“The big story at Comdex was Linux. We gave the Linux Business
Pavilion our Byte Best of Show award, and best software to the
Corel Linux Office Suite. Given this much Byte attention to Linux,
I rushed home to revive Linette, my Linux box, and get going with
the Linux project again. Specifically, I decided to use the Red Hat
distribution of Linux, because Red Hat seems to be both the single
most popular flavor as well as the most widely supported.”
“The first thing I found was that you don’t really want to learn
Linux with old equipment. True enough, Linux is fast enough that it
can make some of your older stuff useful (people are getting good
service out of 386 machines), but take my advice: before you try
that, first learn what you are doing….”
“Once again, Red Hat reformatted my disk, trundled, came up in a
bare command line, and asked me to log in. I did that — and
couldn’t think of anything else to do. I tried various commands to
start the graphical interface, but none of them worked. I looked
through books and help files. I expect I would have found it
eventually, but I didn’t bother. Instead, I did what everyone ought
to be able to do when first playing with Unix/Linux. I called a
wizard.“