GunsNSpot, in my opinion, linux is not superior for your needs. Linux is not easier to use than Windows. There is way more software, particularly retail software, available for Windows. Both software installation and hardware installation are far more straight forward for newbies in windows than linux.
However, linux is infinitely more powerful and more flexible than windows. It is free, and most of the software that has been developed for it is also free. Once you have a moderate amount of knowledge, I’ve yet to find a problem that couldn’t be quickly solved by searching Google groups. It’s a far better operating system than Windows, but it requires more skill and knowledge to use and manage.
So, as others have recommended, it may be worth installing on a second hard drive, just to play around with. If you have DSL or cable, I would download and burn it to CD, rather than paying for a retail box. Or just keep using Windows – just because linux is better overall doesn’t mean it’s better for you. I have both linux and Windows XP at home, and will always keep a windows partition until retail software is as widely available for linux as it is for windows.
I installed Mandrake after reading glowing statements like those above and was more than a little disappointed.
First, I’d been told that Mandrake supported NTFS by default. Well, none of my drives showed up. I searched on the web and found out how to mount an NTFS drive in Linux, but after dozens and dozens of tries, I never got it to work. Error message after error message.
I noticed that the Mandrake distribution had a video player installed by default. So I booted into Windows and burned a CD with some MPEGs on it to test it out. I made sure to burn the CD as a standard ISO 9660, noting that Linux doesn’t understand CDs with long filenames. I booted into Linux. It saw the CD and the MPEGs on it, so I tried to play one. Nope. These were standard MPEG-1 CBR videos. If a video player can’t play them, what can it play?
Worse yet, when I tried to play the video, the taskbars at the top and bottom of the screen started flashing, then disappeared! Now how do I shut the damn thing down?! I opened up a console window and typed “shutdown,” but Linux doesn’t like you to type commands that are shorter than the Declaration of Independence, so it just back an error message that said I needed more parameters. I WANT THE DAMN COMPUTER TO SHUT DOWN! HOW MUCH MORE SPECIFIC DO I HAVE TO BE?! Finally, after several tries, I made Linux agree to a 5-second delayed shutdown. It almost felt like I was haggling with the OS!
When I rebooted, I decided to play a few of the included games, since Mandrake, to its credit, did recognize and install drivers for my GeForce 3 Ti200. None of the games worked right. There were so choppy that they were unplayable. Literally 2-3 frames per second.
I needed some help with my problems, and since the Mandrake help files seemed to be about as good as Microsoft help files for solving any of my specific problems, I took to the web. I opened up a browser, followed a couple links, then watched my browser crash and die. I reopened it, and it immediately crashed. I rebooted, then reopened it, again with the same results. Since Mandrake comes with several browsers installed, I tried another. And another. I was never able to follow more than two or three links before each browser would crash.
Finally, I got fed up and wiped Mandrake off my drive. What a fucking mess!
Now, I’m not holding these experiences up to be typical of the beginning Linux user, but I did want to point out that it ain’t always like the rosy portrait some people paint of it.
Dang! dylan_73 beat me to it. Anybody, and I mean anybody, who’s vaguely interested in Linux (who has broadband :D) but who doesn’t want to mess about too much should try Knoppix. Doesn’t touch your HD as he says, but thirty seconds after you put in the CD you’ve got a lot of the best that Linux has to offer running right on your own computer. Its about the easiest and cheapest way of doing it I’ve seen.
It might not suit GusNSpot’s needs (what Giraffe said), but considering the no risk nature of Knoppix its worth a try.
Also, if you decide to ‘go all the way’ the command ‘knx-hdinstall’ willl install a version of the Debian distribution on your compy from the Knoppix CD (and trash your Windows install if you let it, be careful out there folks).
neutron star: well, sorry to hear you had such a bad time with things. NTFS isn’t supported very well. FAT is OK, but NTFS is read-only at best. I guess it’s difficult to get the necessary info from MS for that, because Linux supports many different filesystems.
