teammatt3 — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 17:21:26 +0000

I have SuSE on my hard drive, I have a dual boot though. I think the reason why you had to buy a new hard drive for Linux was because you didn't defrag your hard drive before you loaded up Linux?

Last week, I tried to remove Linux, because it would not read my modem. I deleted the partition it was on, and it prevented me from booting up windows. I had to reinstall Linux again to boot up windows. The worst part was, it messed up all my drivers so I was forced to reinstall all my hardware.

rtroxel — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 01:56:30 +0000

Thanks for the feedback.

I still like Linux and will continue to experiment with it. Fedora apparently wiped out the boot sector on the Windows drive. I tried some software called GAG (available at gag.sourceforge.net) but the app reported that there was NO boot sector, so I'm going to be repartitioning the drive, etc..

Zeus — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 11:00:11 +0000

Dunno... my 50 years old mother has no problems using Linux... Why not ready for home use?

And your Johnny might just as well want to just want to surf internet and read his emails with his computer he bought from IBM. No problems with that, IMO. Why would Johnny bother with dual boot (which he has never heard of probably).

Actually Linux would be even better for him. He buys computer, sets it up by using manual, boots it up and he has everything there. And it will not disappear and he doesn't have need to format his drive every year to not lose performance. He gets rock solid system and he stays with it.

(That's the best case of course there might happen loads of bad things).

Abhishek Reddy — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 04:03:23 +0000

Each distro is unique not only because they have their own package management, installer, logo and web space. One of the critical factors is the development style. Fedora Core is still somewhat experimental (RH to Fedora is quite a switch). On top of that, Fedora's release cycle is ~6 months -- it's a distro best kept updated. Given this, I think a review of Fedora Core 2 as a basis for generalising about GNU/Linux isn't fair.

You're better off trying FC3 or waiting for FC4 if you must use it. Or else try Xandros, SuSE, or Linspire for easy point-and-click distros. If you're feeling adventurous, give Debian, Slackware, or Gentoo a go. They're far more mature than Fedora. Arguably better installation and package management too.

I've experienced the opposite with regards to boot sector collateral. Windows twice overwrote the MBR making it difficult to boot into Linux. This is unusual, though, as it's only twice out of many dual-boot installs that went perfectly. You could try to repair your boot sector using a LiveCD. It's a good idea to make floppy boot disks too, for just such situations.

I don't see the relevance of your hardware issues to the central point of this article. All that can and does happen in many other circumstances. Bad luck that you ran into it while trying to install Linux.

The GIMP is not a good print design tool. A great deal of free/open software was designed with networking in mind (hence *BSD, tight network security, etc). The GIMP reflects that as it's made primarily for web graphics. Lately, it's been improved to handle digital photography better. I can't see any great leaps in print functionality in the near future.