Welcome to the second part of Scott Berinato’s ongoing guest blog chronicling his Windows-to-Linux desktop migration experience.

We’re underway. Chris and I spent the better part of an afternoon burning ISO images onto CDs and then trying to install Novell Linux Desktop 9. Unfortunately, while booting, our slimline Dell desktop test PC would recognize the install CD, but it wouldn’t proceed with an install. This was annoying and time consuming.

Novell kindly stepped in--remember we have no IT support except ourselves, and that hardly ranks as professional support. It turns out we couldn’t use the Service Pack 2 install CD for a fresh install. We had to also burn the original Release Candidate CD. The Novell folks admitted this was kludgy, but also said it was going to be remedied with the next major release (which is available as Service Pack 3).

After that was cleared up, the install went smoothly. I even got printers loaded--thanks to a built-in printer wizard. A quick battle with FTP settings on both the Linux and Windows desktops was resolved and I pulled the ever-important "My Documents" folder from my Windows machine over to the Linux desktop. I was in business.

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