Linux will recognise long file names…it will mount any CD. Don’t know why it wouldn’t play the mpegs though. I use mplayer and it’ll play anything.
When you crashed the window manager, you can restart X with a CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE. As for
Umm…“shutdown now” is how much more specific it wanted
Graphics card: you want the nvidia drivers from their own website; not the Mandrake ones. This would have fixed that problem.
No idea what the browser problem was…was this a really old version of Mandrake or something? I use Mozilla on Windows and Linux and haven’t had any problems.
Changing OS isn’t easy, particularly when you’re accustomed to the idiosyncracies of one particular one, but can be worth it…
I understood that NTFS support is only supported as read-only, and that’s all I wanted. I just wanted to be able to play MP3s and videos from the drives I use for Windows 2000.
It was not an old version of Mandrake. In fact, this happend only a month ago, and it was the newest stable version when I downloaded it - took up 3 CDs.
Really, I would like Linux a lot more if the commands were more intuitive and as short as possible. “Shutdown now” is a good minor example of this. If I type shutdown with no parameters, it should shutdown. If I add parameters, then it could worry about timed shutdowns and other variables. “Shutdown now” is needless verbiage.
I think I read somewhere that you can change the names of commands and make shortcuts (e.g. typing “ab” is equivalent to typing a really long command), but even if that’s the case, what happens when I sit down at someone else’s Linux computer and realize I’ve forgotten all the commands I made shortcuts for?
I’ve always thought that the Cisco IOS (used on their routers and switches) has a fantastic, very succint, command syntax and wonder why people who make OSs don’t apply many of the same techniques.
Um, you know that the shell on most Linux distributions (Bash) can be replaced by any of a wide array of shell choices, which may have the features you’re looking for?
Regarding the mpegs: there are compatibility issues between mpeg codecs in some versions of windows and linux. I haven’t researched the details, but I think it’s just a standardization issue. All I know is that if you create an mpeg on a windows, linux or mac machine, odds are it won’t run on the other two. (Windows XP may have fixed this issue – I recently installed it and so far haven’t had any problems playing linux-generated mpegs.)
So that’s not specifically a linux problem so much as it is an mpeg problem.
I did not know that. Supposing I were to sit down at someone else’s Linux computer, could I quickly and easily install my shell, and thus my commands, on the other person’s computer?
Also, how much does the command syntax change between shells? Whenever I look at a Linux page, and it tells me what commands to type to accomplish something, it’s not like it says those commands in 15 ways. Would I have to manually translate the commands into my shell’s syntax?
Can anyone recommend a shell that has a good, succint, intuitive syntax?
Only shell commands change between shells (setting variables, etc.). Shutdown will not change, because it is a separate program. Anyway, I like tcsh. You can either just run whatever shell you want to use from the command line (i.e. type tcsh or bash or whatever), or you can change the default shell using the chsh command. (Not available on all systems.)
Unix isn’t intuitive, it’s powerful and flexible. Can’t really have both. At least there’s man pages for everything…
Hmmmm I just installed a second HD, thats still empty on my 98 box. I’ve wanted to play around with linux for awhile, I finally got broadband, so ummmmmm
Well, for you it is. For most desktop users it might be. But it isn’t for everyone. Remember, linux is a multi-user OS. But you can make “shutdown” be the same as “shutdown now” on your system. Just alias shutdown shutdown now. This can be made to be permanent in the shell for your user account. To me this sort of thing is the whole point of linux- one size does not fit all. So it makes no sense to complain that it hasn’t been tailored to your needs. You have to tailor it yourself. Complaints that the tailoring tools could be better or more standard I will generally agree with (although Mandrake does come with some nice ones, actually).
And when all else fails, reboot is short and easy to remember and that works too, just power off during the bios post.
