Hello from Fedora Core 3 (running on VPC)! I should mention that I am a complete linux noob before I continue (I can spell l-i-n-u-x, and that's about it). This isn't my first foray into linux land (I had a round with SuSE 7.0 previously...perhaps 3 years ago?), but it is indeed my first successful one, I never could find drivers for my Voodoo 4 video card for SuSE, so it was basically unusable. Onwards to now...

I won't comment on how I feel about Open Source Software (OSS, and linux in particular) other than to say while I like the idea in concept, in reality it still has a long way to go. The install via VPC wouldn't have been possible without this guide, and even after following those steps, I was limited to 800x600 resolution in VPC. I was quickly having flashbacks of my previous attempt at a linux install, but a quick google found this post which seemed promising. It took me another half hour or so of poking around to figure out that the XF86Config file doesn't exist on Fedora...on Fedora it's named Xorg.conf and lives in /etc/x11. The configuration mentioned in the link works fine though, and I'm now happily running at 1600x1200. So why did I choose to start playing around with linux? No, I'm not jumping ship from MS products...I make my living as a .Net developer, so that would be similar to suicide. First reason, I like new (free) tech toys, but the second (and main) reason is to start toying around with Mono, which could actually further my .Net career...a no brainer.

A little background first... I grew up on Macintosh. My mom is a graphic designer, and in an effort to keep up with the graphic design world she purchased a Mac when I was 12 (circa 1990). Needless to say, I was hooked immediately. Mmmm, I still remember the little critter (Macintosh LC for any afficionados out there) like it was yesterday...12 inch monitor (sporting all of 256 colors...I know this to be true because I counted them all), 8 megabyte hard drive, and a whopping 2 megabytes of RAM...all running on Mac OS 7. I would literally spend hours each day learning everything I could about it, and also played quite a bit of King's Quest (my first ever PC video game...Mom wouldn't buy me Leisure Suit Larry, so I had to settle for that). Little did I know that this would be the basis for my future career. Thanks Mom!

Why the sentimental paragraph above? Hmmm...this is where I'm supposed to segway into my point I guess. When I switched to Windows from Mac a few years later, I felt like a fish out of water. What?!? No menu bar across the top of the desktop? And what's with this mouse with more than one button? A context menu...wtf is that? What does the registry do? Ad nauseum. I'm reliving that now trying to find my way around linux. While it's not as dificult as I thought it would be, it's definitely quite quirky. For example, Fedora doesn't seem to support MP3's out of the box (!!!). The built in (preferred) media player is Helix (Helix is the OSS fork of RealPlayer), and it complains if you feed it an MP3 file...but thankfully it tells you where to go to get a player that will happily accept and play one (RealPlayer for linux). Installing it is not a trivial task, but there is a bit of documentation that walked me through it (involving a terminal window and a few commands). The average user will find this simply unnacceptable IMO, but perhaps I overlooked something. That being said, Firefox works beautifully, and almost all of the Firefox extensions available on Windows are also available on linux, so my browsing experience is virtually identical. AMSN gives me an MSN compliant messenger (again, a non-trivial install). I don't want this to be a "linux isn't ready for the desktop" post, but I can say with some certainty that the average user would have quickly grown frustrated and would have probably given up on the OS having experienced what I have so far.

I'm a technical guy, so I intend on using linux for technical reasons. Mono seems to be making some inroads, so it seems only natural that I should put it to the test. The first step? Installing it. If simply getting MP3's to play on linux was tough, I can't wait to see what challenges Mono presents. Cheers, and more to come on my Mono trials and tribulations.

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