I have installed Linux. This is a rite of passage for a longtime Mac user with a UNIX vocabulary of say, two dozen verbs and assorted modifiers. I doubt I would get on a plane with that, a phrasebook, and blind optimism, but with the help of two pages of instructions from the friends who lent me the CDs, some on-line manuals, various nudges from helpful IT types when I hit the “o-mi-God there’s still WINDOWS on this machine and it won’t do the automatic partition that I was counting on it to do …” impasse, I have installed Linux. There is a lawless streak in me that got a great kick out of doing one of the very things that one learns very early on that One Must Not Even Contemplate: formatting the hard-drive. I privately cherish the knowledge that I could, if I wanted, type rm *.*, and nothing would stop me. Even though I am a great believer in safe design and constraints, it still bugs me to be asked, over and over again, “Are you really sure you want to do that?” That said, I found myself tiptoeing around with exceeding delicacy and trepidation, manual on my lap, when I found myself only able to log in as root, having botched the creation of the user account. Me with my 24-verb vocabulary, working out how to tell it to add me to my own system. And it still refuses to recognize there is a world out there. Nope, says it, your cable company is not a valid domain name. How, says I, do you KNOW the the name of my cable company. I never told you that. You never gave me the chance to tell you it. And all the manuals talk about tools I don’t seem to have installed yet, or edit filenames beginning with dots, which I gather can be a Very Unwise Thing To Do. Still, I am on my way to having a working Linux-box, which I plan to turn into a Bioinformatics workstation, and get down to some consolidation of all the half-digested matter in my Introduction to Bioinformatics course.