Computersight -

Many people this year will not be able to afford a brand new personal computer -while setting aside or selling or giving away their three to seven years old model- as they would have done in better times.

But there is possibly a funny and interesting alternative to buying a new computer, if you want a better performing machine. In fact, mainly for marketing reasons, computer and software producer are often pushing the assumption that personal computers are inseparable combinations of hardware and operating system (that is: the actual machine and the software that allows that machine to function). This is not entirely true. It is true that, unless you are a computer geek, most of the time, you may want to buy a machine that works, possibly very well, as soon as you take it our from the box. But it is also true that the machine that you bought and that came with a given (rather expensive) operating system, can sometimes work well, or even better, with a different operating system.

Switching to a free Linux operating system was, till recently, a synonym of headache, even for someone with relatively good computer skills. Today things have changed. In fact, the “open source” software communities continue to show outstanding skills and have done an excellent job: several freely available Linux distributions have evolved into great user-friendly operating systems that allow you to do everything (or nearly everything) you may need to do with your computer, often in a better and faster way (see References below). Consider that some of these distributions were developed with the challenge to keep both the operating systems and common use applications in the smallest space possible and/or to have all needed bits, stored in RAM for faster access. Isn’t that an excellent way to get rid of the “fat” slowing down other non-free operating systems?

Here are the basic needed skills to start; you will need to know:

1. how to back-up your data; it is NOT advisable to do any experimentation with a computer where you stored data, obviously. Just -in case you decide to do so- make sure you have a good back-up and a reliable way to recover your data, should things go wrong.
2. how to access your BIOS settings; usually this is done by pressing one or a combination of keys during the startup. You can find this information on the manufacturer manual for your computer model or on the Internet. This is to change your boot options (in a frequent scenario you may want to start from a “bootable cd”, made burning a iso image file on it).
3. how to burn a iso image file on a cd-rom. This translates mainly in finding a good software for doing it.

And that’s it.

You can find even simpler ways to use a Linux shell (command line) or to run more or less complete versions of Linux, totally under your current operating system; this would help, if you just want to give it a try, before installing it.

Scan through the sources below, learn some more about it and, more important, have fun!

References

• http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/
• http://www.freeveda.org/linux/puppy/PupWin98.htm
• http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/qemupuppy/
• http://colinux.wikia.com/wiki/Getting_Started_with_coLinux
• http://www.cygwin.com/
• http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
• http://sourceforge.net/index.php