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Maximius

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I have fucking had it with Windows. This morning my wife went to save a story she has been writing and Windows lost it. When she tried to open the file, it said "Unexpected error" When she opened an older version and tried to cut and paste the formatting went fucking haywire, between wordpad (a microsoft product) and Word ( a microsoft product) the computer could not convert the file without mangling it.

 

I am fucking done with Windows. Can someone tell me anything about using Linux? Or where Bill Gates lives? Ive never used Linux before so Im totally lost.

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I have fucking had it with Windows.  This morning my wife went to save a story she has been writing and Windows lost it.  When she tried to open the file, it said "Unexpected error"  When she opened an older version and tried to cut and paste the formatting went fucking haywire, between wordpad (a microsoft product) and Word ( a microsoft product) the computer could not convert the file without mangling it. 

 

I am fucking done with Windows.  Can someone tell me anything about using Linux?  Or where Bill Gates lives?  Ive never used Linux before so Im totally lost.

 

I don't know a lot about it myself but I've heard that the Debian build of Linux is pretty user friendly and robust. Perhaps give that a google and see what comes up. :)

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Windows XP is pretty stable if you know what you're doing with it, and remain diligent in protecting it and updating it.

 

You'll need as much time and energy to configure a Linux OS, but for ease I recommend Gentoo or possibly Ubuntu. Good luck, and I recommend partitioning if you can so that you can still keep a copy of Windows for accessing programs and apps that you may not get working on Linux.

Loose BOWELS are the first sign of THE CHOLERA MORBUS!
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Gentto would be hard for a newbie. I prefer to use it, because it's easy to hell to maintain and has many advantages over other distris I tried (mainly Suse). But be warned. You need to do EVERYTHING on your own with Gentoo. No preconfigured browser, GUI, etc. In fact when you managed to get the first installed version running you have only a barebone unix system. Still if you have the guts to learn all the stuff (there is not THAT much for a basic desktop to be running), then you will certainly have a very stable and userfriendly system.

Gerhard

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No can do on the Mac, we just got a new puter and I hate Apple almost as much as Microshaft. I prefer the flexibility of PCs for upgrading and the fact that Apple video games are generally quite retarded in my experience. Its bad enough that most video games suck, let alone ones that look terrible and suck.

 

Sparhawk, are you saying that with Gentoo I would have to somehow construct a browser? if so, does tht also apply to word processing, media players, and everything else i need? I wouldnt mind learning some new computer skills but I looking at grad school in the fall, a new job, and all the usual curveballs life dishes out. Could you give me a rough estimate, assuming I work at it, to having Gentoo up and running.

 

BTW, the wife found all these missing copies of her writing that had been saved in a folder she had never used. Some were missing 2/3s of the pages, some were formatted so that the text only ran down the left hand column, needless to say she had done none of those things herself.

 

mOdEtWo, i just cheke dthat out, i will download it overnight, thanks! I still want to look into Gentoo but this is promising.

Edited by Maximius
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Get SuSE or Mandrake or something. Gentoo is seriously non-trivial to install, especially for a new user.

 

SuSE and Mandrake will hold your hand through the process and make it pretty painless. Ubuntu and Knoppix have the same ease-of-use involved.

 

Gentoo is going to be jumping in the deep end, same with Debian.

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I've been researching this myself lately - not because I've had any problems with Windows, my installation at home runs flawlessly - but because I have Linux at work, and I have been having a lot of problems with it, and I want to learn more about it so I know what I am talking about when I go to complain to my system administrators.

 

I have so far got it down to a few distros - Ubuntu or Kubunto seem to be the most popular at the moment (and fairly easy for noobs), and are very well put together by all accounts, but there is a question mark over their business model and hence their longevity. Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) is a very good distro for the newbie, as is Lycoris, and they have good hardware support, and aren't expensive, but Mandriva has taken over Lycoris so expect the two distros to be rolled into one soon.

 

There are a few distros that run as Live CDs, ie, you don't need to install anything to your hard drive, so you can try them out to see how they work before you go and partition your HD and install it properly.

 

There are a staggering number of distributions out there, and it is quite bewildering for someone like myself who is quite new to the whole Linux thing. My advice is to invest in some hard drive partitioning utilities and read some reviews of various distros, and do some extensive googling before commiting to anything, abd back up your hard drive!

 

I have kind of settled on Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE instead of Gnome - KDE is more like windows in appearance, so less of a shock to the system IMO), Ubuntu send you a CD in the mail for free, takes 4 - 6 weeks though, if you have fast internet, download the iso, and you can just install KDE to make Kubuntu. I think I will build a dedicated machine for my install though, rather than partition my HD, as I want to see how well I can network it with my Windows machine. I just wish Linux was a bit simpler, without the bewildering array of options... I kind of feel swamped with decisions when looking at Linux.... That is something I like about Windows - it is fairly simple, and I know what software will work on it, wheras with Linux it feels like a mystery tour that could end in tears if I make one wrong turn.

