Why do people switch to Linux 13494

Well here's my Linux story. Sorry one thing I can't give is dates:

Machine was a PII 233 MHz, 256Mb RAM, 32Mb GeForce 2, 4Gb HDD. Had CDROM, CD Writer, tv tuner card, archaic ISA soundcard.

Was running Windows 98. It worked - just. I used OpenOffice (1). WinAmp for my music. I wasn't online.

I had heard of Knoppix and wanted to try it out, but whenever it was on a magazine cover disc, it was always a dvd with an iso image - i have no dvd drive

Found coverdisc CD of Knoppix 3.4 on PC Extreme, late 2004 I think. Liked.

Fairly rapidly moved towards using Knoppix as my primary OS. Xawtv for my tv tuner card. Slight problem - soundcard doesn't work! For those of you who don't know about tv tuners, you have a line out jack on the card, and you use a short 3.5mm male-male steroe jack plug to go to the line in on your soundcard. I plugged the tv tuner line out straight into my speakers.

Also no support for my Lexmark X1150 all-crap-in-one. Since I had another printer (HP deskjet 3820, not actually mine) it was no big deal.

Found and bought old book, RHL 7.3 For Dummies. It was slightly lousy. Still no soundcard support. I think I still was using Knoppix more.

Bought a couple of Linux magazines. Linux User & Developer were, and still are, rather prone to putting distros on their covermounts. Tried and liked Xandros.

Said magazine was running a special offer for subscribers - subscribe and get SuSE 9.2 Pro free. Since I'd already been contemplating buying it (in the hope it would support my soundcard), I subscribed. I think this may have been around February.

LONG WAIT for SuSE - in fact it only arrived very shortly before 9.3 came out. Coincidence? I think not, but I digress.

SuSE was great, but...still no soundcard support! And the boot time was annoyingly long. Otherwise all good.

salvage etc type clearance store. were probably ex school or company machines). Bought 1. PIII 866MHz, 64 Mb RAM, no HDD. Use as mobo, processor, and RAM upgrade. New mobo's onboard sound worked! Finally...

Have since added 20Gb HDD and DVD writer.

If the picture emerging is that I'm somewhat of a cheapskate - it's true. But I was initially drawn to Linux purely for the sheer hell of it, as a geek toy, if you will. The fact is, I can mess around with utterly pointless stuff to my hearts content, and still have a fully usable desktop.

As an aside

----- oof:-home-tw-mp3 # fdisk -ldev-hda

Diskdev-hda: 20.4 GB, 20490559488 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors-track, 2491 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id Systemdev-hda1 * 1 122 979933+ 83 Linuxdev-hda2 1247 2491 10000462+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)dev-hda3 784 1246 3719047+ 8e Linux LVMdev-hda4 123 783 5309482+ 8e Linux LVMdev-hda5 1247 1363 932299+ 83 Linuxdev-hda6 1720 2052 2674791 8e Linux LVMdev-hda7 2053 2491 3526236 8e Linux LVMdev-hda8 1364 1445 658633+ 82 Linux swap Solarisdev-hda9 1446 1719 2200873+ 8e Linux LVM

Parbreastion table entries are not in disk order -----

Horrible or what?

-- Tom Wootten, Fresher NatSci, Trinity Hall. oof.trinhall.cam.ac.uk