I am so pleased to finally have a local Linux installation, which lets me use CPAN and run Perl on my local machine, exactly the way I do when I'm accessing CPAN on the offsite dedicated Linux server I use for my web site. I never have been happy with the locally installed Windows implementations of Perl.
I'm using Ubuntu 5.04, and even managed to get it to drive both of my monitors at the same time!
My machine is a Dell Dimension 4500, which had been running only Windows XP. Ubuntu let me set up a partition on the hard drive for Linux, and at startup Grub asks which operating system I'd like to boot into.
Making enough free space on the hard drive was a bit of a challenge because the XP disk defragmenter (and even the commercial Diskeeper defragmenter I used as well) didn't move all the data to one end of the hard drive. But I found a marvelous command-line utility that did just that: it's called DIRMS.exe (which the author says stands for "Do It Right, Micro Soft)."
