The first order of business was to reformat the WallStreet's 10 gigabyte Toshiba hard drive. I had already backed up my files to the little Que FireWire Quadslim M2 hard drive, so we were all set to go. We used a Mac OS 9.1 disk and Drive Setup to partition the Toshiba drive into six volumes:

• Three HFS+ extended volumes for my normal Mac OS activities
• One small HFS standard 30 MB partition as a Linux boot partition, which is necessary because information on the boot process is stored there by Linux
• A 128 MB Linux swap partition for the "virtual memory" in Linux in the A/UX swap format
• The mean a A/UX Linux partition for SuSE Linux itself.

This all went very smoothly and quickly using the custom setup dialog in Mac OS 9.1 Drive Setup.

The next step was to install a OS 9.1 System on one of the Mac OS partitions in order to boot the WallStreet from so we could use the SuSE Linux install CD. With later Power Macs that have the "New World" ROM, you can skip this step and just boot from the SuSE Linux CD itself.

Once Mac OS 9.1 was installed and we had rebooted, we inserted the first (of six) SuSE Linux CDs and found the boot loader control panel which is called BootX App. With this control panel you can remove control from the Mac OS in start-up SuSE Linux to begin the install process.

This worked OK but the first snag we ran into was that the SuSE Linux installer did not display properly on the WallStreet's 12.1-inch 800 x 600 monitor. The window was too large for the display, and obscured the dialog buttons and part of the content. At this point we could have reverted to a command line option for the installation, but we decided intead to begin over with the WallStreet connected to a 15-inch VGA external monitor, which displayed the graphical installation interface properly.

SuSE Linux comes with a graphical interface installation tool called YAST2, which guides you through the installation with the help of screen dialogs which include a field with instruction prompts and tips. It looks at the hardware and integrates the components it recognizes into the System. The process is shown graphically. When it is finished with a procedure it goes on automatcally to the next one.

The first procedures involve selecting a language -- we chose English (US); a keyboard lay out; and a time zone, which in our case was Canada/Atlantic.

The next chore is selecting a basic software package for your system. SuSE Linux ships with approximately 1500 applications, but to simplify things you are offered several package to choose from. We chose the standard system to start out with. You can always install more software later.

The next stepis to tell SuSE Linux your name, and choose a user loggin and password, as well as a "root" system administrator password,. Since I will be the only user on this computer we use the same password for both.

At that point we were ready to let the installer do its stuff, and with the package we chose the installation run took about fifteen minutes. By this time it was after 2:00 a.m., and Tristan wanted you get on the road, so we just quickly logged in and booted from Linux on my WallStreet for the first time. The computer booted up properly, and now worked fine on the power books native screen.

That is as far as I have preceded so far. I am a complete Linux virgin, and I can see that there is going to be a steep learning curve to climb. I will now have to delve into that 500 page manual that ships with SuSE Linux 7.1, and try and figure out how to use the thing. It should be an adventure.

However, I have established that people who have little or no Linux experience can successfully install SuSE Linux on a Macintosh. I am told that the installation procedure tends to be the biggest hurdle to surmount for Linux newbies, and while the installation is not nearly as transparent a user-friendly experience as installing the classic Mac OS (which I am beginning to appreciate more and more as I experiment with OSX and Linux), it is certainly doable.

One final note for today, I also took a crack at installing Mac OS X on the reformatted hard drive. Unfortunately, I got exactly the same response as I did in my first attempt three weeks ago. The WallStreet simply refuses to recognize the OS X install disk as a boot volume.