Some background information for those who don’t know. Linux is an alternative operating system to Windows. It runs all your hardware to do the things you want it to do. Getting it to run has always been a pain in the ass for me.

My initial stab at it was when I was got my first laptop. It was a 166MHz Pentium core (with MMX, like that makes any difference, heh) processor and a miniscule 1.44GB hard disk (in contrast to nearly 280GB of HD space available to me now). I tried to install RedHat Linux (as it was known back then) on my laptop (version 7.0 I think) and halfway through the install process I just gave up. I didn’t know anything about hardware architecture back then, so asking me what my monitor refresh rate was or whether it belonged to the x86 architecture tree of processors I had no idea really!

Over the years, I’ve tried Linux a couple of times. They mainly failed because something would fail to initialise, rendering my computer quite unusable. I only had Redhat Linux (version 9.0) installed for one semester when I needed to do Unix based scripting and server applications. Heh, it was pretty useless to me after that cause Linux doesn’t even use the same filing system as windows (and I couldn’t figure out how to mount a FAT32 partition back then, I still don’t) and all my multimedia files were inaccessible.

Fast forward to now, I’m trying a new branch of Linux again. This time I’m playing with Gentoo Linux, which is fairly efficient as you have to install everything from scratch. They have a pretty comprehensible manual online and since I bought my KVM switch a few days ago, it’s easier to install Linux through ONE set of keyboard and mouse. Plus the fact that I have more than one PC these days, I can boldly do whatever I wish with my other computer. Last time, I had to think for 10 seconds before pressing the Enter button to commit a process to work, which could irrevocably destroy all the data on my comp.

One thing I must point out about Linux. It’s quite unforgiving at times. If you screw up one variable, you can make your whole system unbootable. If you don’t know how to fix it, the easiest way is to go through the tedious task of going through the whole installation process again in the hopes that whatever scripts are performed overwrite the error you made.

Writing this post now while my Linux installation continues unpacking its Tarballs (or zip files for Windows users). Will see if I can get a nice looking KDE interface (basically one of the GUI modules for Linux) and actually be able to let my mouse do something useful.

Back to command prompts and hair pulling!

* Crap, looks like I have to recompile the lousy kernel tonight. Don’t know what this thing has against Geforce cards.

** Update – Apparently the script pointing to a non existent graphic file garbled my entire screen. Have X Windows running and KDE installed. Heh, don’t know if it will boot up with those settings the next time round though.