Linux for Christians

http://www.ichthux.com/

I spoke with a friend of mine in Switzerland yesterday afternoon around 1 pm and he told me that he uses Linux. We were trying to figure out why he was not able to access our ministry chat room from his computer. We discovered that he needed to upgrade his version of Macromedia Flash he was running under Linux. Well, he was actually running it ON top of Linux but you know what I mean. Once we figured this out he was able to get in to the chat channel without any problems. We got to talking about Linux and he told me that he despises Mickeysoft and that he can do everything on the Internet that I can under Windows XP. I have dabbled with Linux RedHat on occasion over the last 10 years and I know what kind of a pain that this OS can be for the computer professional much less a novice. I think that the last time I installed Red Hat it took me several hours and I had to pull the computer apart and write down chipset information for all the major hardware pieces.
Since then Linux has come a long way and now a novice can pop in a cdrom and answer some questions and the install process takes off much like a Windows install. I played around with something called Knoppix several months ago but got bored with it because I could not save any data to the hard drive. With Ichthux you can either run it as an active cd user and save data to your USB Jump drive or you can actually install it to your local hard drive.

During the install process Ichthux loads up a partition appliction that gives you several choices as to how you want to install the OS. You can tell it to wipe the hard drive and format it and do a clean install or you can point it over to a second hard drive and leave your boot drive alone. Ichthux partition manager also allows you to do a dual boot configuration on hda0 and you can dual boot XP and Linux at the same time. That is the configuration that I went with on my Gateway PC today. I actually dual boot both XP and Linux. XP stays on C drive on had0 and I put Linux on D drive of my ide slave hard disk.

I attempted to dual boot Linux and XP on my Toshiba laptop and wound up hosing the original OS to the point of no return. Once again I had wished that I had made a ghost image of my hard drive BEFORE I allowed my adventuresome spirit to get the best of me. Ichthux would NOT successfully install on my laptop no matter what configuration I tried. I figure there must be a chip set of some sort that would not work right. I spent most of last night and today rebuilding my laptop with XP SP2 and all of its associated apps and while I did that I installed Ichthux on my Gateway system.

I need to get back on the Linux bandwagon and learn it so that I can use something other than Windoze and so I can list this OS on my skills sheet or resume as something I am proficient in. I am sure it will take a little bit of time for me to learn it but I am more than willing.