 

Personally, I had OpenOffice.org installed for ages, but it just wouldn't open Excel and word files properly, and didn't have the features that Word and Excel had, so in the end I forked out for a copy of M$ Office 2003. Maybe OpenOffice has matured a bit since I last used it, but I've got M$ Office now, so I might as well make the expense worth it...

 

But if OpenOffice works for you and does everything you need, go for it, you'll save yourself a fortune that you can spend on better hardware...

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Sparhawk, are you saying that with Gentoo I would have to somehow construct a browser?  if so, does tht also apply to word processing, media players, and everything else i need?  I wouldnt mind learning some new computer skills but I looking at grad school in the fall, a new job, and all the usual curveballs life dishes out.  Could you give me a rough estimate, assuming I work at it, to having Gentoo up and running. 

 

You don't have to "construct" it, whatever that means. But you have to decide what you want to have on your system for each app individually. Most major distris provide a basic working desktop, which has everything installed right away (if you choose so). This is not the case with gentoo. I was quite surprised when I used it the first time and tried to access a remote machine and my gentoo didn't even have telnet or ftp installed, which seem to me rather basic. So if you want something you must tell gentoo to install it. It doesn't do this on it's own. And you have to cofnigure all this stuff as well. It's not so hard to do, but it is some work until your box is fully installed. But after this, it works like a charme and maintainence is absolutely easy. :)

 

mOdEtWo, i just cheke dthat out, i will download it overnight, thanks!  I still want to look into Gentoo but this is promising.

 

IMO it is the best distribution around.

Gerhard

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That is something I like about Windows - it is fairly simple, and I know what software will work on it, wheras with Linux it feels like a mystery tour that could end in tears if I make one wrong turn.

 

IMO Windows is not really simpler in many cases. It's just that MS did all the decisions for you already. The major thing that is really much nicer on Windows is the installer. With gentoo and emerge this problem is now no longer for me, but before this was a major pain. Still configuration of the system is still much more hassle on Linux. Sometimes when I just want to have this soundcard getting to work I whish the apps were as userfriendly as on Windows. But then again, in many cases it provides much more freedom to me and I can configure every detail, which is not possible on Windows most of the time.

 

But if OpenOffice works for you and does everything you need, go for it, you'll save yourself a fortune that you can spend on better hardware...

 

It depends on what you need. In my case for the occasional letter, Open Office does everything what I need and it converted all my MS Office docs fine. My wife uses it more than me and she said it is even better then MS Office. :)

Gerhard

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I've just downloaded a few isos at work, I'm gonna try a few out, the one I'm most impressed with (on paper) so far is VectorLinux, followed by Yoper and Damn Small Linux. I was originally looking at Ubuntu, but it just didn't seem to fit with what I wanted in a Linux system... A lot of the major distros are even more bloated than Windows, and the main reason I would go with linux is to avoid installing loads of crap I don't need. The more streamlined distros like Vector and Yoper are optimised to be very frugal with system resources, and (reputedly) load and run with exceptional speed, and aren't cluttered with ten thousand apps that all do much the same thing in a slightly different way. You can pick and choose what you want to install, which IMO is a better way to do things. Have a bare bones core system, then add what you want, when you want and as you need to. Gentoo and Slackware would seem to be the best distros in terms of customisability, but are definately not for noobs like myself. But I don't want to bother with some of the other very Noob freindly ones like Xandros or Linspire, they seem too bloated and windows like to be worth the bother. And Red Hat/Fedora Core... no way am I going to bother with something that takes up 6+ GB of hard drive space, that is just silly.

 

I'll let you know how I go with Vector and Yoper...

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Hey,

 

I'm running Fedora Core 4 (runs doom3 flawlessly), I've tried some other but for now as far as I have tried others Fedora works best for what I do :)

 

I heard Mandrake and Knoppix are two good ones :D

 

Fedora Core:

http://fedora.redhat.com/

 

Also suggest Libranet if you want an olides style, lol

 

I suggest you ignore Linspire, lol I got it for free using their order coupon, plus they hav some CNR thing that you gotta also pay $50 for and you can't disable, really annoying, the pros to it are, pretty gui ^_^, and you can see all your partitions/hard drives without having to set it up

 

http://slickdeals.net (if you want to try linspire look in the old deals for Linspire coupon gets you the $50 thing free)

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Mandrake is now called Mandriva (after acquiring Connectiva), and they have recently acquired Lycoris, so it will probably change to Mandrivicoris or something similar soon ;)

 

RH/Fedora Core has the advantage of being probably the most common distro, but I've heard it makes some things difficult (like setting up multimedia stuff - no non-opensource codecs included etc), and at 4 CDs, it just seems like it is a bit bloated for my tastes, although I'm sure the installer makes a lot of it optional, I would rather get the install done and then add bits as I find I need them. So small distros like Vector (390 MB .iso for the standard edition) suit me just fine... I guess I will see how I go with Vector... I am going to try out a few to see how different they are...

 

It is good to know you can run some games like Doom 3 on linux machines. If only Sonar came in a linux flavour, I could just about dispense with Windows entirely should the urge overtake me...

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The number of CDs is usually that high because the source code is also included. But you don't have to install the source code, and you don't need to install everything.

