Monday, December 09, 2002
I brought in my replacement hard drive today to work (replacing the cacked Fujitsu drive I had), and using a spare machine and help from sysadmin Peter L. I installed Red Hat Linux on it as a dual boot with Windows XP. This is on the machine originally intended to be my MAME arcade box, but over time it has slowly become my "test" machine and file server.
I was impressed with how much Red Hat has matured since the last time I had a hard look at it, which was only earlier in the year. It is looking more and more like a real competitor to the desktop, and program integration is looking sharper and sharper. On this 1.2Ghz machine it is also pretty zippy, and I like the multiple desktop environment. The installation was also very smooth, and as I found it, the OS is amenable to a dual-boot configuration, and to re-adjusting itself accordingly when I moved the drive from the machine at the office to home (Windows XP was not so accommodating; I had to do a restorative re-install of the OS in repair mode in order to get it to work).
I was able to do some testing of the Konqueror browser on some of the CSS code samples for the book after a few minutes of re-familiarizing myself with Red Hat.
I am highly tempted by this to make my main system a dual boot system as well. If I want to really get into Linux, playing with it occasionally on a secondary machine isn't enough. Will have to look into it and see what is feasible (I really don't want to nuke all of my existing Windows programs on the drive if at all possible).
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