LinuxQuestions.org - Newbie checking in

I'm about four weeks old with Linux and very much liking it. Migrating from Windows went much more easily than I expected. Well, no, there was one snag - I had been expecting to have problems to solve on the way towards getting it up and running. You see, I had done the research first so I knew that getting a wireless broadband connection might be tricky. And there was the matter of a printer driver. And all the Linux geeks on the websites I surfed into began by saying something like, "Don't worry it can be solved very easily." Which is geek-speak for,"Once you've mastered the basics you'll understand what I'm going to say next."

And predictably, the distros I tried couldn't see my router or my printer. Not to worry, I thought, it can be sorted even if it means waiting till my son drops by later in the summer. What does it matter if I have to have two machines running side by side for a while? Then I tried another distro, Ubuntu 10.10 but this time I booted it live on the other machine, the one still running Windows. And within no time at all it had made friends with my router and my printer so now I am completely set up.

If only I had not expected it to be a bit tricky I might have realised much sooner that there was a hardware fault on my old machine. Doh.

So will I go back to Windows? Doubt it.

Rob Crompton