My Linux on the Desktop article for HAL-PC hit this month, and already it’s generated more feedback than any of my prior articles. Everybody emails me the same basic questions, so here goes:
What video card did you use? You should have used ___. Read back through my Linux blog category to read my troubles with video cards. The short story: I tried a GeForce2, a GeForce4, and a Radeon. Half of the readers say I should have bought an NVidia because ATI sucks, and the other half says NVidia sucks and ATI is the only way to go. That’s precisely why I didn’t mention the video card by name in the story, because I wanted to see what my readership would say.
What distribution did you try? You should have tried ___. I tried RedHat, Fedora Core 1, Mandrake 9, Mandrake 10, Knoppix, and Xandros Business. (Yes, I shelled out $90 for Xandros.) I didn’t try Lindows or Lycoris because they hadn’t been updated in over a year, and I knew my hardware wasn’t going to work out of the box. None of the distributions listed were able to install on both my Dell Dimension 4600 (P4, 1gb ram, ATI Radeon) and my IBM Thinkpad T21 (P3, 384mb ram, onboard 3com Hurricane chipset). Linux had problems with the onboard 3com Hurricane ethernet chipset and the 1400×1050 display in the laptop, and with the Dell’s setup of two flat panels hooked up to a single ATI Radeon. Xandros came the closest on both, so I went with that.
The only distro to successfully work with everything on the Thinkpad T21 was…(drumroll)…FreeBSD! Odd. I stuck with that on the laptop for a while just for kicks.
Were you dual booting? No, I was trying to quit cold turkey.
Are you still running Linux? Not on the desktop (associated blog entry) but I’m sticking with Linux on my servers. I wouldn’t go back to Exchange and Active Directory for anything, and Linux is simply outstanding on the server side. I’m an old-school DOS user, and I love being able to configure my mail server and web server in simple text files instead of convoluted registry entries.
You sounded a little biased. More than that – I was heavily biased – but heavily biased against Microsoft! I was ready to do anything to get out from under running my own Active Directory and Exchange servers. I wanted something that just flat out worked, worked all the time, worked without setup hassles. I was willing to spend money (and I did, on video cards and Xandros) to get away from MS. In fact, I spent as much money during my Linux migration as I did buying my most recent desktop computer from Dell.
Brent Ozar
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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