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Some weeks ago my father got one of those dialers (and one or two virus) in his computer, i don’t know how and i don’t even care. I wont make a post about how to delete a virus or stuff like that….. The thing is that this incident consumed me some hours of troubleshooting and eventually more hours formating and reinstalling the box. How was this time wasted ?

- FIrst of all i brought to my house only the box (no mouse, monitor, keyword etc….) so i spent like 30 minutes trying all the mice in the house to find that none of the usb or ps/2 mice were working in windows xp (yes a simple mouse, all those mice were working on linux boxes). I finally got an old mouse working and could continue.

- Formated the box and reinstalled os, 1 hour or so….

- Installed drivers and and upgraded the os 1 hour more.

- Installed office antivirus, antispyware, antiadware…. 2 Hours

As you see “Windows just works”, but no operating system is perfect, not even linux. That’s why like 2 months ago i wiped an opensuse installations cause it was doing some weirds things (nothing big, but i was too lazy) so i grabbed my ubuntu cd and reinstalled the os. In one hour i was finish with a new system everything working, office suite and stuff….

So i wonder why people keep saying that “Windows just woks” when it dosen’t…… (and this was just the installation, caused by something that in linux dosent even exist)

Finally, it will not be fair (for all of you that think that Linux is not ready for the non-geek people[2]) not note that my father a 51 years old layer uses both Windows and Linux.

[1] http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=968

[2] http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20070913/linuxs-free-system-is-now-easier-to-use-but-not-for-everyone/

So… i finally managed to install opensuse, first impression was a bit slow system, mostly when loading applications. Once application is loaded it seems similar to my previous installation of ubuntu 6.10. Now i’m trying to add new repo with the yast wizard and this is taking way too long, i dont know what the heck it is downloading. My father just told me that the computer was a bit slow so, ill see if i can optimize this a bit….

I’m installing opensuse 10.2 on my family box and lets say that my installation experience got back to the linux old days. So far what i know from opensuse is,

-> You need to download a 3.7 DVD image.
-> Ugly Installer, no graphic mode (i have a p4 2.0 512 mb ram).

-> After installation opensuse did not boot.

Nothing has changed since i installed Suse 7.3 back in 2002.

If you are wondering why i am not installing ubuntu on this box, is just because it take ages to boot and thought on giving a chance to an other distro. Lets see if this end up working.