Many small businesses are turning to Linux as way to swim against the tide of rising software costs. Are you thinking about diving into Linux for your small business? From the outside, Linux can appear to be a deep ocean of strange jargon in unchartered waters. Who has the time to wade through all that to save a few clams? With Linux, it's not a sink or swim proposition.

Linux is now a lot simpler than you may think. We can provide you with the easiest, simplest, no-problem process for installing Linux on a PC. After going through this simple installation process, you will have a basic machine that you can configure into any kind of server, workstation, or office desktop. Future articles in this My First Linux Server series will help you build productive, Linux-based servers and small office workstations.

The best choices for your first Linux machine are probably the popular Red Hat Linux or SUSE Linux, primarily because both are easy to install and configure. Additionally, these companies are sound choices for the home office or small business. Both vendors have specialized in Linux for many years and offer full corporate product lines supporting your expansion.

Red Hat, for example, has an extensive library of recent third-party English documentation, while SUSE is better documented in European languages. (As recently announced, Red Hat has discontinued support for Red Hat Linux 9.0, so security updates will no longer be available. But you can still learn the basics with version 9.0 and you can upgrade to supported versions when you need a more secure production system.)

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