Burton's Bytes

I'M writing this review on a laptop. It runs Windows and the first time it booted I returned a few minutes later to find that it had crashed. I pressed the Alt-Ctrl-Del combination to see what was causing the hold up and got the dreaded blue screen of death. There was nothing for it but to turn off and reboot.

Now I'm pretty lucky because my laptop is generally very stable - for a Windows machine. It only crashes on average once a month and I rarely lose my work. That's partly because I am very careful about which applications I run on it. I use the laptop for work so it never sees a PC game and it only has a select number of programmes (Microsoft Office, Photoshop Elements and ACDSee is about the lot) installed; consequently, it has lots of hard disk space that is kept in tip top condition via Scandisk and the defrag utility. It also has a decent firewall and up-to-date anti-virus software.

That's all well and good but the beauty of a PC is the machine's ability to run all kinds of software. Yet, as anyone who installs a lot of demos or runs software given away by magazines knows, filling your machine with software slows Windows to a crawl. Eventually you have no option but to format the hard drive and start again with a "virgin" system.

It shouldn't be this way and, thanks to the incredible generosity of a former student of the University of Helsinki, it needn't be.

On August 25, 1991, a young man called Linus Torvalds posted a message to the Usenet group comp.os.minix asking for volunteers to help in the creation of a new operating system for PCs.

The response was incredible and within a short time, programmers around the world were beavering away on what would become the free operating system known as Linux.

Even better, Linux is now so powerful and user-friendly that it really has become a viable alternative to Windows. And true to the original ethos, you can still get hold of it for free.

Even more exciting, most of the software available for Linux is completely gratis as well.

So here's the scoop: if you want a PC that's more stable than a Windows machine, does most of the things you already enjoy about your PC and doesn't cost you a penny for extra software, then look to Linux.

Of course, most of us are comfortable with our Windows operating environment, even if it is a bit flaky. We're wary of changing in case we don't like what we find and, if we do, who's to say if Linux will run with all our peripherals? (Remember what a chew it was migrating from Windows 9x to Windows XP?)

Incredibly, there is a way to experience the joy of Linux without making any changes to your PC.

Moving To Linux, a new book by expert Marcel Gagne, includes a CD ROM that installs the operating system onto your machine - and configures your printers, scanners, USB devices - without writing a single file to your hard disk. All you do is pop the CD into your machine and boot as normal - the disk does the rest.

Even more amazingly, the disk is packed with a vast repository of free software that's ready for you to try.

There's a full office suite (OpenOffice) that is fully featured and backwards compatible with Microsoft Office. That way, you can use Linux at home but still swap files with buddies who haven't opened their eyes to the joys of an alternative to Windows or edit files from work.

The interface is very familiar; anyone who uses M/S Office will feel right at home. The suite includes a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation programme.

Digital photographer users are well catered for as well. It may have a bizarre name, but The GIMP (it's a recursive acronym that stands for GNUs not Unix Image Programme) is a full-blown rival to Adobe Photoshop. Only it doesn't cost more than £500.

In fact, it's so good that the software is already in use with Hollywood special effects studios where it helped create, among others, Star Trek: Nemesis and Shrek.

Just about everything that can be achieved in Photoshop is do-able with GIMP, from simple photo tinkering to amazing works of digital art. You can get a version that runs on Windows but the latest edition is always available on Linux first.

The CD contains hundreds more programmes, including games (I was playing Battleships for hours), email and web browsing. If you want to try Linux out - and the book holds your hand at every step - then this is the way to do it.

The only downside is the sluggishness, a consequence of running everything straight from CD (even the fastest CD is slower than a creaky old hard disk) and I'd recommend a decent PC to get the best from it (anything more than a 1.4 Ghz processor and 256MB RAM should do the trick).

At the beginning of this review I said this article was being written on a Windows PC. That was true... but it was finished on the same laptop now running OpenOffice on Linux and I couldn't tell the difference.

I'm hooked - and I think you will be too.

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