Laurabelle's Linux

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Mandrake on a Dell Inspiron 8100

In July 2001 I was bitten by a bug which tells me I'm sick and tired of Microsoft, so I installed Linux ASAP. I was somewhat encouraged in this by Maggie's explorations, but I'd still do it even without her.

The first step was to decide on a distro - not such a simple task. There are oodles of different distros, including Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, Progeny Debian, SuSE, Caldera, and Halloween Linux (I saw this one in a bookstore in Hamburg). If you're really interested, Distrowatch.com compares lots of distributions, plus there's a basic evaluation of some main distros on Linuxnewbie.org.

I finally settled on Mandrake, since I had heard good things about it and liked the impression it gave on its website. I consider myself a very intelligent person, but there's a heck of a lot I don't know about Linux and computers in general, so I was reassured by the extent to which Mandrake seemed to try to make itself understandable to newbies, especially Windows users. I ordered the PowerPack 8.0 (three system CDs plus three of applications and two of source code) as well as O'Reilly's Running Linux and had them shipped to Texas, ready for my arrival.

To make a long story short, I was quite a newbie and ended up reinstalling unnecessarily several times when I broke something and didn't know how to fix it. However, I ended up okay in the end. I did have to buy a new soundcard since the original one I had wasn't compatible with Linux, but that was okay and not very expensive.

Linux very much fits how I like to deal with my computers. It's a bit frustrating to have to bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world (i.e. Microsoft), but that's the way the cookie crumbles, I guess. My world is Linux.

In the spring I bought a Dell laptop, and my page about installing Mandrake on it is here. I have recently tackled Debian, which is harder and not working quite as well. I'm taking a brief hiatus from that at the moment. I don't want to get too frustrated.

[1] I now know that it's possible to restore the master boot record without reinstalling, but I didn't then.

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