I originally wanted to call this post (or series of posts) “Patterns of Home Computing” and provide a lot more background on how I use my various computers at home. However, as I really need to catch some sleep I will keep this initial posting reasonably short.

About 2 months ago, I have bought two new laptops for me and my wife. I am running Windows XP on my laptop, which I mostly use for Email, web browsing, Microsoft Office, and some occasional programming. With a wireless network, it’s great to be able to do these kinds of things from anywhere in the house, and it has changed the way I use my computers.

My main desktop PC is an OK but slightly outdated Athlon-1800, on which I have been running Windows XP up to now as well. Now that I have a Windows-based laptop that I use for all of my office-type work, I am planning to make Linux the primary OS on my desktop. In fact, I installed Fedora Core 2 on a spare partition a couple of days ago, and now I am in the process of slowly installing all the applications I need and configuring my system.

There are many different things that I like to do with my PC, for some of which Linux still is not ideally suited (such as games, even though the situation has improved tremendously since the last time I was seriously running Linux, about 6 years ago). Part of this has to do with lack of driver support (for example I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, for which 3D-accelerated drivers don’t exist yet for XFree86 4.4).

I won’t go into all the specifics here. Instead, I have setup a Wiki page on Converting to Linux. I just added some initial information on ATI driver support and games, and I will expand on this in the next few days to cover other topics of relevance (for me, anyways), such as NTFS support, various other types of applications (media players, music software), etc.