I think it’s almost a full week that I’ve been using Linux without any major problems so far. The only time I didn’t boot into Linux, was when I wanted to have a little hacking and slashing with my bro in Diablo 2. Yes, I know it’s an old game, but when you’ve got equally dated hardware, you just have to lower your expectations a little, right? I’ve heard the next phrase all too often already “Spend some money and upgrade your rig”. That would be ideal, but when it’s going to be used only for gaming, I’m still undecided on the justification as yet. I could probably have easily justified spending that amount of cash years back, but right now, when I seem to have noticeably lesser time on my hands for gaming purposes, it just doesn’t cut it. Unless my bro, of course, since he uses his rig for 3DS Max and Zbrush and what not, it certainly helps to have as fast a rig as money can buy.

So, after being told off by a friend that I’ve been saying that I wanted to switch to Linux for a good handful of years and I am still on windoze. Ha. I think I took that as a threat a little too seriously. I promptly downloaded Fedora Core 5, burned it onto a DVD and installed it. Now, I think I can safely say that Linux is now getting much easier to install and use. Either that, of I’ve gotten more affluent with using Linux, which shouldn’t be the case.

This has got to be the longest period of uninterrupted usage of Linux I’ve experienced. Yes, I did have a bit of hiccups here and there, like getting Macromedia Flash and Java working, but after a bit of forum browsing, I got it solved. I also re-installed FC5 once, but that was due to some video card driver issues. My horrendously dated ATi graphics card didn’t have a linux driver. I tried installing a hacked driver which obviously resulted in the re-install. I was missing some libraries of some sort. Anyway, I won’t be going that route ever again. Hopefully. Apart from that, the other causes of failure to adopt Linux previously were (sad to say) apparently my fault, somewhat. Somehow, I would do something to the system and caused it not to boot into the GUI. It essentially left me high and dry in the terminal prompt. If it were back in the good ol’ DOS days, it wouldn’t have been much of a problem. But I guess we have all been pampered a little too much with Graphical User Interfaces, so much so that we cringe at the thought of entering commands into the black box. Well, that almost happened just now. My bro upgraded his video card to a more powerful one, which was able to do Pixel Shading and all the pretty eye-candy stuff. Naturally, his unused video card found it’s way into my PC. In windows, it was easier. Booted in to uninstall the card drivers, shut down, replace card, reboot and install drivers. Simple. Not so for Linux. Because I didn’t install any Linux drivers for my ATi card, there wasn’t anything for me to uninstall. I had a mild shock when it refused to boot into the GUI, with some error of not being able to start the X Server. In normal circumstances, it would have caused me to do a complete re-install of Linux! Ha ha. And to think that I did a good 80% of the kernel updates already! Thankfully, that was not to be. The kernel realised immediately that the X Server couldn’t start properly, warned me about it, showed some error logs which I didn’t quite understand and very nicely proceeded to start with default settings again. Sweet. Once that was done, everything was back to normal. The desktop seemed a little sluggish compared to my Radeon card, but I’ve yet to install the GeForce drivers, so I’ll have to see how it goes.

With this over and done with, I guess Linux is almost ready for the mainstream public. Well, almost, since quite a lot of usage is still done in the terminal. One thing which I’m quite pleased too, is with the ease of software installation. At first, when I read about YUM, it just appeared totally weird to me. What a strange name. It turned out to be Yellowdog Updated, Modified. Whatever. All I know is that it works, and quite well too. I just tell it what I want to install, and it does it’s magic, downloading the relevant package from the server. The best part is that it even checks for missing dependencies and downloads those even! Sweet!

I still have yet to fully migrate to Linux. I think I’ll still maintain my windoze partition for games. Hey, once a gamer, always a gamer, right? Although not as hardcore …