I am going to be converting to Linux in a few weeks and have launched a blog to both, help people who may be doing this in the future and to have people’s help if anything goes wrong during the conversion.
I will be converting from Windows Vista to Mandriva Linux 2007. The conversion will start when I get my laptop, which will be an Acer, the hard drive will be split in two, 40GB for each partition, Windows XP is pre installed, so I will dual boot it with Linux, so if anything goes wrong, I will be able to sort it out.
I have been saying that I would convert to Linux for a while now, but never have. Now I am prepared to do it, the reason; because of how disastrous Windows Vista is, I want to move as far away from it as possible and the company behind it, they just seem to be copying other people’s ideas and making a success of it, I call it taking advantage of their position at the top, and I am refusing to support it.
So the conversion will begin in a couple of weeks, when I get my laptop. From then on I will try to blog every day on The Linux Convert blog, so please stand by me in my conversion, and hopefully in the future this blog will help those who will be taking a similar journey.
So, let the conversion begin, you can go to the blog by going to http://thelinuxconvert.wordpress.com, as I said above the conversion wont start for a couple of weeks, but go there and subscribe to the RSS feed, or add it to your bookmarks and re-visit in a couple of weeks. Thankyou
Simon North
Technorati Tags: Firefox, Linux, Microsoft, Open Source, Vista, Windows
April 17, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Just wondering why your going to be using Mandriva, Ubuntu Fiest Fawn will be shipping on Thursday.
April 17, 2007 at 6:11 pm
I’m going for Mandriva, because after much research I think it is the best I have come across, and has been reccommended quite a few times to me. Ubuntu is currently my second choice and then openSUSE, but hopefully Mandriva will be good enough for what I want to do.
April 17, 2007 at 6:23 pm
[...] Original post by http://thecomputingexpert.wordpress.com/2007/04/17/join-me-on-my-journey-to-becoming-a-linux-user/ [...]
April 17, 2007 at 10:42 pm
The biggest piece of advice I can give you is NOT to use instructions from Blogs and NOT to just google whatever problem you are having and do what the instructions on the first result say.
I would say that 90+% of tutorials on individuals blogs are on topics that are already covered in the official documentation of whatever distro you may use, and if for whatever reason such information is not covered in official documentation there is almost always an official wiki ( like wiki.ubuntu.com ) where anyone who truly wanted to help people would put their tutorial so it was easily accessible and peer reviewed. What that means is that you are taking advice on how to do something from someone who is either:
A: So new to Linux that they don’t know where to find proper documentation themselves ( or else they would have realized it already existed and not bothered making a tutorial )
B: Someone who simply wants Blog traffic and actually helping people comes second.
With Linux there are some things that you can do wrong that will easily make your system no longer bootable ( I have seen many tutorials on how to install Nvidia drivers which leave the person with an unbootable kernel ) and while it is almost always possible to recover, if you don’t understand the steps you took, you probably won’t know how to fix what went wrong.
This is an unfortunate truth about Linux that not many people acknowledge.
April 19, 2007 at 4:06 am
Finally you are becoming a TuxBoy Simon! You should look at my review of Beryl before you get Mandriva… Maybe then you will get Linux Mint
lol
April 20, 2007 at 7:09 pm
I agree with your choice of going with Mandriva. Im also a Linux newbie and used Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora and Mandriva, and I personally feel Mandriva is the best. Its easy to understand and use for a newbie. As a starter, I had a hell of a time in Ubuntu,with its ghory terrible interface. Configuring wireless and getting many things to work in Mandriva was very easy. But after going through a very horrid time with various Linux distros, I have started appreciating MS and Windows. Anyways, going with XP and Mandriva is a very good decision. You have the two best OS’s at ur disposal. Look out for Mandriva 2007 Spring.