I have been redoing our "family computer" this week, as I am changing jobs and have needed to use a computer in between the end of my work at Magenic and the start of my work at my soon-to-be employer (more details on that shortly). As a part of overhauling our family computer, I moved from Windows Media Center Edition (never a good fit for the older hardware on our family computer) to two new operating systems on separate partitions: Windows Vista Beta 1 and Novell's Linux Desktop (SUSE, if I correctly understand the nomenclature).

My first observation was that Linux's installation and boot process is much more polished and smooth than the last time I wrote an editorial about it. On my older hardware (a 1 GHz CPU with 512MB), I also noticed that it seemed to run faster than Vista Beta 1.

Having said all of this, Vista was even more polished, full of features, and easy to use. I was happy using it as my primary operating system (yes, Microsoft strongly advises against this) for two weeks, and then I installed Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 on it. I had a hard time following exactly what combination of Visual Studio, WinFX, and Windows I should install in order to get the optimal experience of building Avalon and Indigo applications - but I assumed that these were the most stable bits, so they should work well together.

About a day after I made this installation, my wife complained that things were running extremely slowly on our computer. I checked it out for myself and - using Task Manager - was able to identify that one of the core CLR processes on the OS was periodically (every 10 minutes or so) zooming up to 100 percent CPU usage and rendering the machine unusable. At first, of course, I just showed my wife how to kill the process. Then it became apparent that having to kill a process every 10 minutes was not really a great way to work, so I decided to reinstall Vista.

Now here is where the story gets interesting. I used Linux to resize the Vista partition, hoping that I could make enough room to put XP Home Edition on the machine (which is what the computer originally came with) for my wife to use, while I continued struggling on with Vista. Unfortunately, after the resizing, Vista refused to boot. Was this Linux's fault? Was it Vista? I really don't know - having become very aware now that I am not an IT professional, merely a developer.

I thought I could outsmart the situation by using the "Repair" functionality of Windows. Unfortunately, in this Beta version, Vista didn't know how to repair the damage. So, I deleted my Linux partition and tried reinstalling Vista there. I figured I could have one partition of Vista that I could boot and then grab my data off the preexisting Vista partition.

When I did this, all of the data on my first Vista partition got erased. All that got put there were Vista's boot files. This caused me to lose two weeks' worth of e-mail and data!

Once I accepted that my data was gone, I spent a day struggling to get Linux, Windows XP Home, and Vista Beta 1 all installed and running on the same machine. The secret seemed to be installing XP first, installing Vista second, and Linux third. At this point I'd been running all three for about a week and was enjoying all of them for different purposes.

So, in honor of Linux having established a permanent place on my family's home computer, I present our open source focus issue! Much within these pages is directly related to Linux, but almost all of it has been inspired by Linux in some fashion or another. Enjoy!