Knoppix is very userfriendly and also very good for testing linux. Since it was designed to run directly from CD without the need to access harddisk (at least if you don't want to) it is very resource friendly as well. And it is my favourite rescue system because everything is there.

Gerhard

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I spent most of my weekend attempting to set up a dual boot WinXP/Linux machine, with not much luck... Every time I try to shrink the Windows partition, it gets so badly corrupted that it won't work. I have a functioning copy of Yoper installed at the moment, but LILO won't boot windows... it gets as far as saying "Loading Windows" and just hangs... I'm glad I backed up all my essential stuff as I've had to re-install Windows 3 times andit still doesn't work as a dual-boot. As linux goes, Yoper is pretty good (although I find KDE to be a bit overly complicated - XFCE seemed cleaner and less cluttered, and I am yet to try Gnome or iceWM), but getting software is a nuisance, as I am still using a 56K winmodem to access the net at home, so no internet on Yoper yet. I have an Ubuntu CD on the way, so I'll see how that goes. I tried to install Vector, but it kept hanging mid install. Morphix loaded OK as a Live CD, but without an internet connection it is very limited. I have Fedora Core 4, yet to try. My copy of Lycoris kept freezing during install - must be something in my hardware not compatible.

 

I am going to try having Windows and Linux on separate drives, so I don't have to mess with partitions on the Windows install, to see if that helps. So far Linux has proved to be an enormous amount of effort for little gain - I had a perfectly healthy WinXP installation that hadn't crashed or locked up in two years (maybe I'm just lucky), but now that is gone. Nevertheless, I am determined to persevere until I can get a dual boot system working, so that I have a better opportunity to evaluate the capabilities of Linux.

 

If anyone can help my dual boot efforts, please let me know.

 

I am attempting to run a dual boot system in the following configuration:

 

P4 2.6 GHz

1 GB RAM

nVidia FX 5600

SB Live!

Gigabyte Mobo with LAN, USB 2, Firewire etc onboard

Primary Master (C:/hda/hd0) 80 GB Maxtor - NTFS Win XP

Primary Slave (hdb/hd1) 20 GB Seagate - Linux - 3 partitions (root/swap/home)

SATA 1 (sda/sd0) 120GB Seagate- several partions - data storage

Sec Master DVD Burner

Sec Slave DVD-ROM

 

Question: does the Linux MBR have to be on the same drive as the Windows install, or the Linux install to work properly? Partitioning my C: drive is not working (it keeps fucking up windows).

 

I am starting to think it might be safer just to build another machine for Linux, and one for Windows, because I can only get one OS working at a time at the moment. And if you are attempting to try out Linux, be prepared to sacrifice several days of your life, and BACK UP YOUR DATA FIRST, or you will be sorry.

 

I've gotta get off dialup and onto broadband ;)

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Ive decided to take my old 400 meg pentium and install linux on that, with no windows whatsover. If that works, then maybe Ill see about putting it on the new 2.3 gig pentium we just got a few months ago. Good news for me, the computer guy at my workplace does side work for cash and he is a big fan of Linux. Phew!

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I dunno what happened, but now I can't install windows onto my main drive anymore. It won't install, after I have reformatted it a dozen times, I've tried fixing the MBR everything. An 80 GB maxtor down the toilet. I did get Vector Linux up and running on my 20 GB drive, but I didn't find it to be as good as it was on paper. It detected all my hardware OK, but it won't let me modify many settings with X running, and i couldn't be fucked editing config files or learning a bunch of arcane Linux commands to get something to work right. Onto the next distro, and down to the computer markets to buy another hard drive...

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You can wipe out your hard disk with linux. I certainly never heard about that Windows can no longer be installed after Linux was on it.

 

What you can do is this:

make your CDROM bootable and download a iso of knoppix or some other distribution. Then you boot with the CD and wipe out the hard disk. First thing you can try is to use fdisk to remove linux from the harddisk. If that doesn't work, you can use 'cat /dev/false > /dev/hda' or wherever your harddisk is mounted. This will take some time, but it will clear your entire harddisk with 0's. After this the harddisk should work for Windows for sure.

Gerhard

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Hah, all this nonsense, and then you wonder why most poeple don't choose to attempt to install linux of any kind, and go for that 'shitty old windoze, winshaft nonsense' - it's supremely user friendly, that's why. and that's what most people want above all else.

Christ, there are people who need computer clases just to learn ho to use windows or surf the internet, can you imagine what sort of advanced universtiy training they'd require to install and run linux.

I think you find calls to computer technical help lines rising about a billion times if everyone trued to run linux.

WHat I want to know is, why don't they just make a version that's as user friendly and straightforward as windows and that works with all sofrtware and hardware and games available? It's forever going to be in a niche otherwise.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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Just use Knoppix, if you want to have a preinstalled userfriendly Linux. You can boot directly from the CD and run it from there, without even touching the harddisk. Nice to try out, and also nice as a rescue system. And it works with most hardware I have seen so far, without user intervention. In optimal case you don't even need to configure teh network. Beat this Windows! :)

Gerhard

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