What was I thinking?!

Greetings! I am Jason Estimado, a businessman located in the tropical islands of the Philippines. I welcome you to my blog, where I will put in my experience in switching from the ubiquitous MS Windows operating system to the more obscure -- but rapidly gaining popularity -- Linux OS.

What was I thinking? Windows is very user friendly, easy to learn, has a lot of compatible software and hardware and most people use it. It's a sort of THE standard OS these days.

But Windows is also full of bugs, sometimes unstable, and is the target of innumerable viruses, worms, hacks, spyware and other malevolent software and intentions. It's also a resource hog, consuming disk space and other PC resources when you are not looking (or sometimes, even when you are -- you just don't have much choice).

Recently, my Windows PC got nearly infected by a virus in my friend's thumb drive. The anti-virus inexplicably shut down and left my system vulnerable. I was able to remedy the situation immediately, but the threat of possible infection, downtime and data loss scared me. That's when I decided to take the plunge and dived into the world of Linux.

Linux has many strengths; namely, its tight security. There are very few Linux viruses in the wild, and does not share Window's threats. It's also rock stable -- IF you can get running properly in the first place. That's what made me hesitate in the first place. Linux was notorious for it being user-unfriendly. But now, several distributions (or "flavors") of Linux has emerged and matured to the point that many exhort it's ease of use for the common PC user.

I'll put that to the test.

While by no means am I a complete PC newbie, I am no expert also. I have built PCs from ground up and installed various versions of Windows. I even remember the days of DOS, that command-line OS that was popular in the 80's. I think being a PC user who does not demand special software makes me a valid subject to try Linux and see if it works for the average user

Deciding that preparation would be the best weapon against the possibility of Linux being uncooperative, I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with the OS. I decided to concentrate on Kubuntu Linux, a distribution by Canonical which can be downloaded for free or ordered in a CD for free also.

And so last night, I bought a new hard disk (a hedge against data loss in case I screw up partition and installation in Windows hard disk) and installed Kubuntu. But to my dismay, after installation, the OS cannot access my old hard drive when I have my precious data! It can detect the disk, but cannot access the files. Also, no matter what I do, I cannot seem to install nVidia drivers, the desktop resolution cannot be changed and the multiple desktops don't seem to work -- switching only minimizes the programs running. Devastated, I booted from my old disk and found that it was fine. So I tried to boot Kubuntu from the CD to see if it's only the installation that was bad. Apparently, it was not. For some reason, it still cannot access my old disk. Then I tried to boot Ubuntu, the GNOME version (Kubuntu is KDE version). Lo and behold! My disk is detected! So the and there I, with a little regret, installed Ubuntu.


So was I successful? Fortunately, yes, but not without frustrating moments. In my next blog entry, I'll relate the troubles I encountered during and after installation and how I overcame them, the ones I did overcome anyway.