I have a regular turnover of machines at home, with currently six PCs in the house, with my office machine, an SAP supplied laptop, my wife's desktop, laptop, and my son's machine, which is my old office PC, and a really ancient Gateway rotting in a cupboard somewhere. I mean, it's not at Jerry Pournelle levels yet, but I do have a lot of hardware.
So, given that my son, who is six and is actually more interested in Gameboy, and too small to use the Internet, at least not without continuous supervision, is going to have his machine requisitioned, and used for the great SUSE experiment. I have been mouthing off about the annoyances, dangers and perils of DRM and some aspects of the future plans of Microsoft around Trusted Computing, and so I thought it was time to regain my nerd credentials and get back onto UNIX. To give you an idea of the length of time since I used UNIX in anger, it was using an ICL SPARC based server, with System V. So that ages me. In other words I haven't had a bash at UNIX for a long time. (Arf. nerd joke)
Bought Suse 10 off Amazon, to get the English version, and I am going to completely dedicate this old Dell pentium IV one GHz to the new OS. Bit of a test bed for future use. Basically, it will be my tin foil hat machine. If it all goes terribly wrong in the world of Windows, I have a fallback plan. (Incidentally, it turns out that tinfoil hats do not work. How tragic.)
I will let you know how I get on with it.
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