Virtual Coder

I’ve been using Windows for many years now but after using Vista for a while recently i’ve thought it’s time to look into an alternative to Microsoft. Vista isn’t a particularly bad operating system but there were a few things that bugged me when using it.

I’m no stranger to using Linux, a few years ago i worked for a company that had many Linux boxes running as web and database servers. It was my job to set up and maintain these systems. Linux as a desktop is something I’ve not really tried though. I currently have Gentoo Linux installed as a dual boot system with Windows on a secondary PC at home. So far I’ve not made much much use of this as i mainly use it as mysql/php development and testing system for any web based projects that i’m working on.

My main PC is currently set up as a dual boot system between Windows XP and Windows XP 64. Linux is going to be an additional OS on the PC as at this point i still rely on quite a few Windows only programs so i can’t switch over completely just yet.

For the installation I’m going to go for the 64 bit version of Gentoo.  One of the big advantages of Gentoo over other distributions such as Ubuntu is that it doesn’t come with a pre-installed set of packages so you can install only what you want on the system. One downside of it is that the package installer system portage downloads and compiles packages from source code so installing new programs can sometimes be a slow process.

I’m going to start the install process now and will document my process and experiences here as i go.