Computer Saga Installing LInux on an Xp Machine.

My back ground so you can interpret my biases and skills. I'm not a computer nerd by any imagination.

The first computer I ever used was a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP11. I have no idea what the machine actually looked like because it wasn't at the high school, but at a consortium location (BOCES). Its login shell was a BASIC interpreter. I have no idea what operating system it used. It had a mechanical teletype terminal with punched paper tape for back up. It printed 10 charaters per second There was also a new dot matrix printer which could print 30 characters per second. A cassette tape was used for back up. Each account had 500 characters of storage. This was 1976 to '79.

There was a few miscellaneous computers up to the mid 80's when I had an account on a Dec VAX machine whose OS was VAX/VMS. The next college I went to had an IBM something that was UNIX plus a bunch of computers everywhere. I did word processing on an Apple Mac. I had keys to the room that had the good one. It had TWO floppy drives. That was much superior to the Mac with one drive because you could leave the OS floppy in one and use the other and if you were coping a disk you put the one to be copied in one drive and the one you were coping to in the other and didn't have to switch disks multiple times to make a copy.

I also worked on a one off system that did computer vision. It was built with all wire wrap circuits. There was also an IRI (I think) vision system which used a language called Forth. It was a stack based language and prone to small errors being hard to find. I once spent 2 days trying to find what turned out to be a missing comma.

The first computer I owned was a Dell lap top with windows 98 that turned out to be a lemon. The OS worked alright, the laptop itself had a string of hardware failures that has turned me off to Dell every since. I built a tower in 2002 and I spent a lot of time making sure I had hardware that would work with Linux. I made it a dual boot machine with windows 98 and SuSE 8.0 That was the computer that I referred to in another thread were some combination of the power supply, hard drive and motherboard failed taking out the other two. I'm talking about smoke and flame rolling out the power supply type failure.

There's been several computers since. Some mine and some work ones. Mine have always been dual boot machines with Windows 98 and SuSE 10.0 then Xp and SuSE 11.2. I've also used Knoppix 5 point something on a work laptop to do my own work and I've tried Ubuntu 10.04 as a live CD.

The system I've booted the most often in the last ten years has been the Linux one, but by no means the only one. I've used the Windows system mostly for two reasons. One is I play Civilization periodically. The other is that I've had scanners and printers that just plan worked better under windows than they did in Linux. The two that come to mind are an Epson printer that had head cleaning utilities under windows that the linux driver didn't have and I had a Poloroid film scanner that had a lot of software for windows. I don't remember if I couldn't get it to work under Linux or if the interface was poor. I also had a device for profiling a monitor that was WIndows 98 based.