You might consider WindowMaker. Personally, I love it.
I’m becomeing a Linux Doper - I’ve just completed the first stage of a Novell/Suse Linux course and I’m very impressed with Suse 9 and I’ll be installing it dual-boot with XP on my home machine just as soon as I can get a bigger HD. I’ll be using it for servers etc at work too.
becoming - Sheesh! that was just a typo, but I can’t leave it uncorrected.
The first time I installed and used linux was on a 386 computer, back when you could download linux (on a blazingly fast 9600 baud modem even!) onto floppies and install it from them. Slackware was just about the only distribution you could get back then, and I’ve kinda stuck with it over the years just because it’s what I’m used to.
I’ve always had a linux machine set up in my house since then, but it has never been my primary computer. After dealing with numerous IE exploit viruses, I tried to switch all of my net stuff over to linux a few months back but found too many things that I liked just didn’t work under linux. I think a lot of them could have been made to work with some effort, but I ended up switching to firefox and got rid of the IE problem. Most of my time spent on linux these days is on software development at work. I absolutely hate the editors that come with linux, so I end up editing the files under visual studio in windows, then ftp the files over to the linux box and build them there.
I like linux, but IMHO it’s got a ways to go to catch up to windows in the user friendly department. I will say it’s come a long way since the early days of unix. There’s an old joke that goes “Unix is very user friendly, it’s just particular about who it’s friends are.” If you spend a lot of time at the linux command prompt you know what I mean.
I use Mandrake 10 on my machine, it dual boots with Windows XP, but I seem to be preferentially using Linux, mainly because it means that I can write papers and stuff at home, which is useful. Plus its just nicer all round, and less prone to randomly crashing.
Okay, I’ve collected my hug from my son, and he asked me to thank you all, but especially Tentacle Monster because ever other set of instructions he has gotten to get the scrollmouse thingy working have failed…and there are three huge Linux books sitting right above the computer, so I know he’s been trying. So thank you again!
This is why I love this place!
I’ve got a Linux server built and run by a vendor; a White Box server built and maintained by me with help and a White Box client I built to play with.
What books/links can I learn from? First thing I want to do is compile a Doom tar.
Thanks
What exactly do you mean by that? man tar will tell you how to do that, easily. But I don’t think you mean exactly what you said.
First, google your question. That usually gets answers.
If it doesn’t, O’Reilly and Associates probably have a book that covers it. You can graze them at Barnes and Noble or Borders or any large book store.
As for the Doom tar, it depends on the tar ball.
bash% tar xf doom.tar to extract a simple tar archive.
bash% tar zxf doom.tar.gz to extract gzipped tar archives
bash% bunzip2 doom.tar.bz2 to uncompress bzip files, then** tar xf doom.tar** to extract the archive.
Or use file roller or one of those pretty, new-fangled archive tools that you can access from your KDE or GNOME application menus.
Once the archive is extracted into a directory, go to that directory.
bash% cd directory_name
In that directory, you should see a configure file. Execute the configure script, make the makefile it creates and install the executable made with the makefile.
bash% ./configure && make && make install
That should be the basic process. Of course, if you want better instructions you could extract the archive and read the INSTALL.TXT, INSTALL or README file that is included. The name might change, but it should be similar to one of those.
I’m writing this on a box that (has/will) never see(n/) windows, and at work I have another box (with a software raid of 320GB) that can say the samething. We run primarily Redhat/Fedora distro altho I may give slackware a try when I get a second box. I have a DSL connection that currently serves a small network of computers running various linux distros.
There is nothing I’ve wanted to do with this box that I cannot do under linux, but then I’m not big into gaming.
-DF
Add me to the list of Linux dopers. I’m writing this post using Firefox on Mandrake 10.1. Like engineer_comp_geek, I’ve been using Linux since the download-it-at-9600-bps-and-write-it-to-floppies days (5.25" floppies, no less - my first Linux kernel was 0.99pl13). I’ve only recently started seriously using it as a desktop OS, though. I’m finding more and more stuff I can do with Linux that I’m seriously considering moving away from Windoze altogether. I run WinXP on my primary machine at home (Linux runs on my server/router, of course).
I got a laptop last year, partitioned the disk in half, installed Linux on one half while intending to install WinXP on the other. I have yet to have a need for XP. I don’t do PC gaming any more and 99.8% of what I do is net-related (web browsing, chat, etc.) If I can convince my GPS software to run under Linux with Wine I think I might just scrap XP totally. I’m becoming more and more willing to live without certain perks just so I can dump as much commercial software as possible. Free software is your friend.
I don’t find that to be true at all. While I ran the 64 bit system, it was so fast that I often screwed up! I find the 32 bit version to be every bit as fast as Windows. Some programs load slowly, but then many Windows programs load even more slowly.