I'm excited to report that my friend Mike, who is a published author and an editor for my writing from a previous position, now has a new Foresight Linux 1.1 install on his old IBM ThinkPad T20. Mike has all Macs in his house currently, so this was his only PC option for Linux. I told him I saw no reason we couldn't get something installed on it, even if it ran slow and the user was forced to limit simultaneous activities.

He pulled the T20 out of his closet, dusted it off, and burned some Foresight install disks. I learned that he had purchased it as a refurbished machine back in 2003, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to learn it only had 192 MB of RAM and a Pentium III processor. I didn't realize this was going to limit our install options, though; after the disc failed to boot to the installer, I had Mike bring the T20 to me and we worked together to get it installed.

We determined that our best option, since the discs were continuing to fail, was a network install. I supervised a network install from a shared ISO image. That took about three hours, and the remaining configuration and test run at the end was successful.

We took advantage of the install time, though, as I offered a crash course on basic Linux structure (this was his first time using it), how it compared to Windows with which he was familiar, and the Gnome Desktop Environment. We spent a lot of time talking about the "software appliance" concept, too, and what rPath offered as technologies for building them. Mike picked up everything pretty quickly and was anxious to explore his installed system.

I look forward to helping Mike learn more!