Converting to Linux full time was not a one day journey, it took about a week. There was a lot of hair pulling and cursing, and a lot of yelling while I was searching on Google.

And now, I’d like to share the secrets to my victory over the waves of bullshit.

1. Pay attention to when the article you are reading was written. If it is older than six months, try to find something newer. If it’s a year or more old, ignore it. This is critical. This is the ONLY way I was able to get anything working.
2. Look for a forum post or tutorial, but don’t ignore the program documentation. MAN pages and doco are good for explaining the various functions and flags of a command, but they are piss poor at explaining how to actually do something. Forums are great for explaining how to complete tasks, but they are piss poor at keeping up to date on what the functions and flags of a command do. In the time between when your tutorial was written and now, that “-interface eth0″ on the command could have changed to a “netint /dev/eth0″ in a config file, and it will cause you heartache.
3. Don’t get too hung up on built from source versus binary. I had a severe build-it-from-source hardon from my FreeBSD days. The various source based distros out there right now suck, and linux dependency checking when building from source sucks. If there’s a repository for the software, use it unless there’s a good reason you can’t.
4. Don’t get too hung up on open source or licensing. If you do, you’ll miss out on some of the more awesome software out there.
5. Learn how to launch the program verbosely. This is important all the way around for figuring out if you screwed up a config file or if there’s a dependency missing. Usually a V or v flag will do it.
6. Learn where the log files are for the program you’re having problems with. Don’t just assume that all it’s output is coming to you on the command line.
7. Get some fun things working early on. That way when you’re getting totally bogged down in bluetooth or whatever, you can go wobble your windows or surf the internet or play some games or something to calm you down. I can’t tell you how many times in my history with Linux/BSD I would freak out just because I never spent the time to get browsing the internet working first.
8. Have another machine you can search the internet on hand. A friend’s computer, a spare machine, whatever. I had my laptop so when I was way off the charts trying to get wireless working, I could look for articles about it. Having a dual boot setup so you can go back into Windows to try is not ideal for this purpose, because it makes shit take way too long.
9. Two partitions. These days it’s very common to have a huge, monolithic partition for your OS and data, but I definitely think keeping / and /home separate is a good idea. It lets you keep your important files, like your pictures and music and whatnot, even if you end up screwing things up totally have have to reinstall.
10. Try try again. For me, the distro that stuck was Ubuntu, but it’s not the be all end all. Try a couple distros to see if you like them. Maybe Fedora is your boy, or straight up Debian, or Slackware, or one of the liveCD type distros installed to your disk, or you feel crazy and want to do Gentoo. PC-BSD is getting some high praise, and I hear they have gotten FreeBSD straightened out to one degree or another. CDR’s are cheap as hell.

And now for a couple of pages that helped me immensely.

Linux6400
Tom’s Technotes
Ubuntu Wiki : MX1000 buttons
The WineHQ app database

Last post harping on my conversion to Linux for a while, I promise.