Back on my Mac, I had downloaded the latest version of Kubuntu Linux. This is a version of Ubuntu Linux which is configured out-of-the-box to use the K Desktop Environment (KDE) -- more on that later. Ubuntu has a lot of momentum in the Linux community and is regarded as being full-featured but easy to use, so I thought it would be a good choice. The file I downloaded designed to be burned to a CD-ROM which the computer boots off of, then uses graphical software to install itself to the hard drive. So I burned it to a CD and popped it into my new machine.
(An aside: Every computer deserves a name, and I later decided to name my new machine Weird Science. My creation. Is it real? It's my creation. I do not know. From my heart and from my hand, why can't people understand, my intentions... Moving right along.)
The system was set up to look for an OS on the hard drive first, then to look in the media drive. As mentioned above, there was no OS on the hard drive, so it found the OS on the CD-ROM in the media drive and started booting up. However, there was a problem... Part-way through the boot process, at the point where the graphical installation should have started, the system would hang. I restarted and restarted and kept trying, but would get no different results. Finally, I downloaded the regular version of Ubuntu Linux and tried with that; this would hang at the same point, only it would display a cryptic error message as well; something about the X windowing system not being properly configured or something. Both of these discs worked fine when I tried them in my parents' Dell, so I knew it wasn't a problem with the CDs being bad or something. Finally, I downloaded another version of Kubuntu which used a text-based installer instead of a graphical one. That one worked just fine, and finally let me get an operating system on my computer.
I wasn't home-free yet, though. When I started up the system and booted off of the hard drive, it would hang at exactly the same spot as when I tried to boot off of the CD. Damn.
Somewhere around here, I somehow discovered PC-BSD (probably through a Wikipedia article). This is a branch of the FreeBSD strand of Unix. FreeBSD itself is usually used for web servers and other heavy-duty uses, but PC-BSD, like Ubuntu, is designed to wrangle it into a form which is easy to use and install. (Linux itself is heavily inspired by Unix, but there are fundamental differences which make the two incompatible. However, it's possible and quite common for software to be ported between the two.) On a whim, I downloaded and burned a copy of that too. It booted just fine from the CD, it installed just fine, and then it booted just fine from the hard drive. I could have probably fiddled with settings in the Kubuntu installation to get it to work, but with PC-BSD, I had a computer that was already working. Maybe I've been a Mac user for too long, but I'd much rather be using a computer than fixing it.
However, I sacrifice a few things using Unix instead of Linux. As Linux has a great deal of momentum nowadays, a lot of free software is written with Linux in mind, so it has to be ported to Unix -- if it's compatible at all. This is relevant to my plans to use Weird Science as a PVR; it turns out a lot of the relevant software is currently Linux-only. I might give Linux another try in the future, but for now, my computer is fully funcitonal using PC-BSD; in fact, that's what I'm using as I write this.
It's getting late, so that'll be all for today. Tomorrow, I'll talk about using PC-BSD and its included apps, and my experiences trying to get my wi-fi card to work, my monitor to behave, and installing new applications.