Newbie decided he likes Linux

[Farmer Mike]

I think I'm one of the people Kevin Kleinsmith wrote about in his excellent article Taking the Linux Plunge in Misc. I had been using Windows 98SE on my 7 year old desktop(Compaq Presario 5284), and Windows ME on my 6 year old laptop(HP Xh485). I decided to keep these systems going as long as possible, I can't afford to buy new systems every few years as they do in the Windows world, and these computers worked well enough for my purposes.

In June the hard drive on my desktop failed. I put a new hard drive in it, but didn't see the sense in reinstalling an unsupported OS, and after many annoyances with Windows, was ready to try something else. I wound up installing a copy of Red Hat 9 I had to see if it would work. (I explored Linux a few years ago but at the time didn't know enough about computers to make a go of it.) It worked well, so I went out and got Fedora Core 5 to put on it for a working system.

Then the Windows installation on my laptop became unstable with age and use, and HP had given me unuseable restore disks with it. So this morning after work, having saved off my files earlier, I installed open SUSE 10.1 on it. I'd had some trouble over the past couple of weeks, different distributions would come to a halt before fully loading. I found that "Installation - disable local APIC" worked. Then I found the display's refresh rate by trial and error and I'm good to go.

I like Linux - it's inexpensive, it works well, and I'm impressed by the Linux culture. It seems like people are very helpful, and one glaring difference from Windows, it seems like they're enjoying themselves. When I do buy or build a new Computer system, it will be a Linux box.

One of the other people at work is still running Windows ME, and asked about FC5 when he saw my copy of The Linux Bible. Later this week when we're both at work, I'm going to show him Linux from a live cd. He may change over to Linux too.
Mike

[Juan Pablo]

Good Story!

This is how most people discover Linux. Well, I discovered it because I got tired of being treated like a stupid in every webpage I wanted to download a program when using Windows.
e.g Download the program to your desktop and double click it ... Duh! And they explain how to click in each next button!

[fingal]

Hello Mike

I enjoyed your story. It's true, this is actually fun most of the time!

[easuter]

welcome to linux man! you can finaly start enjoying a real operating system