had a bad file. Nope. I downloaded another RawWrite file from another site thinking that might be it. Turns out, after more discovery, that the utility doesn’t work right from a DOS window in windows. You have to run it from outside windows. Too bad there isn’t a LINUX cookbook to tell me this stuff. I should write one. Day ONE is over and I now have some install discs. Ready to begin!