I’ve been interested in Linux for some time now, even looked into switching this Sony VAIO that’s my main machine to it a year ago, but until now I never had the hardware or sufficient motivation. With the Sweet One getting her new toy Twiggy last month, though, I had the hardware in the form of her old box DeepPurple and the motivation came from, well, from somewhere unknown. But it was there.
So the three of us (me, DeepPurple, and the Sony) packed up yesterday afternoon and headed for the CABAL meeting in Menlo Park. The group, which yesterday consisted of our host Rick and the geek archetype Ross, turned out to be extremely generous, intelligent, and friendly. Reminded me a lot of the core members of the Clipper Club of NJ who I blame as much as anyone for my success in the software biz. Blame in a good way, as that’s where I met David Chazin, my first mentor.
My goals with Linux are pretty simple: become a competent user of the system. I don’t want to devolve into a rabid religious fanatic or develop a craving to compile my own custom kernel/personal distribution. Being able to know my way around the OS at the application and general configuration level seems good enough. Run a test server for my web application development work with PHP and MySQL instead of testing live on billsaysthis.com as I do now. Explore Open Office, Mozilla, KDE, and find an UltraEdit-like text editor–no vi for this guy!
Rick, Ross, and I spent a little while discussing this to consider which distro would be the best choice. Rick pulled out a CD album that was amazingly thick with a couple of dozen different choices! garrett had recommended Mandrake, so that was a strong possibility. Red Hat was also considered because it seems to have the biggest penetration in corporations. In the end, though, we decided on Knoppix, a very interesting variant out of Germany.
We chose Knoppix for two main reasons plus one consideration. First, it’s based on Debian–that’s Rick’s general choice and he’ll be one of my primary sources of support–which has a lot of developers and therefore strong application coverage plus probably the best install and update mechanism in apt-get. Second, Knoppix builds on top of Debian extensive hardware detection and hardware driver support plus the ability to run a really complete desktop right off the CD (by complete desktop I mean a large selection of applications, development tools, and utilities). The consideration was that installing a different distro next week or next month, to try it out, is very easy now that the machine is set up with a Linux.
Initially we used the run from CD capability to test the machine. DeepPurple passed the test easily and I could see, as it booted Knoppix, the various bits of hardware being detected. The OS has a utility to install itself to a machine while running, so that was step two, and Knoppix does this with just a few configuration questions. Creating a filesystem (we went with ext3, a journaliing type) was next, wiping out the Windows partitions–no looking back now! A few checks to ensure things were in order and we rebooted, bringing the box up under it’s own power. Sort of felt like watching a baby take her first few tentative stabs at standing without support.
Voila! After logging in, the KDE desktop came up and at first, everything seemed to work just fine. Ross and I brought up Konquerer and a few utilities. Then I opened Mozilla and tried to load this site. Oops, the machine couldn’t find it! Rick to the rescue–for some reason Knoppix had not detected the Ethernet card and didn’t install the DHCP client. A little investigation and some comparisons with his wife Deirdre’s iBook, though, and we found the necessary 8139too driver. An apt-get and some judicious conf editing was all the effort needed to fix that.
It was getting a little late by this point and my stomach was beginning to growl, so I said my goodbyes, packed up, and headed home to TS1 and a delicious steak dinner. Tomorrow I’ll get DeepPurple hooked into the network here and see what fun I can have. Big shout out to Rick and Ross for all their help!
BillSaysThis 