Why Linux

In May 2006 I had just finished taking a web programming class. I had Apache, MYSQL, and PHP up and running on XP. So why not add the L in LAMP. Went out bought Fedora 5 Bible by Chris Negus. The reason I chose that book is it has a DVD and a couple of CD's attached. I browsed the book, went to the Fedora forum web site, read about all the problems people were having installing and running Linux. Can you say paranoid?

First Linux install

A P2 400 with 384 MB ram white box computer was chosen for the first install. It had two eide hard drives, XP on one and the other was used to store data. I backed up the data I though I wanted to keep to CD. Mistake 1. I should have backed up all the data.

The Fedora install was on DVD and all I had was a CD-R drive in the computer. Went back to Fry's bought a cheep DVD/CD RW drive. Installation was simple unplug the old, plug in the new it worked. I did not want the Linux install to mess up XP so I removed that drive and plugged in the data drive as master.

The next problem was the computer would not boot to the Linux CD. That puzzled me since it would boot to the XP installation CD. A quick search of the Fedora forum let me to a thing called Smart Boot Manager. It took a while to figure out how to make a Smart Boot floppy, but after that things went smoothly. Using the floppy the computer booted the Fedora installation DVD. I answered any questions that were asked or if I did't know just went with the default and soon got installation complete please reboot.

Rebooted the computer. Watched some messages go by and WOW I had Linux up and running. The first thing I did was open Firefox and it worked. I could browse the Internet, I was set.

Dual Boot

Grub is an insect that eats my yard and is only useful as fish bait.

Well I wanted to dual boot Fedora and XP so I plugged the XP drive back in as the slave drive. Now how do you dual boot? It took a while but I found out if I added the following to a file called menu.lst. I could choose at boot time which operating system started

title Win XP Home
      map (hd0) (hd1)
      map (hd1) (hd0)
      rootnoverify (hd1,0)
      makeactive
      chainloader +1
      boot

Did I mention there is a learning curve involved?

Current Setup

I have 3 old Tower PC's that I use for playing around with linux.

The main Linux PC is a 10 year old white box PC. Ubuntu Linux is installed on the 30 gig drive and XP is installed on the 8 gig drive.

This E-Machine was given to me with a dead hard drive and 64 MB ram. It now is setup to boot to a half dozen Linux distributions.

Bought this white box PC in the early 1990's. I use it just to see how diffrent distributions run on a low power / memory machine. Currenty boots to XUbuntu and Puppy Linux

Got this machine in February 2006, I wanted a machine powerful enough to run MS Visual Studio 2005. XP professional opperating system.

I have a home network set up for Internet, printer and file sharing. The four desktops are conneted to the router via cat 5 wire.

The four desktops are connected to the router via cat 5 wire. They share the same mouse, keyboard and monitor through a PS-141B KVM switch.