I’m logged in to ricketyclick via Firefox running under Linux-Ubuntu. I stopped for dinner before posting, but basically, once I figured out what I was doing, it was less than half an hour from booting up the installation CD to rebooting into the root desktop. Absolutely clean, no problems with hardware.
Comes up loaded with Firefox, Evolution Mail, Open Office (Word processor, Presentation, Spreadsheet), the Gimp, and a bunch of tools, games, and utilities.
The Windows XP disk I use runs for about an hour. Office is another hour.
I was easily able to install Flash in Firefox for the root account so I could watch Youtube, but I haven’t figured out the trick for doing it under my personal account. I may need to give myself root powers for long enough to do that.
I ran through setup a few times to play with the file system options.
I have an NTFS data drive from when this machine ran XP. Linux recognizes it, but the word is the Linux NTFS driver is not stable for writing, so my plan is to copy it to the dev/sda/home, reformat the drive as EXT3, then copy everything back.
When I was in the partition manager, I failed to recognize this drive, and marked the partition for deletion. Fortunately, I caught the mistake before committing the change.
That out of the way, I then tried to set up the linux partitions in SDA (Linux equivalent of C:). In order, I set up /boot, swap, /tmp, and the root directory, /, all as “primary” partitions, a total of about 4 gigs. The balance of the drive then showed as “unavailable”. My intent had been to make the /home partition a logical partition in /. That turns out not to be the way.
Second try: /boot, swap, and / as primary, then /tmp and /home as logical. That worked, but I haven’t figured out how the partitions actually lay out on the drive, and there’s some other details I need to learn about, but the thing basically works.
Be advised that once you go past the partitioner, you shouldn’t click the “back” button to revisit it, or all your unsaved changes will be lost, and you’ll have to set the whole thing up again. (The changes aren’t applies until Linux actually begins to install.
All that aside: as a Newbie user setting up your desktop machine, don’t worry about the filesystem. All you really need is a swap area, and the root / directory (not to be confused with /root, which is the home directory of the root administrator account). Everything but swap can be EXT3, which is very mature, reasonably robust, and reasonably fast. I wish the partition manager gave a bit of guidance for the newbie, but it is simply not all that daunting once you find the right reference.
I still need to install a printer, download pictures from my camera, and see about playing video files in various formats.
In essence, though, for ordinary desktop users, Linux is not remotely forbidding. It really does just work.
Unless you have Windows specific apps or hardware you are wedded to, it’s time to free yourself.
Linux has arrived.