More Good Products - Yellow Dog Linux

I had been using my home computer at work for several months. It is a Frankenstein machine cobbled together out of an HP Pavillion with a mysterious IDE hiccup, a monitor from a co-worker who was moving and needed extra space, and an 80 gigabyte Maxtor drive that we bought as a backup a while back.

I installed Suse Linux 10 on it, and fiddled with the drivers to get my USB flash drive to function, with limited success. Sometimes I could get it to mount, other times, it would sit there, a 256 MB bump sticking out of the computer. I broke down and installed, patched and secured Windows XP in one afternoon and found that everything worked, including the printer.

After several months of happy work computing, I felt that I was too at ease with my computing situation and decided to switch back to Linux, but did not want to muck up the Frankenbox. I needed something challenging, that would not be an easy install and had a minimum chance of working with any periphrials whatsoever. You can't learn anything from a computer that works flawlessly.

In the office we had an Apple Flat Panel iMac with a 1 Ghz CPU that everyone else refused to use. It was slower than Bob Dole's grandmother, and I got tired of waiting for web pages to load. It also had no office suite, and I did not know the admin password. Instead of resetting the password and buying MS office, I decided to install Linux on it and use it as my main machine.

"Why would you do this"? You ask. "The machine has no floppy drive". You Say. Your are right. It also has no serial or parallel ports, and no expansion capabilities.

I downloaded Yellow Dog Linux onto it and burned the 4 ISO CDs. I installed Linux on a Wallstreet Powerbook once, and had limited success, so I had my doubts.

The install was easy, and I was up and running in under 40 minutes. Yellow Dog is built on Red Hat, andpost install patching was a snap. I set the firewall to refuse everything. I turned off all of the services I don't need.

I have been running it for several weeks now and found the machine to be much faster than when running OSX. On the flip side, I have yet to get the HP USB connected printer to work. Airport works fine, the only issue is that it connects to a private network of someone living in a house across the street. The machine cannot even see our corporate wireless network. I resorted to using the ethernet port and disabling the wireless adapter.


OpenOffice has sufficed for all of my Word, Excel and Powerpoint work. The Gimp has more than sufficed for all photo editing tasks. I have been using firefox as my primary browser, but occasionally use Konquerer when visiting Java enabled sites that give Firefox fits.

I had to chuckle when the PowerPoint exploit was announced. I open MS Office docs with impunity. As George W. Bush so eloquently stated several years back: "Bring it on!".