Cool, I like to see people of all ages futzing with computers… and FYI, you’re only a couple years behind me
both of those tasks are OS independant…
for moving or copying files you either use the “Windows Explorer” to drag and drop, or you use GMC/Nautilus/etc to drag and drop… or you could us mv instead of move, and cp instead of copy: the commands are still there, just shortened for faster typing.
for stuff like the SDMB, as long as you’re running an HTTP compliant browser you will be fine… mozilla under windows/linux/macos/solaris all work for me (and yes, I use them all at home… ok, I’m a dork.)
Probably a good idea… I lost about a year of my life (and about a 1/2 point off my overall GPA) in college to online gaming… that being said, if the online games aren’t dependant on a piece of Windows software, it’ll still run just fine under linux… or, if it does depend on Windows software, just run it under Wine.
you won’t need to download such things… all you have to do is tell Mozilla not to “open unrequested windows” by unchecking the box under “Scripts & Plugins” to that affect in the preferences windows (which is available via “Preferences” under the “Edit” menu, oh yeah, it’s in the advanced section)
depending on you digital camera, this statement has different responses… depending on the storage media and/or transfer method(s), the instructions will vary… if the camera has a removable media card of some kind, you can probably find a USB reader for that media type, cable it up, and just ‘scp’ the images from point A to point B (or just ‘cp’ if you’re working within a trusted environment)
and if it’s not a removable media camera, well then the answer gets more involved… sorry to not reply, this post is going to be long enough as it is.
I can only speak for my distro of choice… but with RedHat I can just have RPM remove any package I don’t like permanently and completely (oh, and if it wasn’t an RPM package that’s annoying me, that means I somehow logged in as root and manually installed the annoying piece of software, so it’s my own fault, and I can just remove it [or, it’s installed under a user account, and hence didn’t affect the overall system and I can just ‘rm’ it])
give it a chance some time… it’s really not all that hard… if a dumb old monkey like me can do it, anyone can
Given the current economy, that’s probably a good thing (sorry, just being silly now)
welcome to the club… I can’t type for crap… that’s one of the many reasons I love *nix:: tab completion! well, actually I’m pretty good at typing (70 to 80 words/min), but I screw up a decent bit… tab completion still comes in handy
and with *nix you can do that too… infact, when I copy paste something, all I do is highlite it with the curser and then middle click where I want it to go… or if I’m using MacOS I just “drag and drop” whatever I want to copy… (ps, you might want to try <a href… as opposed to <a hreif… how’s that copy-paste working )
actually, you’d probably have better luck with Mac OSX… then you’d have the comfort you’re used to, with the chance to get a little freaky with some command line stuff… while I don’t think OS X is up for server level duties YET, it’s definately a great way to break into real OSes while still having the cushy GUI backing you up.
Fist off, plug and play hardware should be avoided… buy stuff that allows you configure it, then you can make sure it works right
second, you’ll understand why plug-n-play is bad after you understand what I just said.
too many to mention all of them… I’d suggest starting with “Running Linux” from the O’Reilly press… then buy everything from O’Reilly on linux
cough usenet cough google cough redhat network cough (ok, I’m out of coughs, but there a whole hell of a lot more references out there)… people are happy to answer questions (provided that you aren’t too demanding or too idiotic)…
well, I can’t speak for the poster you’re commenting to… but yes, linux is superior to Windows in many ways…
should “a person like [you]” use it, I’m not certain… there is a certain learning curve involved with linux (as with any new platform)… you have to be willing to put in the time to figure it out and become skilled with it…
if you’re willing to work a bit, and do a bit of reading, you’ll be better off with linux… if you aren’t willing to figure out a new operating environment, then stick with what you know, and don’t get involved with the holy wars
welcome to Mac OS X…
as for “as cheap as Win -98”, well, linux is definately cheaper… you can download the ISOs for free, free is pretty cheap… if you want to talk about what comes pre-installed, and hence theoretically “free”, look into the Walmart OS-less machines or something from http://www.penguincomputing.com/
…keep in mind that win98 isn’t free, you paid for it when you bought the PC… included isn’t free.
