Technically, all Linux distibutions are free, you just pay for the cost of burning the CD's or havig them burnt for you. My distribution of Mandrake 8.2 cost me £9 and with that I can run a full blown Unix interface, web server, the works...

Some distros cost more for various reasons. Some are bundled with non-GPL software, meaning it has to be paid for (an example is Sun's Star Office or the Mandrake 8.1 gaming edition which comes bundled with The Sims). The boxed distibutions you will see in computer stores priced at about £40 are more expensive because they contain extensive manuals etc, as well as (perhaps) some of the non-free software.

You can find Linux distributions all over the place; my flatmate bought a £20 book "The Redhat Bible" that came with Redhat 6, and if you've got the time and patience you can even download the disc images to your PC and burn them onto CD. Just pop 'em in your CD drive, boot from them and bingo - you're into the install.

Linux is a very sharp change from windows, which is all I've ever really used... some brief flirtations with apple, but nothing spectacular. One thing you need to know about Linux: it's not as easy to use as windows, not by a long chalk, but it will let you do far more stuff.

You're right about the SCSI thing with Linux; Unix based OS's write to the hard drive ("swap file") much more than Windows does, hence anything that reduces this time, such as SCSI, gives a significant performance increase. Conversely, Unix systems use far less processing power and much less RAM than windows does.

The standard for cheap high-load servers on the net is a box (usually intel - typically a 500 MHz P3 or thereabout) running a Linux distro (usually redhat) with a gig or so of RAM (servers need lots of RAM to remain fast); this configuration would more than adequately serve a desktop (obvously, you don't need the gig of RAM!). I've seen Linux running on 386's, and Linux with Xwindows (i.e. Linux's primary GUI) running on 486's. It'll slow down if you do fancy graphical whizz bangs, but it'll still run.

If you're thinking about SCSI, remember it's expensive; HDD's are typically three times the price of an average IDE drive. Personally, if you're only wanting to tinker with it, a standard IDE configuration will do you fine, although if you want the best speed obviously SCSI rules! Though like cyrax says, it can get hot.

Oh what, you have no programming experience? Oh well, Linux is not for you. Haha, only joking. No, I have no programming experience either; Linux has of late been designed for the average idiot to be able to install it and do stuff. The tricky parts are basically just understanding how *nix handles things - you'll need to learn what terms such as mounting and the like mean - and secondly the use of the terminal.

The terminal is to Linux what DOS used to be to windows. It's a command line interface (not entirely unlike DOS for that matter) which you can use to do things with your system that the software can't (which isn't alot actually), but the terminal will let you do and see things that aren't included/shown in the GUI.

First time I used the terminal, I didn't have a clue what i was doing (having never used DOS or read any of the documentation), but it's all a matter of remembering a few simple commands. For instance:

sdtpikachu: su
password:
home: cd downloads
downloads: tar xvjf program.tar.gz
:extracting files:
downloads cd programfolder
program folder: ./configure
:compiling code:
program folder: make
program folder: make install

All looks very confusing I know, so I'll talk you through it.
Call up the terminal and you start off in your /home directory. You then type in the "su" command to change user. You are then given a password prompt, upon which I enter the root password (in case you don't know, root is the *nix term for system administrator). I remain in the home directory, but now have the rights to install software. I then use the "cd downloads" to go to the downloads folder (which was made earlier and had a few files put in it). I know there is a program package in here called program.tar.gz (.tar shows that the file is a "tarball" and contains many small filesm whilst .gz shows the file has been compressed by gzip). I then type "tar xvjf program.tar.gz" to do several things: the tar command shows there's a tarball there (I think), the x extracts the files, the v... umm... I can't remember what the v does... the j uncompresses/unzips the files using gzip, and f creates a folder to put them in.

I then cd into the folder that was just made (which is now full of the uncompressed source code), and with ./configure I compile the code. "make" and "make istall" will install the files to the bin (for binaries) folders.

I know it all sounds hellish, but at any time you can type --help to be given a list of options over what to do - context sensitive too!

If you want to give Linux a try, I would recommend the Mandrake or SuSE distributions; these are the two that concentrate hardest on making the OS as easy to install and us as possible. Installing my version of mandrake coudn't have been simpler (even the "expert install" was a breeze), it will automatically detect almost all hardware mounted (there are some exotic hardware confugrations that Linux has trouble with, mainly due to manafacturers not releasing the drivers for their hardware to the linux developers).

Some words of advice: if you can, partition your hard drives BEFORE installing Linux as the Linux partitioners don't tend to be as intuitive or forgiving as programs like partition magic. And as always, make sure you defrag before partitioning anything! I partitioned my C drive in two with PM before installing Linux on it as well (and then reformatted the Linux file system to ReiserFS, which doesn't need defregging, at install) and put another partition on my G drive, a 500 MB swap file.

Installing it is easy, using the graphical environments is easy (I recommend GNOME - KDE is too much like Windows, and runs slower), getting to know the system isn't, but be assured that once you do there'll be nothing you can't do, mwah ha hah! Remember that setting up your owen server will be exactly like setting up one of the internets several million Linux servers (Linux servers running Apache and the like make up an estimated 61% of the total - it's cheap/free, and more capable than Microsofts efforts). For me, starting to learn Linux has been very rewarding, and I've learnt a helluva lot about how computers work.

Anyway, here's some links to keep you busy:


Tux, the Linux Penguin

SuSE homepage

Mandrake homepage

Surprise everyone. Surprise yourself. Surprise Bill Gates.

Hope I haven't scared you off!