New Levels of Geekiness

Well, I've expanded my geekiness further. As if video games, RPGs, fantasy/sci fi books and movies weren't enough, I loaded Linux on a computer last night.

Now, granted, it only ups my geek quotient a little because I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING!

But I did it.

I acquired an older P4 Dell. Its a single core 2ghz with, currently 256meg of RAM. (1 gig is on its way from Tiger Direct)

I tried loading the Ubuntu my brother gave me. The lastest version didn't even load, so I tried the 6.06 release he gave me a few years back. 45 minutes into the installation I was on step 2 "select your time zone." Apparently it required a bit more RAM than I have.

So asking some of my Star Pirates buddies one of them, a sys admin, suggested I try Vector, a Linux distro that is aimed at older machines. It only took 2 times to install, and I think the first time it installed fine, but I selected the wrong viewing mode because I couldn't see anything on the screen.

So I got it installed, and working, and I have realized, I don't know how to use Linux at all. I'd fiddled with Ubuntu a little, tiny bit before. But Ubuntu is Linux for idiots (or everyone) apparently because it's REALLY simple to use. Vector is easy too, but I don't know any Linux commands, so I've installed a couple programs (at least I THINK I have) but I don't know how to execute them yet.

Thankfully I've found a nice little Linux/Unix tutorial online, and am reading up on it. Maybe I'll at least be able to get some programs installed and working. We'll see. If nothing else its fun to fiddle around with a computer again. WindowsXP is a nice OS, Vista works. (I hate it because it sucks up SO much system resource, especially graphics, that if you don't have a decent graphics card, forget playing any game made within the last few years.) But, MS products are also not all that much fun to use. I mean, they work, but I dunno. I sort of am looking forward to working with an OS that I actually have to learn how to use. And who knows, my brother keeps saying Python is the greatest thing since Perl, so maybe I'll program too! (I only sort of know what those things are...but xkcd talks about them sometimes....