not running AOL is a good thing. not an ISP you should work with.
depending on the software necessary, you might not be able to run it natively under linux… see my previous comment about Wine… or if you want to keep that functionality around, just keep a windows partition around: for the necessities
while I won’t give you my phone number, I’ve already given you several online resources to tap for your tech questions… there’s something about us linux/unix geeks, we support our own, even the newbies…
first search for your question in the archives, then ask away if your question hasn’t been asked before… someone will answer it it. it might even be me
as for which version you get at the computer store… NONE!.. download RedHat 7.3 (8.0 if you’re feeling outgoing) or a recent slackware, or a (free/open/net)BSD… then burn the install CDs, backup whatever you want to keep and HAVE FUN!!!..
try out what ever FREE installations you want. but keep backups incase you don’t like the environment.
I will do nothing of the such… in all honesty, if Windows works for you, use it… but if you want something more, look into linux/*BSD/MacOSX/etc…
I personally have 3 linux boxes, 2 Mac OS X boxes, 1 Solaris box, 1 FreeBSD box, and 1 Windows box at home… so I guess I fall into the non-biased catagory, if there is such a catagory.
Ok, I’m not “un biased”… I don’t like my windows box
neutron star: No, shutdown shouldn’t just shutdown straight away. On a multi-user system shutdown is a potentially destructive action and shouldn’t act without the proper syntax.
Anyway, I tried just typing shutdown by itself. It displays the syntax and 9 lines of options and the last line reads:
** the “time” argument is mandatory! (try “now”) **
Sorry, but if that isn’t a dead giveaway I don’t know what is. It’s even marked with **!
Actually I tried to download the RedHat ISOs last night. It’s not a good sign when I’m to stupid to download Linux, let alone install it and configure it. I’m going to try again tonight. x386 version 7.3 correct?
Y’know, this gives the impression that you could buy MAC OSX and install it on an intel-type PC. Which I’m pretty damn sure you can’t, so there is some significant expense involved in “trying” this out. I would love to try it out, though. Anyone got 800 bucks they can lend me? (that’s the cheapest MAC I found at the Apple Store)
WorldEater, what problem are you having with the iso’s? (Since this thread is already hijacked enough, I would recommend you try out linuxiso.org. They have messageboards there with lots of helpful advice. But yeah, go with 7.3, 8.0 is still beta.)
Plus a lot of the support information on the web is still geared toward 7.3. I kept typing “Xconfigurator” which in 8.0 has changed to “redhat-config-xfree86”. Another suggestion I’d offer, choose custom install and make sure select all the development options. This will prevent you having to hunt down some devel library on the web when trying to install applications like Xine, Mplayer, et al. Also, if you have the space, install both GNOME and KDE. These programs are kind of like what Windows Explorer is to Windows, only in Linux you have a choice. There are others out there, but you’ll probably want to stick with these two for the time being. I use Gnome, because it runs faster on my system, but KDE has more options, from what I understand. Good Luck!
I don’t remember mine saying that. There were a few different shells (is that the correct term in this case?) to choose from to get to a command prompt in Mandrake. I must have picked one that didn’t have the “now” suggestion. Either that, or I just overlooked it.
Now, why is “shutdown” a destructive action on a multi-user system, but “shutdown now” isn’t? I’m having trouble understanding this.
Oh, also a suggestion for those trying to download ISOs of Linux - make sure you download an MD5 checksum program to verify that the images aren’t corrupt. The first time I downloaed Mandrake, two of the three CDs were corrupt! Both came across fine on the second try, but it still wasn’t fun having to download an extra 1.4GB. I’m not blaming Linux for that problem (quite the opposite, even - I’m glad they included the MD5 sum), but it is something you should check and not just take for granted.
