It's been a while since I've blogged. As a matter of fact, I was bogged down at work with tight deliveries and not enough resources. Any help is appreciated.

Now back to the subject of this blog.

During one of my business trips, I decided to buy a Linux magazine out of curiosity. What grabbed my attention was the double sided DVD with all those Linux distribution to test and a couple of articles on some graphics software. I am so glad for being curious. I discovered, to my surprise, how sleek Linux has become. Of the few distribution I've ran and tested, I like Open SUSE 10.1 and Fedora Core 5 the most.

I haven't touched or worked with Linux for more than 7 years now. My first experience with Linux sucked. I tried installing Linux about 7 years ago on a laptop. I struggled for a week and then decided to dump it for Windows. The problem with Linux then was that it didn't have a simple installer and it didn't support hardware devices like Windows.

So, 7 years on, I decided to give it another try, except that this time I installed it on my home PC. The system configuration is a P4 3.02 Ghz (dual core) with 1GB RAM and 2 x 120GB SATA hard disks. The VGA card is an nVidea. The motherboard is ASUS with onboard LAN and DSP (Audio card). I have an external USB SB Extigy, a USB Canon ImageClass MPC600F printer and a Lexmark Optra T616 network printer.

I installed the Fedora Core 5 distribution on the above configuration, using only one of the hard disks. I partitioned the disk in three, the main or boot partition, the secondary or data partition and the swap partition. I set the swap partition to 5 GB and split the rest among the other two partitions.

Installing Fedora was a breeze. The installer is graphical and easy to follow and it detected most of my hardware devices. But I wished running all the devices on Linux was as simple as the first step.

After the first boot of the system on Linux, I was amazed at how nice the Gnome desktop is. But unfortunately, Linux failed to recognize my Extigy audio device. It did show a USB audio device with the name Extigy, but couldn't play a sound or do anything with the device. After researching for hours, I found a device driver for it on creative's open source website. To my bad luck, it's not an easily deployable device driver. I have to recompile the Linux kernel to get it working. I haven't done so yet, but I'll share my experience with you when done.

The next setback was the Canon printer. I couldn't manage to have Linux recognize it. The internet is your friend when you're running Linux. So trawling for a few more hours I failed to find a Linux driver for this device. It seems Canon doesn't provide a Linux driver. I should voice my dissatisfaction about Linux supportability with Canon. Linux is generating headway in the desktop space and we need hardware vendors to back up the Linux community.

The third setback with Fedora was the fact that it doesn't allow you to mount NTFS volumes. Connecting to Windows shared folders was as simple as point and click. Unfortunatley, mounting NTFS volumes wasn't that easy. For some weird intellectual property reason Red Hat doesn't include NTFS support with its distribution. So I had to search the internet and found an unofficial site describing the procedure for adding NTFS support in Fedora (http://www.fedorafaq.org/#ntfs).

Three days on, I still don't have a fully functional Linux. So I decided to remove Fedora and try with Suse next week. I have seen the Suse live distro DVD and it looks nice. Suse does come with NTFS support, so one less thing to do. Also Suse 10.1 comes with XGL (Xserver on top of OpenGL) which produces faster screen rendering and some snazzy effects. I am also hoping that Suse will identify my Extigy. Stay tuned for more.

On a final note, I really love the tools and programs that come with most of the major distros. Specifically, I loved the Open Office 2.2 that I replaced my Office 2003 with it. It may be early days for such a drastic decision but I didn't hesitate to switch over.

My next steps will be to get Suse up and running and install MONO, Kylix, Eclipse and play around with GTK+ development.