WillShattuck.com

My main desktop computer (TWEAKED) was having issues tonight so I did a "chkdsk /r c:" upon reboot.  During the first 3% of Stage 4 my hard drive started making a pinging sound.  Being a computer technician I know that is not good.  I shut the computer down and restarted again.  It only detected my secondary hard drive (Mepis Linux), but not my main hard drive (Windows).  Since this computer was given to me by a friend I do not have any of the original installation media so I feel left in the dust.

Fortunately, there is this other operating system out there called Linux.  I have tried several distributions of Linux over the last 5 years and found that I prefer those that use the packaging tool called "apt", which is a Debian tool.  If I can find a distro that uses apt and is desktop friendly that is what I am going to continue to use on this desktop.  I have always wanted to switch to Linux full time on one of my systems.  Heh, now appears to be the time to do this.

As a result of this I think I am going to do a series of reviews on various Linux distributions.  I will create a separate post that will outline the criteria I will have for each distribution.  I am thinking that I will use each distribution for a month before I switch.  I do not know if that will be completely feasible, but we will see.

If anyone has comments on which distributions I should try please leave them in the comments of this post or the next post (which should be up in a couple of days).  The laptop I am using now has Windows XP on it so I am not completely moving away from Windows.  In today’s world you cannot completely move away from either Windows or Mac OS unless the shop you work in solely uses Linux.  My work has three Linux boxes (one NAS, two DB servers), but the other 30 are all Windows 2000/2003 servers.

Thank you for any comments that you have on which distributions I should try.