From Windows to openSUSE

My first encounter with Linux came one day in 2003 at Barnes & Noble as I began thumbing through a new book on RedHat's Linux Fedora Core 1 (CD enclosed).  Curiosity got the best of me. I bought the book and decided to give installing Fedora Core a try.

I didn't want to give up Microsoft Windows XP Professional at the time, so I went about setting up a dual-boot system with a GRUB boot loader menu. 

There were some initial issues in resizing the primary partition to make room for Fedora like deleting the MBR (yikes).  Some of my issues, were solved by searching for answers with Google.  For example, ndiswrapper was needed to get my wireless card working.  Others required posting questions to forums like LinuxQuestions.org.  Ultimately I was able to create a dual-boot Windows XP Pro and Fedora Core system.

Looking back, I do wonder if I might have given up entirely had it not been for my background in IT using IBM's AIX and Sun's Solaris.  It certainly didn't hurt to have that kind of experience especially being quite comfortable with working from a UNIX shell command line interface.  For sure, in 2003, Linux was not ready for prime time and it would not have been well-received in the corporate world, much less by 'Joe Average' user.

I continued using using Fedora with GNOME UI for about a year until I replaced it with SuSE 9.3 Professional, while still keeping the Windows XP partition.  During the installation, I also chose to switch from GNOME to KDE.

KDE, as far as I am concerned, is better than GNOME. It is closer in certain respects to the Windows UI in terms of behavior and features, yet more powerful and capable of doing things that in GNOME and Windows Explorer aren't possible.  SuSE was acquired by Novell who open sourced the code under the name openSUSE and merge select branches of the open source development tree to their enhanced 'Enterprise' Server and Desktop subscription-based Linux products.  openSUSE, at this writing, is in revision 10.3. Version 11.0 is due out in a June 2008 time frame. 

Some time ago, I removed the Windows XP partition entirely and instead installed Windows XP into a VMware virtual machine running on the openSUSE Linux desktop.  Using VMware Server works well and the only complaint I have at this point is the lack of USB 2.0 support.  Sun's xVM VirtualBox might be an easier route to go for first time VM users. 

As for openSUSE 11.0, I am going to upgrade to the AMD64 version this time around and see how things go--a review will follow.

--dietrich