Taming The Dragon

When Tommy first gave me the Dragon Linux cd he said "good luck I couldn't get it working". With those awesome images from the Enlightenment desktop still fresh in my mind I had to tame this beast called Linux and get it running on my computer. At the time this was an HP Pavilion running Windows 98. My internet was dialup using AOL. This version of Linux was unique as you did not actually install it. You did have to configure it but the installation was simply copying it to your C: Drive in a folder. Then there was a batch file in Windows that actually launched you into Dragon somehow. Those parts are a little foggy as this was quite some time ago. The hard part was configuring your hardware. I had to manually look up everything from the horizontal and vertical refresh rates of my monitor to the exact model of video card, sound card, etc. Most Winmodems at the time would not work at all. This was a fairly complex procedure and I normally had to go through the config several times before I got one that would actually boot me into a graphic user interface or GUI.

This version of Linux was running KDE as the desktop environment. At that time it came with these cool themes. There was one that had a desktop background of ice and glaciers and your windows actually had ice around them. There were only a few themes but they looked really cool. Being the first adventure into Linux I did not get to see or use the Enlightenment Window Manager at this time. That would come later when I began to use Mandrake.

The internet at that time was a huge problem for me in Linux. First of all my WinModems did not work at all. I had to get one of the expensive $100 US Robotics External Modems. Then I found out that there was no way to use my AOL connection. I had to end up canceling the AOL Service and going with a local dial up service that only provided a phone number , user name and password. Once I had all that in place I was able to go online with my Linux System.

Fast forward now to today. Now Linux is super easy. Get any of the main distro's like Ubuntu, Mandriva, Mint, etc. and you can usually be up and running in 20 minutes. No need to look up all your hardware or configure x from scratch now. Linux looks at your pc and puts in all the drivers except occasionally you will get prompted about a proprietary video driver but that is more of a legal issue. Internet for the most part is no longer dial up so I just plug in my network (ethernet) cable and go.

You can even get versions of Linux that run right from a cd , dvd, or flash drive without you having to install it to your hard drive. How cool is that? Check out distributions such as Puppy Linux or Knoppix for something cool like this. When using Puppy you can actually save a file to your hard drive or flash drive so you keep all your settings.

Now you might think that with all this Linux talk I am typing all this out on a computer running Linux. You would be wrong. I actually just recently picked up my first Mac on ebay. You can find many of these old iBooks on ebay now for under $200. I grabbed one up and it works great. If you have never tried a Mac this is one way to get your hands on one.