The other day I dusted off my old Pentium III 450Mhz and installed Mandrake Linux on it. It’d been about 7 years since my last experience with Linux and I wanted to see how far it had come.

I got all the software I needed from http://www.LinuxISO.org, all free of course. Installation took 3 CDs for Mandrake and took about 2 hours. It installed gNome as the window manager which takes a little getting used to but I soon got the hang of it. I’m really impressed with all the quality of these open source applications such as GIMP, XMMS, Konquerer, Epiphany, OpenOffice and so on. Seems like things have come quite a way since I last used this stuff.

So with this small success under my belt, I realized I could install Linux on Virtual PC on my laptop! This time I chose SuSE over Mandrake, just for the contrast. It took 1 CD, a 1.5Gig Virtual Harddisk and about 3 hours (VPC runs slow) to install. It’s all working now however and I now have the best of both worlds. I’m loving it.

SuSE even comes with WINE which lets you run Windows applications (MSOffice for example) inside Linux. In theory I could run Excel inside WINE running on Linux running inside Virtual PC running on WinXP Pro!!!

Ok, maybe I’m taking this a little too far.