Comment Articles

New boots for Linux

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 08 Jan 2004 16:25 GMT

One of my dirty little secrets is that I have never successfully installed Linux on anything. I've tried many times over the years, because I bought into the idea that it could revitalise old computers. I'd cobble together a 486 processor, some no-name disk controller, a clonky old hard disk, a VGA card from the Boer War, and off we'd go. My Linux experience terminated shortly thereafter with an incomprehensible error message concerning IRQ 9, lost interrupts or goblins in the bidirectional bus buffers. Fair enough. I didn't get where I am today by not courting gratuitous hardware problems through trying to do things on the cheap.

What put me off, though, was my inability to fix them. I normally laugh at IRQ conflicts, and giggle like a girl in the face of IO address clashes. In these cases, I was stumped. The errors had few clues for their rectification, and browsing online forums only revealed other people piteously reporting the same. Each time I tried to get Linux running, I seemed to end up at the point of going through the source code before remembering that I gave up writing operating systems some years ago. It didn't help that the friendly Linux experts I drafted in to help also ended up stumped: "It does that with that chipset sometimes" is not a song to lift the spirits.

There was always the feeling that with a bit more work, a little more fiddling and card-swapping, a few more midnight stints, I could have got things humming -- but with age comes impatience. Faffing with hardware for its own sake is less fun at thirty-something than eighteen, likewise learning fifteen incomprehensible command syntaxes before breakfast: besides, there's a whole Internet of good things to play with once you've got your browser going. Why wait? No matter how you cut it, Linux at home meant an anorak in the wardrobe.

But now there's Knoppix. The promise, as always, was tempting: download the disk image, burn it onto a CD-ROM and reboot. It will sniff your hardware, configure itself and just run. Instant Linux. Nah, I thought. I've been caught that way before. Still, I've always been good at letting faith triumph over experience.

The only remotely technical things involved were finding a way to persuade Windows XP to burn a bootable CD-ROM -- a tiny utility called ISO Recorder did the trick -- and setting the BIOS to make my computer check the CD-ROM first before booting from hard disk. Those done, the disk was burned, the computer restarted and three minutes later I was running a Linux desktop. You know, that mythical beast wot don't exist.