Ubuntu or other Linux experiences

[mike11]

This part of the forum looked so bare I thought another thread wouldn't hurt.

Had anyone tried to go to the other side of the tracks? I tried Ubuntu. Partitioned my hard drive and everything setting up for a Vista/Ubuntu dual boot system. Unfortunately for reasons unknown there was some sort of conflict with hardware and I couldn't even reach the login screen. But the next time I put together a computer I think I'll try again.

Anyone else? Tales of trial and tribulation?

[Olin Coles]

Occasionally, when I don't want to create a Windows install to test hardware, I will load Ubuntu from CD and run the system without any hard drive attached. This usually allows me to load benchmarking software from a flash drive, and even browse the web without worry.

Rather than going dual-boot, I would try to run directly from the CD/DVD. If this works, the install is guaranteed.

[Daryl Greene]

I've tinkered with Linux flavors over the last few years. I find it rather lacking. I can't play my games and it is a pain in the ass to get anything installed.

[XJnine]

I'm really hoping this takes off.

http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture.

The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow your Windows applications and drivers to run as they would on your Windows system. Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows® would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows® and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change.

[mike11]

That's really cool XJnine. Thanks for the link. I'll try it out on an old junker in my garage. By they way you wouldn't be named after a certain XJnine of Nickelodeon fame would you?

[XJnine]

LOL.. I get that quite a bit but, no, I'm not.

I've had the handle for about 13 years now. It's really supposed to be X-J-nine. X being an old clan tag and J-nine for my online name. My first name is Justin and I'm a huge Nine Inch Nails fan thus leading to X-J-nine.

There ya go!

[Mathew Thompson]

My preferred version of Linux is Debian for a few reasons.

A) It's usually very well-tested and doesn't have a lot of stability issues.
B) The APT-GET repositories make installing common apps easy
C) It can be installed to suit both home computing and servers.

I use Debian for my web server and I find that it was both the most stable and easiest to setup of all the versions I've tried. However, I refuse to ever use Linux as a home computer until they remove any necessity to use command line, which has not happened yet.

[tinfoil]

I started off on Slackware 3 (ya, that long ago). I'm now running bleeding edge (2.6.29-gentoo-r2 w/ ext4 & btrfs) Gentoo on my desktop (x86_64) and on my laptop (i686). Somewhere along the line I moved to Mandrake then SuSE and then Mint. After getting tired of waiting for an upgrade path from Mint5 64bit to Mint 6 64bit, I buckled under the pressure from a couple of other Linux fanatic friends of mine and put Gentoo on.

Gentoo is certainly not for the faint of heart. There is a lot of commandline bits involved, but once it is all working properly there is certainly a feeling of accomplishment there, and the Gentoo community is surprisingly friendly.

My latest conquest was setting up distcc and crosscompiling, since Frank(enstein, the laptop) is a rather sluggish P4M 2.2Ghz and my desktop skips along at a comparatively blistering 2.7Ghz C2Q. Next is to see if I can build an install for my Zaurus SLC-3000.

Point of note for the curious. Just because the Gentoo livecd works with all your hardware, don't expect it to work like that after it's installed. Everything on my machine was great on the livecd, but once installed I discovered that while the LiveCD has a rather large kernel with everything needed built in, the kernel installed to the machine is much leaner with very little built in.

[tinfoil]

However, I refuse to ever use Linux as a home computer until they remove any necessity to use command line, which has not happened yet.

I rarely had to use the cli on Mint, and even if I did, it was certainly offset by the fact I didn't have to deal with inevitable malware invasion (my wife also uses the computer).

[tomslick]

4 machines in the house and 3 of them run openSuse. The oldest is a dell dimension 2400, newest is an i7, everything works out-of-the-box except the wireless cards and they only took minimal configuration.

[Daryl Greene]

Well, if all you're doing is web surfing and minimal office type stuff Linux is OK I guess. I like to play games like Unreal Tournament, CoD4, Crysis. etc. So, it is a waste of time for me to even fool with it.

[Colin Armstrong]

I used to use Linux Mint (an OS based off Ubuntu) as my main OS a while back. It served me well. I was dual-booting XP at the time, and booted into that partition whenever I wanted to play any sort of PC games.

I finally realized the process of booting into my XP partition was far too time consuming, so after much debate, I deleted my Linux partition and just stuck with XP.

[stuartk]

My preferred version of Linux is Debian for a few reasons.

A) It's usually very well-tested and doesn't have a lot of stability issues.
B) The APT-GET repositories make installing common apps easy
C) It can be installed to suit both home computing and servers.

I use Debian for my web server and I find that it was both the most stable and easiest to setup of all the versions I've tried. However, I refuse to ever use Linux as a home computer until they remove any necessity to use command line, which has not happened yet.

I would look at various things for servers, including Debian, RHEL or CentOS, and OpenSolaris.

I started using Debian back when buzz or rex came out. I've used it off and on ever since for various things. However, for a desktop box I prefer Ubuntu at this point. It works quite well for that. (I've heard it makes a good server too, but I haven't tried it for that.)

Why would you want to not use the command line? It's simply a better interface for performing some tasks.

I have my wife using Ubuntu on her netbook, and she likes it better than the Win 7 that's on her desktop. Actually, I think the only time I had to open an xterm on it to do something was when I wanted to tweak the mount options for ext3 to better suit an SSD. I might have been able to do that with a GUI, but it was far easier to just open an xterm and "sudo vi /etc/fstab"

[stuartk]

I feel that at this point it really comes down to the apps you want to use. If you have specific apps that you want to use and they only work on one platform, then you need to use that platform.

If your needs are more generic, you may have several options.

Linux on the desktop has actually been for several years or more at the point where the average desktop computer user would have no problem at all using Linux instead of Windows. There are still some areas where you have to be wiling to learn or else have someone available who can hold your hand, but that's true of Windows too.

[stuartk]

Well, if all you're doing is web surfing and minimal office type stuff Linux is OK I guess. I like to play games like Unreal Tournament, CoD4, Crysis. etc. So, it is a waste of time for me to even fool with it.

I"m not a gamer (or at least not since when I used to play Commander Keen and Duke Nukem on DOS). So I don't know much about games like you mention.

However, there _are_ games available for Linux, and you can also run some Windows games using WINE or some other related packages.

As for it being a waste of time, you would probably find that you learn a lot about how a computer works if you used Linux. A lot of that is transferable right back to Window, so you might find that you're better able to use Windows after using Linux.

It's also good to see different ways of doing things. It keeps you thinking and gives you fresh new ideas.

I have a PC running Windows 7 x64 at home, and I also have a PC running Linux, a Sun SPARC running Solaris, and a Mac running OS X. I like being able to use all of them, and I'd feel limited if I had to choose only one.