Hello world Linux
I’ve been threatening to do this for some time – but now, I finally took the plunge. I have a little net-book that’s a perfect candidate for experiments. I started this afternoon and now a few hours (took me 6 hours before I was fully online), I’m reporting to you live from my new Linux Mint 9 (main)!
First things first – I had to choose a distro (my vocabulary has really expanded today). It had to be something light-weight – and after reading through reviews… trying to decipher which meant what… I closed my hand and pick the one, I hit first with the mouse… Then came the download, and while that was happily churning away – I read up on the user guide for Linux Mint. Turns out, the default is to install it on a DVD/CD… which is a no-go on this netbook…
With some trepidation – I google’d for way to circumvent this. First link – first win! There was a step-by-step tutorial… Download this program… select the downloaded distro (it could actually download it if I hadn’t already started that) – and point at the USB to serve as ‘Live’-USB.
Now, booting from the USB worked perfectly (and is a really nice feature by-the-way). I had read the user guide – so I went ahead and tried to install it on the harddrive – since boot-time was not that good from USB (Linux is fast… but not that fast). First problem – partitioning didn’t show all the possibilities (I wanted a side-by-side installation). Google to the rescue – turns out there is a bug if there are problems with the harddrive – reboot to windows and did a chkdsk – back to install. Now everything went perfect with the install – except for one little detail… WiFi…
Uhoh – I knew that is one of the major pain-points in Linux – WiFi and printers has historically been pains when installing Linux judging from the comments in various forums. So, I started approaching the problem like I would with Windows… looking for a driver download… this is not how you do it in Linux… Instead of using hours trying to find a workaround – I should have picked up that Ethernet cable and plugged directly into the wireless router -> Gone to ‘Hardware drivers’ -> Selected the proprietary driver -> clicked ‘Activate’… Okay, that was an eye-opener as to how far Linux has come on the desktop.
If I had been a little bit more informed – installing Linux Mint would have been a cinch and I would have been installed in under 2 hours including downloading for an hour. But still – I am nowhere near installed on a Windows box in 6 hours… Here, I had to restart once (going form USB install to Harddrive install) – and all my usual programs are here by default (sans Visual Studio for obvious reasons). Hello Firefox, VLC, OpenOffice… and things are really snappy with limited resources… And updating to latest versions on everything with one click… that’s just awesome!
So, first try would qualify for a near-total success! Will be fun to see how it goes with day-to-day using it.