I've come to the conclusion that I need something to fill my spare time with. When I was teaching, it was reading. Now, I am fixated on computers and everything computer related. My newest toy is my iPhone. Two of my favorite features are the 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. These are two things I use quite regulary, Wi-Fi in coffee shops to stay in touch with the outside world and Bluetooth because I'm too lazy to hold my phone while I talk on it. It's also got the cool touch screen feature.

Before the iPhone, it was Ubuntu's latest distro, Hardy Heron (version 8.04). This is my second foray into the Linux world, the first was way back in 1990 something with Fedora 7.x and it was utterly unsuccessful (no drivers for my Conexant modem chipset). Ubuntu's a great Linux, for starters and "apprentice" level users both, however, those who are masters with Linux would probably find it to be a little "light" in functionality. Ok, don't take that last statement as me saying I'm a "master" Linux user, I fall in between starter and "apprentice" (leaning more towards the starter side of the spectrum). I've been playing with Ubuntu for several months now and, to be honest, it's starting to get a little boring. I've already installed, uninstalled, and reinstalled every application that I use, played with all the cool little apps that Windows doesn't offer (for free, at least), and changed the desktop several times to a variety of "I hate Microsoft/Windows" themes;" there's tons of them, just do an image search using your favorite search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN; understandably not the best search engine for this particular query; or Webcrawler), then save it somewhere on your computer, right click on it and click on "set to wallpaper."

Now, it's time for a new toy. I saw a Xbox 360 the other day, along with a PSP and a Nintendo Wii, all three tickled my fancy, but they cost more money than I really want to spend right now. So, I looked for a cost-free alternative and I found OpenSuSe 11.0. It was just released today, so part of the fun will be finding all the bugs that are in it and seeing if I can work around them. I'm going to treat this like I treated reading while I was teaching, I'm entertaining myself and I'm learning something. Ok, why learn Linux? Windows isn't going anywhere. That may be true, but fewer people are familiar with Linux than the masses that are familiar with Microsoft products. I'd rather be in the minority on this issue, especially when working in a highly competitive computer industry. So, my new toy is going to be like the little toys you buy toddlers to teach them what sounds cows make ("The cow goes 'moo'") and how to say their ABC's (anyone with little one's around will know what I'm talking about and will probably also be quick to point out their hatred for Elmo). I'm going to have fun with OpenSuSe and learn as much about Linux as I can. Then, when I find a better Linux distro, I'll switch to it. That's one of the nicest features of Linux, it's free, so changing OS's is painless (as long as you don't mind giving up a couple of hours to install an OS).

Wow, I just noticed that I had a lot of things in parenthesis in this post, I'm going to have to watch that on my next one, get's confusing. Ok, one more just for the road (as in, for old time's sake).

Oh yah, I spent the time to find these, so I'm going to post them as well.

More information on the OpenSuSe project.

Wikipedia article
BetaNews article