Until recently, the only thing of interest about Linux for me was how to pronounce it ("Lih-nuks", according to my new manual). But that was before the challenge of being able to browse the web across my home network without mortagaging the house. In our kitchen a venerable Acorn A3000 sits at the centre of a Heath Robinson multimedia centre, providing computer, TV, CD, fax and email in the room we use the most. Although the old warrior, upgraded to a massive 8MB of memory, refuses to die, it has one limitation: a very slow serial port, making it next to useless for web browsing.
Given that I use Mac OS at work, look after three versions of Windows on the home network and still use Acorn's Risc OS for preference, tackling yet another operating system, would not be the first-choice solution.
In fact, the first method I hit on was to download a proxy server on to the PC, which, after a couple of splutters, the A3000 browser happily picked up across the local area network, giving us access to unlimited Guardian Unlimited while waiting for the carrots to boil.
But the proxy server was a demo - and the full version cost a cool $450 - a bit steep even for convenient access to the net's best news site. So how about taking up the proud claim that: "You have to spend nearly $5,000 for a 50-user licence for Windows NT at the time of this writing, whereas you can get much more (including more than 1,000 programs) from Linux for the cost of this book" (£10 with CD in a remaindered shop).
A first piece of advice: read the (expletive deleted) manual. Linux may well be, as claimed, stable as a rock compared with Windows, logical and in open code for teccies; but intuitive it is not. I have cursed Windows' "unexpected errors" and pulled hair out at trying to get it to recognise a new piece of hardware (three weeks and several software reloads for an internal modem once), but a Linux instruction like:
mount -t iso9600 /dev/cdrom
/mnt/cdrom/
which you have to type in just to be able to access the CD rom drive, brought on a sudden affection for Windows' point-and-click friendliness.
The second surprise to a novice was the sheer size of Linux "distributions" - the term for the various collections of programs based around the Linux operating kernel put together by the leading suppliers like Red Hat, Caldera, Suse and Corel. The minimum hard disc storage required is about 300MB, with about 1.2GB required for a full load (those 1,000 bonus programs). And you have to create space and a separate Linux partition on the disk to load all this into.
I solved the problem by adding a second hard disc to my system. But if you don't fancy getting under the bonnet, some dealers offer ready-loaded hard disks (and will probably fit them) and shops like PC World are now even selling complete Linux systems.
Third illusion shattered is how much knowledge of dead languages you need. Where Windows offers wizards to install system components, Linux has quotations from the Rosetta Stone. I wouldn't advise anyone attempting Linux without some familiarity with a text-based language like DOS. The two main Linux graphical user interfaces, Gnome and KDE are fine, if a bit clunky, but virtually any tweaking of the system has to be done from a text command line (showing the derivation from Unix).
Here's how to load WordPerfect, for instance, in one version I tried:
cp guilg00.gz $HOME/tmp
cd $HOME/tmp
gunzip guilg00.gz
tar -xvf guilg00./runme.
Try to get that right with dyslexic typing and fading eyesight.
But I now have Linux Red Hat 6.2 loaded and I can do most desktop work with very acceptable word processor, spreadsheet and organiser programs.
But... it will work only on relatively low resolution, I can't get sound, it can't find the network and I have yet to introduce it to the modem - which makes it extremely slow to load as the Sendmail module searches high and low for it. So another illusion shattered: it makes Windows chuntering load sequence look like turbodrive.
Needless to say, I haven't solved my problem of web access via the local area network (LAN).
However, I'm persevering. In the short term, there's no cost-effective replacement for my kitchen computer - though the new generation of internet TV boxes (many of them ARM and Risc OS based) may provide the solution. And every new version of Linux is more user-friendly - and every new version of Microsoft software just as expensive.
But for the idly curious, I can only repeat the on-screen warning as I tried to change the installation parameters to access the modem: "Unless you really knows what you're doing, don't play here."
