COMMENTARY--Hello from Linux! Today's column, a follow-up to my first "Life with Linux" story, is being prepared using the KWord word processor that's included with the KDE desktop I installed atop Red Hat Linux 7.3 Personal Edition. So far, so good. At the end of the last column, I was struggling with how to change the screen resolution on my monitor. Turns out this is managed by a piece of middleware called X Windows, familiar to all in the Linux/Unix community. Alas, the only way to change the screen from low-resolution 640x480 to a more useful 1024x768 was to run a program called Xconfigurer from the command prompt. Or I could simply reinstall the OS, which seemed like the easier way out.

I used the opportunity to change machines, too. Moving from a 166MHz Pentium with something like 10MB RAM to a 500MHz AMD K6 with 256MB RAM had, as expected, a dramatic effect on system performance. So far, Linux has run just fine, hasn't crashed, and seems to offer tremendous flexibility, but this comes at the price of complexity. Up to a point, Linux is as easy to use as any other mainstream operating system. But after that point is passed, the water gets very deep, very quickly--as my monitor resolution issue serves to illustrate. Windows also suffers from this "easy up to a point" issue, but the point is a good bit farther down the road than it is in Linux.