Linux Desktop…

Update below.

For years I have been wanting to have a usable desktop machine that is running nothing but Linux. It appears I finally have one. It wasn’t that hard, really.

At the advice of my nephew, Ken (www.shieldsit.com), I downloaded and burned an image of the free version of www.xandros.com. Then I booted from the CD and let the image do its thing. While it took a while to install, when it was done, it was working fine.

I didn’t have it install Open Office because the version that comes with xandros is old. That was a mistake. It took me quite some time to figure out how to install the rpm I downloaded from openoffice.org. I found the instructions for doing so here — toward the bottom of the page.

Then I discovered the xandros network, from which you can install many things without typing at the console. In any case, it was fun to install the hard way.

Anyone else using linux as a desktop?

UPDATE (4/5/2008): About a month after posting this, my son told me about Ubuntu.  It’s a very stable Linux desktop platform.  I’ve been using it since version 6.  It’s ready to release version 8 in less than a month.