Sometimes, a single idea remains at the back of your mind, only to be brought up later when someone else vouches for it. The same happened to me, lately. I am a subscriber of Digit (A technology magazine based in India), who have a habit of providing latest flavours of Linux in their monthly installments of CDs and DVDs. It had always remained in the back of my mind that one day, I would certainly install one of these “Free, Open Source and Robust” operating systems. Sounded too good to be true.

Finally, the last resort came when I chanced upon a blog, TheLinuxConvert, which had the ramblings of a guy who had successfully converted to Linux. Hmmm.…. That long gone idea of conversion came back, and I fired up the March 2008 DVD of Digit and started installing Fedora Core 8.

For the Uninitiated: Just like Windows, Linux is also and Operating System. But there is a main difference. Linux is open source, meaning, anybody can access the source code of Linux and make changes. The person can later submit the changes to the parent foundation and with his luck, the changes can be reflected in the next version.

Also, Linux is freely available. You can download the installer from the web, burn a CD or a DVD, and start the installation. No payment necessary.

Linux comes in many flavours, too! Like Fedora, we have the Mandriva, Linspire, Ubuntu, OpenSuSe and many other Linux Distributions. Its an overwhelming variety to choose!

Ah.. Let me come back to my experience. Fedora installed at my PC alright. I shifted the contents of my Drive F (where I was to install Linux) into Drive E, and booted from the Digit DVD. I wanted to keep my Windows XP installation intact, and intended a dual boot system. So, Fedora installed a bootloader that would help me select an OS at the time of starting up my PC. Fedora also somes with a plethora of software (contained in numerous packages), all for free!

The installation took about 10–15 minutes, and about 3GB of my hard-drive space to complete. Everything fell in order and within minutes, I was with my brand new OS. However, there was a major problem.

I have a cable internet connection at home, and use a program called Cyberoam Client to log in to my account. It didn’t come with the default installation of Fedora (it was obvious..). So I got back to Windows, and did a google search for a linux version. I got it alright, but was stuck up on how to install it (it was a command line version, you know). The internet did not help, either. So, that saw me juggling between Linux and Windows trying to find a solution — for three days. Nothing helped. Then I threw up.

I uninstalled Fedora Core 8. Welcome, Windows XP…

For a layman like me, Linux was intimidating. I wasn’t able to solve even the simplest of problems. I need some linux lessons, and fast, because I am getting fed up Windows lately. Anybody, who can help me out, please do so.