Word on the street is Linux is better than Windows. Linux is the next thing…from a support point of view Linux requires minimal maintenance, Linux is IT! Needless to say an adventurer like myself was rather curious about this mysterious Linux and wanted to learn more about its uh potential.
So I proceeded to download, burn, and install Linux. Which distro did I used might you ask? Well after much research (actually I just clicked on the first link that came up) I chose SUSE Linux 9.3 Professional from Novell. It was free and looked pretty good and being a complete novice in Unix I didn’t have much of a choice did I? With broadband connection I left the downloads to finish overnight and voila before you know it I had 5 iso images each taking up 600-700 MB of HD space. I got my burning program out (Nero) and proceeded to burn the images to CDs (When I burned I chose the burn as image instead of data disc, this is what the instructions said from Novell’s website).
My test PC already had Windows 2000 Professional and I figured it would repartition the HDs and proceed to overwrite everything which was OK with me. So I put the first CD in and it started the inspection and installation and then about 45 mins to an hour later it was done with the CD 5 and the installation. Now after the initial reboot (post installation) I received a pleasant surprise, the Windows 2000 Professional was still there fully intact complete with the logical drives. Very nice indeed and unexpected to say the least. It found all my hardware and configured it to near perfection except two minor and annoying things which we will get to soon enough.
Onto the bootup and GUI. SUSE booted up and it uses KDE (I have no idea what that means) and a desktop similar to Windows with My Computer, Mozilla Firefox, and Trash came up with a bunch of icons on the bottom and a task bar looking thing with more icons on it complete with the clock etc…reminds me of a MAC more than Windows. The interface was clean, crisp, sharp and looked easy to use.
The 2 annoying things that I have to mention are the KVM switch box issue with the mouse and the NIC. I use a industrial strength custom made Connect Pro Master IT 4 port KVM switch box with no power cord (draws the power from the mouse? and/or Keyboard?) and switch back and forth between my regular PC and this test one. As soon as Linux booted up to desktop my mouse behavior was erratic and in fact was completely useless. This is a logitech USB (with a PS/2 adapter) Mx510 optical mouse. The KVM switch when it was switched to the test PC and only WHEN BOOTED UP IN LINUX would have the corresponding light on the switch flicker. This problem is nonexistent in Windows 2000 on the same PC and needless to say the mouse works fine. I plugged in the mouse directly to the PC in the USB port and it found the mouse but I still can’t use it, in addition I plugged it into the PS/2 port and same result…no good and very frustrating to say the least. If any gurus here know how I can go about and resolve this issue your help is appreciated. I am going to reinstall the OS with the mouse plugged in directly instead of going throught the KVM switch and will update on the results.
The second issue was the NIC. It found the NIC, the drivers, and configured everything but I was unable to surf the net. I am not sure if I did something at initial setup but since I don’t know how to check for IPconfig, lol I didn’t know what to do. So I used the keyboard (very painful and slow lol) to explore around and went to YAST — System configuration? and opened up Network info or something. I checked it out and it was set to DHCP which was good, so I went through a bunch of other screens in Network configuration and then hit finish. So then I opened up Firefox and it worked…and I still don’t know what I did…lol. Oh I was also logged in as root when I was doing this…so maybe that had something to do with it? I checked out a few other things in YAST and hardware and the amount of info that Linux displays about your hardware is staggering. Windows has never done that. As soon as the mouse “issue” is uh resolved I definitely hope to continue my adventures in Linux and update this thread as necessary.
If there are any novice Linux users and I mean absolute beginners out there I hope this helps if you were curious about Linux. Linux looks very promising and is definitely worth a try. I also hope that this thread is continued as I plan on updating my adventures and posting questions or other tidbits and I encourage others to do the same.
Now onto to tackle the mouse problem…;)
