The move …
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005Within the next few months, I will officially be moving from using Microsoft Windows as my primary operating system to a Linux distro. I will most likely be dual-booting using grub but it will definitely default to the Linux distro of my choice instead of Windows. Depends on how flexible Wine will be when I want to run applications and other programs that depend on Windows.
I am 95% set of making Gentoo my Linux distro of choice. The other 5% is a mixed evaluation of Debian in second and then Slackware being third in line.
Gentoo has by far amazed me beyond my wildest expectations and previous experience with trying out various Linux distros as a desktop replacement over the past few years. I have tried Redhat, Fedora, Debian, and FreeBSD in the past (some of them not successfully due to cumbersome incompatibilities). Gentoo, although it has the reputation of being a very frustrating operating system, only demanded a few hours of my time to get the basic system installed from stage3 (stage2 took way longer on my test P3 500MHz system so I didn’t even bother starting it from stage1). I’ll probably try bootstrapping when I’m ready to get Gentoo installed and hopefully, I’ll have plenty of time free to get everything compiled and troubleshoot anything that needs troubleshooting. Other than the time it takes to get Gentoo basic system, X, gdm, and fluxbox (a very simplistic and clean windows manager) installed, everything was extremely stable and customizable.
I also purchased a 2-port KVM which apparently has a high chance of successly functioning with my Logitech Cordless MX Duo Elite and is cross-compatible with Windows and Linux. So far, all I’ve been doing was running my secondary PC without a monitor and just either VNC (or remotely ssh) into it. This limited to the secondary’s function when the primary crashed so a KVM would make things much easier. 
Anyway, I have been taking a much-needed break from everything back at home after the Summer semester was over. It was nice to just relax and not continuously worry about school for a while.
