WARNING: A geeky post!

Its not easy to learn how to use a new operating system from scratch, with no one to teach.

I felt like I was back in primary school days, when I got my first PC, a 80486 IPC running on Win 3.1. I still remembered I just came home from school that day when I saw the PC in the living room. It was switched on and showing the desktop, which was left there for testing to ensure it did not crash. I was curious and clicked on an icon. A window popped up and my heart skipped a beat because I did not know how to close the window. Haha I thought I did some irreversible changes to the computer so i quickly ran off.

Its the same nervous feeling now that I'm playing (or rather, trying to play) around with Fedora Core. I'm afraid a wrong move i make will harm the system. Haha.

Firstly, the documentation is full of words and that puts me off.

Secondly. the help system embedded in the terminal is greek to me, so I could not understand half of what its saying.

Thirdly, Linux is different from Windows in terms of concept; Linux is a multi-user environment and it runs on a tree-like system where everything else, from normal text files to entire hard drives, are nodes linked to the root. So I dunno where all the important system files are located for me to explore.

Fourthly, there's a whole new lot of extensions, so instead of .exe or .bmp or whatever, they are now .out or .rpm.

Fifthly(is there such a word?), the strength of Linux seems to lie in the terminal (aka the DOS-like screen) rather than the GUI. I have no complaints about it, just that its difficult to learn when I can see nothing but text.

I'm not touching Linux for now, primarily because I need to do my homework. Haha. But then again, there are some problems with the updating of my Fedora Core. Two of the components cannot be updated because of "package dependency" problems, then it hung at the updating screen a few times, and now it hangs at the installation screen. I give up.

I don't blame it actually. Its not easy to handle 243 updates.

Good news is that the latest stable version of Fedora Core, the fifth version, will be out next monday. I shall then take out some time to play with it. This shall be my first step to coming up with my own OS. Muahaha.