After two months of using Linux in a dual boot system with Windows 98, I decided I was ready for a 100% Linux box. Friday night, Jack and I went to a local store front that assembles generic machines, picked a machine, and waited while they installed the upgrades that I wanted. The guy slapped components in so quickly I wondered if the system would work when I got it home. However, the next morning, I quickly installed Redhat 9 Linux, which is what I had been using on my dual-boot machine. Getting it customized the way I like is taking much longer, of course.
The response time on my new machine is much faster. I can run Gnome as my desktop environment and still open and close big applications like Mozilla in a few seconds. Small applications load apparently instantaneously.
The most interesting discovery has been using the wheeled mouse that came with the new PC. I had never used one before for extended periods, and I love it. The wheeled mouse now falls into categories of things I didn’t know I needed and now can’t live without.
My old machine has gone downstairs to become part of what Jack calls his server farm. So far, we have had a difficult time getting the old box to work as a server: as Jack remarks, “There is such a thing as TOO secure.” We have vsftpd (the ftp demon) working on the server, and can log into it from the server, but have been unable to log in from another machine on our LAN.