By Stephen Bucaro

After you install Linux you usually find your display in a low resolution mode. If you were installing Windows, you would then install driver for your video card and use Display utility in Control Panel to change to a higher resolution. Unfortunately, with Linux things are not so easy.

Linux uses a free version of X Window System called Xfree86 to control your display. Xfree86 supports VGA, Super VGA, and some accelerated video adapters. If you have a new video card, or new motherboard with on-board video, you may want to download latest version of Xfree86 from ftp://ftp.xfree86.org

The configuration for Xfree86 is in a file named XF86Config located in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11. This file is created and edited by a program called Xconfigurator.

In Windows, monitor is viewed as a "dumb box" driven by a video card which is controlled by a video driver program. Xconfigurator seems to think that video cards don't exist and it requires you enter all kinds of obtuse information about your monitor such as horizontal sync range, vertical sync range, amount of video memory, and which clock chip you have.

If you have a no-name monitor like I do, you may not know all of these parameters. You may get stuck in display configuration step of Linux installation. This is one reason why I say "Linux is not ready for prime time".

This is how it should work: Linux detects your video card and configures itself.

By Stephen Bucaro

Linux uses a whole different file system philosophy than Windows. Windows automatically assigns a drive letter to every partition and drive it finds. But Linux makes every partition and drive a subdirectory of root (/) partition. If you are a Windows user, you may get confused when you try to use Linux.

No matter how many partitions, hard drives, or floppy drives your computer has, Linux File Manager displays everything in a single directory tree under root directory indicated by a slash (/). Every partition or drive is "mounted" onto directory tree, and appears in File Manager as a subdirectory.

Linux needs at least three partitions to work, root partition, /boot partition, and swap partition. The root partition is mounted at startup. The root directory itself doesn't contain any files, just subdirectories. The /boot partition contains files used to boot system. The swap partition is used as "virtual memory".

When operating system needs more memory than there is available in system's RAM, it can use disk space to emulate memory. As system operates, data is swapped back and forth between RAM and swap partition. The swap partition doesn't have a mount point because it's a system file and is never accessed directly by user.

Note: Linux, Internet, and rest of computing world use forward slashes to form directory paths. Only Windows uses back-slashes to form directory paths. The back-slash also represents an ASCII escape character, resulting in all kinds of bugs in Windows programs.