You may remember a few days ago, when certain individuals associated with a certain large corporation were claiming, simultaneously, that a certain hardy band of brothers and sisters were infringing on their copyrights, and also didn't exist.
Hard to wrap your mind around, I know, but if you go back even a bit further, you may remember said huge mega-corp signing a deal to offer coupons of another company's distribution of said work of the same hard-working and sharing band of brothers and sisters. And now the Shift key has flown off the keyboard.
The reason for this is that the coupons have no expiration date, and that any work released by the same band of etc.. will now be indemnified from FUD, scary **AA tactics, and viable lawsuits. OK, maybe not the FUD. But avoiding the latter two is nice. Details and lawyer-speak here.
Not that anyone took those claims seriously, anyway. But how delicious the irony that the corporation that tried to split Linux may eventually split itself, unlike the Justice Department, which was going to do just that in 2000.
I have something to confess. I really love old computer games. If it requires a Radeon X3trillion to run, not so much. But old AD&D games, old games from Ambrosia, Inc. (pre-system 9), spiderweb software, and the like, I really enjoy.
So much so that I recently re-installed OS X Tiger on a pre-Intel Powerbook so that I could play one. It seems that I had forgotten to install the drivers for System 9 when I last re-installed, and couldn't use the classic layer.
After the interminable hunt for the proper install disks, I finally got going, but it did take awhile, as the install disks were for system 10.4(.0) and the current state of Tiger is 10.4.9. No need to hunt for drivers, etc., but all the downloading updates, filling out info boxes, and it was a tad bit longer than two and half hours before I could run that System 8 game (Barrack) in classic mode (i.e., emulation).
The last Windows XP re-install? Oy. Apart from having to install all the spybot/antivirus/anti-malware software before I even considered going online to get SP1, and then updating them all and subsequently getting SP2 (all through IE, yuck!), well, by the time I was finished it was close on four hours plus.
So I kind of understand why some folks say 'I have to think this through', or 'I'm getting fired up/psyched up to do this'; but even for the toughest install I have yet to do (OpenSuse), it took little more than an hour. The fastest? Twenty-seven minutes (I actually timed it. How sad is that?). From inserting the install disk to having a fully online updated version of the system and surfing the web. Twenty. Seven. Minutes.
For the distros I didn't like, a few minutes of browsing around in the liveCD, and then reboot, and back to the original operating system I was using. And if I did install it, and then got sick of it, and wanted to try something else, well the next distro I tried worked, as I had test-driven it before I 'bought' it. And each of them 'just worked'; well, except for Red Hat, and Fedora (Stay away from Fedora!!!). Just kidding. I prefer Debian-based distros, but they all just worked, and were quite easy to set up.
Granted, downloading the torrented ISO files for these various distros took some time, and in the case of liveDVDs, more than a day, but that was time I was either at work, sleeping, or writing diaries. No time lost, so not really counted, in my estimation.
So if you want to prove this normally astute fellow wrong, then test drive a Linux distro, you may like it, and it will change the way you look at computing, save you a ton of dough, and strike a blow at the Man, all with one stone install.
The one hurdle you may face when installing is how to partition the disk; as this is something that Windows and OS X do for you, to have to do it manually can be a bit intimidating at first. The tool that you bring to this particular battle should be the best one out there: GParted.
When you partition you hard disc drive, you need to take into consideration how many OSes you are going to be booting from; and also whether you want a separate home directory to keep your personal files, music, vid, etc. downloads in. You not only have to make those decisions, but also which file system you are going to use on the partition; ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, zfs (kidding!), and FAT are probably the choices you want to consider.
Though I never remember to do it, it is probably really, really wise to have a separate home partition, particularly if you are going to be changing distros in the future, and/or if disaster strikes, your files will likely be spared. Short of a direct lightning strike on your router, that is.
If you want to share files between two different distros, or have Windows XP on the other partition (and who doesn't?), then you should choose the FAT option for the home partition; for the other Linux partitions? I always go for ext3, though some more knowledgeable than I (a very long list of individuals) say that xfs is speedier and more responsive. But what do they know?
In addition to the separate home partition, you'll also need to designate a swap partition, which is a kind of virtual memory space where oft used bits get stored for your system to call upon more speedily when needed; a good rule of thumb is how much RAM you have is about how big your swap file should be, provided you have at least a Gig of RAM; I usually go with two plus just to be on the safe side. And then you need to choose a '/' partition, which is where the operating system puts its files. You can probably choose an 80/20 split between home and / partitions, unless you are installing some seriously bloated distro.
You do not absolutely have to use GParted to partition your disk, all of the distros you install will have some sort of partition manager included with them, and if you are leery of making those kinds of choices at the early stages of getting to know Linux, then you can just have it use the whole remaining space/entire disk (provided you don't have the ubiquitous Windows partition). And as for bootloaders, I've always been kind of GRUBby. Heh.
A fun vid; MEPIS running Beryl: