I’ve had a spare computer by my side running Linux for a couple of years now. I started out with a very old, slow PC that struggled to run an ancient version of Red Hat Linux. It was unusable as a desktop machine, but did the job as a development web server for testing sites before unleashing them onto a live server.

When I upgraded my desktop PC (or rather Steve bought a new PC and I got his cast-off, the normal pattern in our office) I decided it was a good opportunity to try Linux on a more realistic platform: my discarded 733 MHz Pentium III. I didn’t want to spend days fiddling about trying to get things working though, so after due research online I plumped for recently-released Xandros, trumpeted as a newbie-friendly release.

It certainly did what it said on the box: I popped the Xandros CD into the drive, clicked a few buttons, and then left it to install. Within half an hour I had a working system — it was easier to install than Windows! I was favourably impressed by the fact that everything worked immediately: all devices recognised, Internet connection working, even file-sharing with the Windows PCs on the network was easily achieved. And it looked very nice too, with a desktop environment barely distinguishable from Windows.

After that, I installed XAMPP, a one-stop way of getting Apache, PHP and MySQL running so that I could continue to use the PC as a development server. That too went smoothly … it seemed Linux was truly “ready for the desktop” — but Xandros stayed on the spare desk and I continued to work on my trusty Windows 2000 PC.

Next instalment: the application that convinced me to push the Windows PC aside and put the Linux box on my desk!