P.C. Shannon

I’ve been beating my head against my computer for the last week, trying to get Red Hat Linux 9 running on my older Athlon 750. The install itself, of course, was painless. And much faster than Windows. But there are always catches. It took some work to get Red Hat to dual-boot with Windows and to see the shared data drive on the machine (which uses NTFS). But the real problem was getting my USB wireless network adapter to work. It involved much hair-pulling, desk-beating, and general all-around cursing. Two reinstallations of linux later, it seems to be working.

I installed the OS so I can get familiar with it, since it’s a workhorse in bioinformatics. The take-home lesson really is this: in order to install linux, you must already be something of an expert. This is the real barrier to linux becoming viable and widespread on the desktop, let alone threatening Microsoft’s dominance. It’s its own worst enemy. But as a backend server, it’s definitely powerful and full of potential.