Home | Hardware | Internet News |Web Hosting |IT Management |Network Storage
LinuxPlanet
Search 
  Power Search | Tips 

 Front Door
 Discussion
 LinuxEngine
 Opinions
 Reports
 Reviews
 Tutorials
 News
 Technology Jobs

 Browse by subject.
Free Newsletter

Linux Planet
Linux Today
More Free Newsletters

Be a Commerce Partner


















internet.com
IT
Developer
Internet News
Small Business
Personal Technology

Search internet.com
Advertise
Corporate Info
Newsletters
Tech Jobs
E-mail Offers

Print this article
Email this article

   LinuxPlanet / Opinions







.comment: So You Think You Want to Use Linux
What Does It Take?

Dennis E. Powell
Wednesday, January 10, 2001 08:28:58 AM

Last Friday in this space I took Mark Kellner to task for an article he wrote in the Los Angeles Times about a two-week experiment with Linux. At bottom, it seemed to me that two weeks is not enough time to tell anyone very much that's useful about Linux; even if one were in an enterprise and an expert came in and set it up and trained the brigades, it would probably be more than two weeks before people became sufficiently accustomed to it to form the beginnings of valid opinions. Qualitative issues aside, Linux and Windows are entirely different, and skills gained in one do not translate to the other.

In the days since that column appeared, Mr. Kellner and I have exchanged email. He's not an unreasonable guy. Nor is he clueless. Our communication has caused me to revisit a question that I (as many other Linux users, I suspect) have avoided even trying to answer: what is an orderly way of giving Linux a fair trial? What should we tell friends and associates who are thinking of taking our favorite operating system for a spin? What are the minimum requirements that a would-be user must meet?

With that in mind, I'm now going to try -- with no idea whether I'll succeed -- to figure out the advice I'd give to those who are not especially computer savvy, but who want to explore Linux for whatever reason, from wishing to be trendy to support of the idea of free software to a dislike of Microsoft. Mostly, I want to see if such a thing can be done without asking a great deal more of the user than is required by whatever came on the computer. Here goes.

Next: The Preliminaries »

Skip Ahead

1 What Does It Take?
2 The Preliminaries
3 Give It a Chance
4 The Myth of Linux's Difficulty





Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.


internet.com home | search | help! | about us

Jupiter Online Media

internet.comearthweb.comDevx.commediabistro.comGraphics.com

Search:

Jupitermedia Corporation has two divisions: Jupiterimages and JupiterOnlineMedia

Jupitermedia Corporate Info


Legal Notices, Licensing, Reprints, & Permissions, Privacy Policy.

Web Hosting | Newsletters | Tech Jobs | Shopping | E-mail Offers