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How I got started

In the last year, I started using Linux as my destop operating system. I was introduced to Linux during a school project, and as many, I thought Linux was just anoying and difficult.

Somehow, this view changed during that project, and although I'm not sure what changed my mind. I still believe it was the speed and ease I saw some (not many) people working with Linux. Both command line interface (CLI) and graphical user interface (GUI) appealed to me, and I wanted to to try out Linux when I had my own computer.

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of my system:

KDM login screen with a dynamic xplanet background (July 2004)

KDE desktop with activeheart theme, Konqueror and Kontact (July 2004)

KDE desktop with a new layout, plastik theme, Konsole, KMess and Firefox (October 2004)

Linux Distributions

I've used the following distributions so far:

Slackware Linux 9.x

Slackware is the Linux distribution I started with. It is currently the most "UNIX-like" distribution out there. You could say it felt like a completely different world. Lots of configurations have to be done by hand, and you can get a lot of insight in Linux internals if you can cope with this. Slackware is a distribution doesn't sit in your way; an ideal choice for a poweruser who likes to do things on their own. It also seams to follow a Keep-It-Stupid-Simple philosophy, no bells and whistles, no inhouse enhancements. This makes it easy to understand the very internal workings of your system.

Gentoo Linux 1.4 (and up)

Gentoo Linux offers automatic installation of software packages. I didn't want to spent time downloading, compiling and installing software from source code anymore. This process is automated in Gentoo Linux, and they offer more then 7000 highly up-to-date packages. Gentoo Linux is a source based distribution, which means every software package will be downloaded in source-code form and compiled before it is installed. This process consumes a lot of time now and then (which I regret), but I haven't found any other distro offering the kind-of packages Gentoo does. There is a lot of flexibility and some control over which dependencies a package should have. Gentoo also allows you to try more experimental things with your system, or some new software. The main disadvantage: if it breaks, you have to clean up the pieces.

SuSE Linux 9.2

SuSE Linux is a highly polished, fast and stable Linux distribution. It makes life a lot easier, as the entire system is already configured completely, with a lot of attention to little details. Things like automatic mounting of removable media, Bluetooth support, Remote Desktop, CPU Frequency Management and Suspend to Disk are all ready to use after the installation. It's RPM package format might be crude compared to Gentoo or Debian, but it works surprisingly well with SuSE. The available official and third party mirrors provide all packages most users need. After using Gentoo for one year, SuSE was a refreshing experience. It's the distribution I prefer the most nowadays.

My hardware

Off course, there is a lot to say about the hardware support in Linux. The next table gives some information about the hardware I have, and how well it works with Linux. I hope it gives an idea.

CPU: AMD Athlon 1800XP

This works off course, but notice that some distributions are optimized for Pentium processors and higher. You can find details about the CPU with cat /proc/cpuinfo under Linux.

Memory: 1GB

Of all things, this works very sweet! I've disabled my swap space, and Linux makes efficient use of the available free memory as disk cache. If you compile your own custom kernel, don't forget to enable the option "High Memory Support (4G)" if your machine has more then ~700MB of memory.

Mainboard: MSI KT400

Some features of this mainboard are automatically detected and loaded, like AGP and USB drivers for instance. The onboard sound support gave problems in both Linux and Windows XP, and I bought a real sound card to solve these problems. My hardware sensors work also work with a little effort, but I'm not sure about the bluetooth and infrared support (the hotplug system does seam to load drivers for both of them). ATI's binary display driver still doesn't reconize my AGP chipset, so you need to tell the ATI display driver to use the in-kernel AGP driver.

Videocard: ATI Radeon 9000, 64 MB [RV250]

Normal VGA/VESA modes work out of the box, but to get 3D acceleration, tv-out, or tv-capture working you might have to work a little harder, especially if you have an ATI card. The Open Source Radeon Driver is stable and fast enough for me, but the ATI Binary Driver seams to crash my X11-Server (the graphical subsystem) a lot. Although I don't have perfect framerates with the Open Source driver, I can play OpenGL based games at an aceptable framerate. Enabling TV-Out is easy with ATI's own drivers, but can be hard, even impossible, with the Open Source driver.

Hint: buy an NVidia Geforce card if you like to have stable (Linux) drivers!

Monitor: Philips Brilliance 109P4 Monitor (19inch)

XFree/X.org detected my monitor capabilities automatically. I did have to enable a higher screen resolution manually. With a little tweaking (e.g. fetching modelines with ddcxinfo-knoppix), I was also able to increase the refresh rate to 100Hz.

Keyboard: Logitech Cordless Desktop Pro/Comfort

Off course, you can use a keyboard instantly, but getting multimedia keys working can be a little difficult, although it is not impossible. To configure these keys, either use a nice Configuration center module, or open the configuration file of your X11 Window System in a text editor to perform some surgery. The option called XkbModel needs to be set to modified in either /etc/X11/XF86Config, /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, or /etc/X11/xorg.conf (the exact file name depends on your X11 Window System). For my keyboard it had to be set to Option "XkbModel" "logicdp". If you need to buy a mice, find one with a third button or scroll wheel; you can use the middle-button to paste the currently selected text. It's also worth to mention that the USB-interface didn't require any additional configuration, it just worked as well. Making use of the firth and sixth mouse button is quite a puzzle, and I hope this will change soon.

Harddisks: 2x 80GB.

This works out of the box, but some features, like DMA and 32 bits I/O, should be enabled manually. They are off by default, which is slower but safer. Browse the hdparm manual for the options -v, -m, -d, -c, -u and -k to maximize the I/O throughput of your drive. You can test the drive speed with hdparm -tT /dev/hd[ab]. My settings are currently: hdparm -v -m16 -c3 -d1 -u1 -k1 /dev/hd[ab]. Especially the -d, and -u should be used carefully as they may not work with older drives or mainboards.

CD-Rom: A-Open 52 speed

Works out of the box off course. Most CD-Player software do require read access to the device node file, but most likely this is configured in your distribution package already.

CD-Burner: Lite-On LTR-12102B

Works with a little effort, the wizzard from the burning application K3B can help you setting up the configuration (like access permissions) for burning. Systems still having a 2.4 kernel also need to use IDE-SCSI emulation on the device before the burner works.

Sound: Ensoniq 1371 AudioPCI

This works out of the box (ens1371/es1371 driver), but note that the sound will be muted be default. Sound recording also works, after enabling "Full Duplex" mode somewhere in the KDE Configuration center, and selecting the right sound input channel.

Network: Realtek Ethernet Card

This works out of the box (8139too driver). I can definitely recommend to use an ethernet router for your Internet connection, because it saves you from a lot of trouble configuring your internet access and firewall.

Printer: Epson Stylus Photo 750

After installing the right printer drivers and software, you can perfectly use this printer. Fortunately, LinuxPrinting.org is a great resource to get your printer working.

Scanner: Mustek 1200UB Plus

I got this device working, but the story is a bit longer. I switched scanners with my dad, he couldn't get his working on Windows XP, and mine didn't work in Linux. The strange part is, that I got this scanner working in Linux with a scanner filmware file (SBfw.usb) found in the C:\WindowsXP\System32 folder. And yet, Windows XP still doesn't reconize my scanner.

Webcam: Logitech Quickcam USB (earlier edition)

This device works as well, but it takes a little effort because the qc-usb driver needs to be installed manualy. However, this driver supports most Logitech devices.