Starting from the beginning, this is everything I needed to do to acquire and install Linux for my Windows XP PC.
Obtain Live CD
- I went to wikipedia and browsed the Comparison of Linux Distributions page to investigate the various distributions that are available.
- Also valuable is the List of Linux Distributions page, which has a graphic describing the lineage of the various distributions. The graphic indicates that the majority of distributions originate from Debian, Slackware/SUSE or Red Hat.
- I eventually settled on Fedora because it is based on Red Hat, is described as a general purpose distribution, has Live CD support, graphical installation procedures, support for several processor architectures, and it has a cool web site.
- I went to the Fedora web site, then to the downloads page and downloaded the ISO-format image of Fedora 14 for 32 bit Intel PCs.
- I went to my C:\temp folder and tried to burn a CD from the ISO file, but Right-click -> Send to -> CD Drive just creates a corrupted CD.
- I looked around on some Microsoft forums and learned that Windows does not have the capability of creating ISO image CDs. You need to load a CD burning application.
- I went to Kim Komando's web site and searched for software to burn an ISO CD.
- Kim recommended CDBurnerXP, which is cost free and hopefully virus/malware free.
- Installing CDBurnerXP, I accepted the license agreement, chose to not install the extra languages, and declined the extra Registry software.
- After that CDBurnerXP started up and I blocked the outgoing internet traffic it generated.
- Then I put a new CD in the CD drive, used CDBurnerXP to burn and verify the ISO file, and 10 minutes later I had my new Live CD.
- I put the Live CD into the CD drive of my guinea pig computer and restarted it.
- It restarted with Windows XP. Try again.
- This time when it said To interrupt normal startup, press Enter, I pressed Enter.
- On the next screen, I selected Load from CD/DVD.
- A few minutes later, I had a running Linux system with a cool picture of a bullet hole through the monitor.
- From there I was able to run Mozilla, start a console window, view the hard drives, including Windows files, and run basic linux commands. It is apparently running the GNOME desktop environment.
- When finished, I restarted the system and booted Windows XP.
I set this project aside for a week and in the meantime Fedora released a new version 15. At first I was inclined to go ahead and install the previous version 14, but then I noticed that all of my machines had processors which are compatible with the 64-bit version. So I decided to download the 64-bit Fedora 15 with the KDE desktop.
I created a new CD using CDBurnerXP and rebooted to try out the KDE desktop. It has a lot of nice features, but I didn't really like the taskbar. It must be configurable, but I found it very difficult to read compared to the defaults on Windows XP.
Next, I downloaded and tried out the 64-bit Fedora 15 with the LXDE desktop. LXDE is very clean, but since I was using a Thinkpad in combination with an external monitor it was initially very confusing. I could tell from the background graphic that I was only seeing the right half of the screen. Eventually I figured out that the other half was visible on my Thinkpad, which I normally don't keep in view. After fiddling around some more, I figured out that right-clicking on the background gives you a configuration menu which allows you to enable more configuration menus. Once I got to the additional configuration menus it didn't take too long to figure out how to disable the Thinkpad monitor. After that, I could see everything on the external monitor. In all, it took about 30 minutes to figure this out. Still, LXDE is my favorite so far. It seems more like a Unix environment than a Windows environment.
So at this point I intend to install the 64-bit, GNOME-based version of Fedora 15 on the family computer. I expect that everyone else will be happy with that. For my own use, I plan to additionally install LXDE. Maybe someone else will try it out too.
Default/GNOME-based Fedora 15
I restarted the Thinkpad with external monitor with the new CD and immediately hit some difficulties. Both the Thinkpad monitor and the external monitor were enabled in 'mirror' mode. I could see the top bar which contains the Activities icon in the Thinkpad monitor, but not the external one. I found the System Settings menu and started tweaking that, turning off the Thinkpad monitor and setting the resolution on the external one. When I applied the settings, the Thinkpad monitor went off, as expected, but the external monitor output was completely scrambled. Reboot to Windows.
Next, I put the CD into the family computer. It booted OK and I could see the top bar OK. At this point you get an almost entirely blank screen. The key to finding anything you actually want to do is the 'Activities' icon in the upper left corner. Click that and you'll get some icons on the left side, including Firefox.
One thing the user immediately notices is that the top bar of every window only has an 'X' button to kill the window. The minimize and maximize operations are buried in the right-click menu. OK, I can adapt to that. The next oddity is that when you minimize the window, it seems to just go poof. The window disappears from view and the icon disappears from the top bar. That's just plain strange. To find it again you need to click Activities, which switches to a view of all of the activites in that workspace, and then you click on the item you want to restore.
Speaking of workspaces, they are buried in the Activities view also, all the way on the right side in a vertical bar. I don't think I like that either. Why bury them? To switch from one to the other you have to click on Activities, then double-click on the window you want. OK, I can adapt to that too, I guess.
Upon further inspection of the Activities view, there is a button labled Applications. Click on that and you'll see everything you'ld normally expect to see as icons on the desktop or in the right-click menu of the background (which, by the way, doesn't exist). At this point, I'm thinking that the GNOME interface is going for a Mac look-and-feel rather than Windows. But everything seems to be available and make sense once you find it. It looks good too, with more of a 'black and white' look rather than the former 'shades of gray'.
Back to minimizing windows. If you minimize some window, it goes poof as previously mentioned. If you click on Activities to see your various Desktops, you can see the un-minimized window in the mini-desktop. If you double-click on the mini-desktop to switch to that desktop, the minimized window is not there (even though it appeared to be there in the miniature representation of the desktop). To rematerialize the window, you need to click Activities again and then click on the picture of the minimized window. Humpf.
On the other hand, I'm writing these blog entries from this environment, so obviously it is working well enough.
It's time to reboot back to Windows and I don't see anything that says shutdown or restart or anything like that. I decided sign out to see if that would help, and eventually I got to a sign on screen which also had a restart icon. I used that to restart and just pushed the button on the CD drive when it starting rebooting Linux again. The machine booted to Windows OK.
In all I'm underwhelmed by this version of GNOME. Everything seemed hard to find. I did notice that it is version 3.0.1, so this is a major version change compared to the one I looked at in Fedora 14.
Installing LXDE
So the new plan is to install the 64-bit, LXDE, Fedora 15 on the family computer and see how that works out for everyone.
Continued at Installing Linux, Part 2.
