A Fedora Install
In my quest to prove my theory on running a completely free software based computer and after installing my new 120 GB hard drive, I installed the Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat — Linux Distribution. I chose it because it was Red Hat based… should be generally excepted (supported RPM’s for easy package install), and supposedly was easy and complete and comprised of all free software. After 2 separate attempts to install, I finally got it to boot. I ended up having to force the IP address (DHCP did not seem to work — possibly because it had already been assigned under Windows XP so the DHCP server might not have wanted to give it out again to the same IP physical address). I was successful in upgrading Python to the latest version 2.3.3 but I couldn’t get IDLE to run and my attempts at getting wxPython to install failed completely. The “easy to use” RPM method seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. I did get MozillaFirebird to install (which was just basically un-taring into a local directory).
As a whole the experience was: humbling (what little UNIX skills I might have had were already weak at best — 10 years now since I was in college), frustrating (nothing worked easily the first time and sometimes never), frightening (as I started having some trouble in my Windows environment after doing the install — even though it was on a separate HD). So for now, I have decided that I don’t need to be messing with Linux stuff. I think I saw that it could work for me (I used Open Office successfully as well as GIMP for image editing), but it seems like the way to go still is Windows 2000 or XP for an OS and then the possibility still exists to go pure open source from that point on or for many of the items.
I have also decided that if I were to try again, I will probably go with a separate machine altogether for the install rather than trying to do the dual boot type of thing. I don’t know how well Mac OS X hides the underlying UNIX stuff but I sure hope it is easier to understand and use than Linux. The Linux Gnome desktop is easy to use, but under it all, there isn’t a “Program Files” subdirectory and no easy way to install programs across all Linux distributions. There also doesn’t seem to be an easy way to remove softare once it has been installed. For instance, I thought it was rather silly to have both Python 2.2 and Python 2.3 installed at the same time, but I wasn’t completely sure about how to correctly install 2.2 since it was installed during the OS install. I sure hope Apple’s OS X stuff is easier to manage.