If we imagine two baseball teams – the Windows Windjammers and the Linux Lumberjacks – the Windjammers are the longstanding pennant holders and the Lumberjacks are the struggling up and comers. Judging by my experiences last weekend, things may very well stay that way for the foreseeable future unless the Lumberjacks make a serious effort to get their act together.

I don’t exactly know what my real worth is on the open market, but at my rapidly advancing age, I reckon $50-100 an hour is a very conservative estimate. I personally think my time with family, friends and clients is worth a lot more than that but let’s not split hairs.

The point is that, in this day and age of plug and play online computing, Baby Boomers, Gen X’s and even Gen Y’s don’t have time to waste. If they’re anything like me, they certainly don’t want to waste a weekend trying unsuccessfully to install a standard Linux distribution on a Microsoft Windows computer. By my reckoning, the 12 or so hours I’ve spent so far could have bought me a copy of Windows XP and Office 2003 or even a new computer.

Last week, I was determined to find out for myself what the real story is with Linux for the desktop. I knew that I could have gone out to a computer store and bought myself the latest Red Hat distribution but my view was that since everyone is telling me that the software is free, why should I pay for it? Anyway, I’m not totally computer illiterate. I used to fiddle around optimising the autoexec.bat and config.sys files back in the DOS days of the 80s. Heck, once I even managed to install OS/2 in a dual boot configuration with Windows 3.1 off a wad of floppy disks. So I should be able to handle a simple internet download and dual boot Linux installation – or so I thought.

Last week, I did some research on the various Linux distributions in the free market and, after visiting a number of websites, was weighing up whether I should go with Debian or Suse. To increase my chances of choosing correctly, I emailed an acquaintance who is a renowned local open source expert, asking which distribution was likely to be present me with the most painless installation. He suggested I try Ubuntu, which as all you Linux stalwarts would know is based on Debian.

So off I went to the Ubuntu site, www.ubuntu.com, to discover that installing the latest i386 version 5.10 (AKA the Breezy Badger) involved downloading an image of a 617MB CD-ROM, which would be the installation disk. No problem at all. I have a very fast cable broadband connection and I downloaded the entire thing and copied it to a CD-ROM in just over 10 minutes. That’s when my troubles began.

I loaded the disk into the drive and rebooted the machine, up came Windows XP as usual. I rebooted and checked the bios to make the sure the boot order was correct. Yep. First it checked the CD-ROM drive, then the floppy drive, then the hard drive with Windows. So I tried it again and once again up came Windows. I took the disk out and tried it on another computer – same thing.

Perhaps my download was faulty? I downloaded the Ubuntu installation image again to another CD-ROM and got the same result. I have a 2GB USB memory stick, so I downloaded Ubuntu to it and tried to boot of that. This time I got the message “Invalid system disk. Replace the disk and press any key”.

By this time I thought maybe Ubuntu was stuffed and I should give Suse a try. I thought maybe if I downloaded the whole damned Suse distribution – all five CDs – maybe everything would work out fine. No such luck. My PCs just kept on ignoring those CD-ROMs and loading Windows XP. And yes, I checked the boot order on the BIOS. So, after wasting 8 or so CD disks, and many hours of my time over the weekend, I still don’t have Linux.

Now I know that I’m probably doing something wrong that’s so trivial that about 500 or so Linux aficionados who may be reading this are jumping up and down saying, “What a moron! Doesn’t he know that all he had to do was such and such?” They may be absolutely right. However, the point is that, to the best of my knowledge, I followed the instructions on both the Ubuntu and Suse websites to the letter. And really, how difficult should it be to download an installation CD-ROM and install the thing?

No doubt, the whole Linux world is going to tell me how stupid I am but the fact of the matter is your online documentation just hasn’t been good enough so far to help me find out whether there really is an alternative to Windows on the desktop. Hopefully, after someone from Red Hat or Novell or one my Linux guru acquaintances calls to tell me what I’ve done wrong, I’ll have some better news to report next time. In the meantime, the Windjammers keep hitting the Lumberjacks all over the ball park.{moscomment}

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