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MIGRATING TO MANDRAKE LINUX
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For a fair amount of time now, probably since the first Alt Party in fact,
maybe even before that time as well, I became rather intrigued by the name of
an operating system which, having started from lowly beginnings in Finland in
1991, was gradually gathering in importance and going from strength to strength
as the months and years went by, from 1991 to the present day.
The first time I ever used any version of Linux (I believe it was the Debian
distribution that they use at Fishpool), I was impressed. The sheer stability
reminded me of the good old TOS here on my Falcon and my ST, as that is
probably the nearest thing you can compare to when it comes down to OS
stability. LIke TOS, it is rocksolid and is only (from my experience) known to
crash as a result of something you've done personally as opposed to doing
nothing at all !
The next Alternative Party came and went, as did the third one in January of
2002. More use of Linux followed there, with the 'getting to know' phase just
about done on one of Q-Funk's computers in his rather nice flat in Espoo. I was
getting, over this time, gradually more and more cheesed off with Windows, one
of the perennial problems being that, for a commercial piece of software it was
very unstable, with programs often crashing for no reason and also not working
properly at times as well. This was especially annoying when I had left the PC
on to download something large from people on Kazaa or the other file-sharing
networks that have grown up in the last few years.
After viewing the various sites for the distributions of Linux, I eventually
settled on downloading a copy of Mandrake Linux, v8.2, from the Mandrake mirror
site that was based in London. Taking up 3 blank CD's (stuffing them totally
full of software it has to be said). I took the plunge during the month of May,
2002.
The first initial install went quite smoothly, with the installation program
fully and correctly detecting all hardware inside the machine. It took a little
while to install, bearing in mind the speed of the old pc, it was a 500mhz AMD
K6-2 - fortunately this was not for long.
I was fortunate enough to get ADSL installed here at home as well, like a lot
of other people on #atariscne now also have, with either ADSL or cable. While
that had worked pretty well with Windows, using it with Mandrake once
everything was configured correctly was a dream !
The difference on my PC in using Linux compared to Windows was pretty huge - no
unexplained crashing of the OS. Yes, Linux programs do also crash as well, but
at least when they do go they don't take the OS down with them, which is a good
thing. I was pleased to have banished the infamous 'Blue Screen of Death' that
I had seen with Windows forever !
The Mandrake distribution of Linux has some seriously excellent pieces of
software with it, I can list a very small amount here that I have regularly
started to use, but I feel like I am just scratching the surface so far.
Browsers such as Netscape and Opera are available, in fact, the only browser
not available for obvious reasons as a separate program is M$ Internet Explorer
! To be honest it isn't missed, as Mozilla and Opera do a lot more than IE does
and better as well. The same goes for other stuff that I have used so far.
Pan is the name of a Usenet newsreader package, and this is very powerful. I
don't think I ever saw a usenet package as good as this on Windows ! As well as
being very fast when it came to downloading, it also used the full power of the
DSL modem to squeeze an average download time of 56k per second. Whether you
are downloading CD's, pictures or whatever, this is much faster than Windows'
average speed, which on my system was around 45k per second. This gradually
dropped, whereas with Linux no drop occurs at all.
IRC is catered for with a full suite of programs, the one I use being called
KVIRC. It is not quite as functional as Mirc on Windows, but it does a good job
and the new version which I installed recently just about matches Mirc in
functionality.
In closing, I would seriously think it is worthwhile everyone who uses a PC and
is not using Linux yet to seriously consider swapping over. Microsoft certainly
have a bit of a fight on their hands right now with Linux already taking over
much of the server market, the fact that Linux is also very secure means that
interest is also being paid by the security services and the military.
There are a few distributions around, notably Red Hat (www.redhat.org), Debian
(www.debian.org), Slackware, Mandrake (www.mandrakelinux.com) along with a host
of others. Mandrake is certainly the easiest to install for me at least,
however it is worth viewing all sites of the distributions and making up your
own mind.
Good Luck !
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Felice.
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