A Mac has invaded my house!

[CentralMass]

57. I recently procuured a Toshiba laptop that was being tossed

because it got bricked when the owner attempted to upgrade to Win10 while overseas.

It has a quad- core cpu with a 500gig hard drive and no cd/dvd drive. The boot record had gotten corrupted during the WIN10 update and the bootup repair option did not work.

So I booted it up with a live version of Fedora (Linux) off of a usb stick and took a look at it. Since the owner had upgraded and did not want it back i did a permanent install of Fedora on the hard drive.

Fedora desktop ($0) is pretty slick. It has windows like feel and comes with everything yhat the typical user needs for free if you can download the install onto a usb stick and have internet acess.

There is an applications tab at the top left that allows you to start up native Linux apps and an option to install additional free native apps.

It has (native) Firefox and chromium (the Linux version of chrome) and an open software version (LibreOffice) of Microsoft office.

It also has an app called PlayLinux that has a long list of windows programs that you can select and install for free with a click it will install and run them like you were on Windows. .For instance internet explorer ie8. So you dont have to be a Linux geek to use it.

It also has a tool to create virtual machines where.it partions the disk and lets you install other operating systems. I've created one VM and installed Ubuntu Linux on it. If i can find a cheap online install of windows 7 or 8 install , i'll create a windows VM.

You can run (login) to these vm's on the laptop itself or remote into them from other computers on your network.