As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine.

So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros.

I visited the booths of several distros, Ubuntu, Suse, Red Hat and even BSD (which is NOT Linux but is an open source operating system), grabbing disks along the way. The plan was to give each a test drive, then choose one based on my experience. I ran into a bit of difficulty right off the bat, because my dear Inspiron wouldn't let me boot directly from the CD. Only the Ubuntu discs gave me the option of installing a utility that let me boot from CD, so I test drove the Hardy Heron versions of both Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

While Kubuntu features the KDE interface, which I'm familiar with, I ultimately chose the standard Gnome desktop version for the sake of variety.

On My Own