Beckoned by the dark side!

["Mark McCall" <mark@xxxxxxx>]

OK everyone you may want to sit down for this one (Nigel - pour yourself a
big glass of Bushmills and have it standing by!).   OK..here goes…

On Friday night I INSTALLED LINUX!!!!!!!!!!!!

:0)

I have installed Red Hat V6.1 on an old P200MMX.

Anyway, first impressions - The old machine that I installed it on
contained
a motherboard and chip that I had bought second hand about two years ago. 
I
had never been able to get Windows to run on it with crashing to blue
screen
of death all the time.  I suspected a bad simm or dodgy hard drive.  For
the
Linux install I used a 64meg dimm out of one of the other machines and a
new
hard-drive.  After several attempts to install the system was bombing out
with a "Signal 11" fault.  Turns out this is a hardware
problem!!!  After
reading a few articles on the Net I disabled the on-chip cache of the CPU
from the BIOS and away we went!  I would imagine this severely dents the
machines speed but I proceeded anyway.  Lesson one - it appears Linux
stresses your hardware much more that Windows.

I installed from a bootable CD-ROM and there was a nice GUI, which was very
easy to follow.  There is also an excellent installation guide (which I had
running on another machine in front of me) on Red Hats website.  I had a
basic hardware setup - hard drive, CD-ROM, Matrox millennium video card and
it picked these up without problem.

The system needed to install 395 "packages" (562 meg) and took
around 20
minutes to do this.

I made a mistake when picking the comm. Port for my mouse (it worked during
the install but now not in GNOME).  Kwong from Laser Business Systems - for
Kwong read Linux support desk :-)  gave me the commands to change the comm
port of the mouse.  It was anything but friendly, however being old enough
to remember "edlin" in DOS it wasn't difficult.  No doubt this is
part of
the attraction to the "boffins".  You seem to be able to get
right up to
your knees in Linux if you want to.

Apart from actually installing it and seeing GNOME and typing a few command
line things at the console I haven't actually "done" anything
with it.

So - what AM I going to do with it?  That is the question!  I don't really
know.  I will have a "play" with it over the next day or two. 
With my
exclusive Wintel setup I presume a firewall or mail server are my best
options?  I need to use Win2000 as my web server because I'm running
Comfort
Web Interface.

Suggestions?

Thanks.

M.

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