Linux has Arrived

The first time I touched Linux was during my graduate school days. In 1997 one of my colleagues, Dr. Venkatesh Raghvan visited us in Tokyo University and we discussed the possibilities of serving maps on Internet using GIS and Relational Databases. He told many good things about the funky operating system called Linux and we decided to give it a try! Venkatesh and I went to Akihabara and bought no less than ten different distros (In those days internet -- at least in Japan was too slow to download iso's though we had a cd-burner in the lab!) including slack-ware, redhat, debian etc and a external SCSI hard drive. We spent the whole next day in a doomed attempt to get one of the distros going in my (primarily Windows NT 3.5) computer. Linux got installed alright, but it always gave up on us when we tried to get the X-server started. After a day we had to give up! That is how friendly the Linux OS those days was! Of course we were trying to get the OS and the X Windows running.

This story came to my mind when I was sitting in front of the home computer running the latest Ubuntu Linux incarnation -- Edubuntu. A week ago we had another very friendly linux distribution -- Linux Mint, but we decided that we need a different system and Chandani downloaded the Edubuntu ISO, burned to a DVD and installed within an hour!