| wIndependence Day Essay: Kicking the Windows Habit |
by Steven Christenson (July 11, 2002)
I didn't know it at the time, but our route to Linux desktops began when I purchased two Windows 2000 Professional Upgrades for the NT 4.0, Service Pack 6 machines my wife and I were running. Both machines had worked happily with my NT installs and service pack upgrades but it was immediately clear when I started the W2K upgrades that something had gone terribly wrong with what I had known as Windows.
True, my machine is unusual for a desktop: mismatched dual scsi drives and an ATAPI Zip for starters. Drivers for the scsi controller were not included with Windows 2000. The process of installing drivers I downloaded from Adaptec seemed to follow out its course, but with no perceptible result. Why else would it crash appearing to attempt an installation onto the empty ATAPI Zip drive? Cracking the case to disconnect the Zip (not where I wanted to go that day) got me reliably to an error the installation guide described as something like a 'random act of God or any of a whole bunch of stuff that would be really hard to discriminate'.
Well, if at first you don't succeed, move on to another machine. The manual for my wife's 2000 motherboard declared Windows 2000 compatibility, so that had to be better. Well, not at first when I saw a result much like my machine even after I pandered to the operating system's disdain for one board and two drivers. But if all else fails, do the smart thing and strip the machine to mobo and video and do a fresh upgrade install, right? And, indeed, that gave me a full install reliably booting into a system hang in all of the (was it really SIX now?) safe/risky/hopeful/dopey/sleepy/insane ways to boot! Thank goodness Microsoft produces operating systems for the non-technician.
Around this time, I realized that since I had a Linux web server and I wasn't experiencing a happy present or projecting a happy future with Windows, it might be a synergistic learning experience to have Linux on my desktop too. That was last August and the rest is history.
The installs were a joke. Since :Linux pretty much has to ship with drivers, it found my scsi drives, ATAPI Zip, net card, and video card. If I had accepted the lesser defaults instead of tweaking the monitor frequencies, my install would literally have been an "ENTER, ENTER, ENTER, Y, Y, Y" experience. Almost the same for my wife's machine. Except that, as a web developer, she wanted the capability to see how pages load on dial-up. And a Winmodem (whose fault is that?) was in the machine. A quick web search: LinModem driver? Yes. Installs. Yes. Works. Yes. End of story.
Apps? I had a copy of StarOffice for Windows installed for several years in an office where I was known as the problem solver. Probably four out of five mangled Word .docs people sent me could be opened and resaved in StarOffice. Best 70 meg secret utility I ever downloaded and a suite I've come to respect. I remember when Netscape was the lead browser, so I'm happy to see Mozilla come back strong. With secondary apps like xawtv to drive a WinTV card, RealVideo, xmms streaming audio, gPhoto for digital cameras, The GIMP graphics manipulator, Grip, X-CD-Roast and --- well, you have to cut the list off somewhere and just say, lame as it sounds, that there really is something available to do pretty much everything. If you don't play a lot of Windows games and can't see what Office offers you that StarOffice or OpenOffice don't, you would have to have a compelling reason not to benefit from the rapid development of the Linux world-wide community.
And I doubt I'll ever have to sell a failed Linux upgrade on ebay.
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Please note: The opinions expressed in this essay are those of the writer, not of the management or staff of DesktopLinux.com.
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