Last friday I suddenly decided that I was going to install Linux on this machine's spare partition.

Now, I've not had good luck with Linux in the past, partly because the tulip-chip NIC drivers dislike my other machine, which has two Linksys cards in it, and partly because I'm the sort of user who almost always knows enough to be dangerous, but only usually knows enough to fix it.

I've used several distros, including Corel, Debian, and Slackware. I've also tried using NetBSD.

This time, I decided to use Mandrake 9.0. I also installed it on the new Dell, which only has one NIC, and that is a 3com.

So far so good. (I'm running under it right now.)

If only I could get it to recognize my tablet, then ... well, I'd probably use it at least a bit more often. There's still Lightwave, Paint Shop Pro, and Painter 6 to think about.