Damn. The OP got flushed.
Take Two:
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve installed RH8, and so far, so good.
As a complete and utter babe in the Linux woods, I’ve managed to:
[ul]
[li]Find a modem that works. I messed with the drivers for my PCTel winmodem for a couple of days, but finally got sick of dealing with it. I scored a Xircom 56k-10/100-GSM combo PCIMCIA card on ebay for thirty bucks, and it worked on the first try.[/li][li]Get my Windows fonts working in X.[/li][li]Get XMMS playing MP3s.[/li][li]Do a major rebuild on my site after the DB got corrupted. I discovered you can ssh directly from a terminal. Cool.[/li][/ul]
I haven’t really tried to get any of my peripherals to work, though, and I suppose that’ll be the real test.
I’ve only had to boot to Windows a couple of times, though, so I guess it’s been a qualified success.
I’d like to thank everybody here who’s answered my stupid questions in GQ. I’m sure I’ll have plenty more for you in the next couple of months.
Anybody else?
Damn. The OP got flushed.
Take Two:
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve installed RH8, and so far, so good.
As a complete and utter babe in the Linux woods, I’ve managed to:
[ul]
[li]Find a modem that works. I messed with the drivers for my PCTel winmodem for a couple of days, but finally got sick of dealing with it. I scored a Xircom 56k-10/100-GSM combo PCIMCIA card on ebay for thirty bucks, and it worked on the first try.[/li][li]Get my Windows fonts working in X.[/li][li]Get XMMS playing MP3s.[/li][li]Do a major rebuild on my site after the DB got corrupted. I discovered you can ssh directly from a terminal. Cool.[/li][/ul]
I haven’t really tried to get any of my peripherals to work, though, and I suppose that’ll be the real test.
I’ve only had to boot to Windows a couple of times, though, so I guess it’s been a qualified success.
I’d like to thank everybody here who’s answered my stupid questions in GQ. I’m sure I’ll have plenty more for you in the next couple of months.
Anybody else?
1st an OP flush, Now a dual OP, what will that hamster thing of next.
Well my venture into the Linux world was short. I still have about 10 gb abandoned linux partition. I started to get thigns working, printer, modem, network - I don’t know if I ever would get my old scsi scanner connected to a USB port working. THe problem I found, well the 2 problems I found are:
I didn’t understand where thign s were stored or how to install things- I know I did it but lacked the understanding of how.
and some key pieces of software don’t run on Linux. The main 2 were MS Streets and trips and Garmin mapsource products.
Before you go yell at me and tell me I can use an internet map or something - I need to be able to find places by entering their address, get the waypoint (longatude, latitude) and (using the Garmine mapsorce program now) download the waypoints and maps into a hand held GPS.
Also not having 100% compatability with excel files is a downer too.
I’m not surprised that you had problems with Winmodems…they really aren’t that well supported, if at all, in Linux.
I’ve been using Debian 2.whatever.whatever.whatever… since last year sometime, but only as a user. The only think I know how to do is apt-get install stupid games and applets, if I read about them somewhere, and even then I can’t always get it to work 
My SO is my “administrator”, and he installed/fixes eveything. I am learning a little as I go along, but a lot of it is sort of “theoretical” - like knowing that Winmodems aren’t supported because they require the OS to handle some of the info that the modem itself usually does. I can’t reallya pply any of the random little linux knowledge pieces in my head.
That said, however, I do like the OS. It never crashes, and although I still go into my Windows partition to use Excel and ChemDraw, etc, I prefer to be in this OS. OpenOffice is a pretty decent office package, but the chart support isn’t all that great yet in their spreadsheet program, and it seems to run REALLY slowly on my computer (I have a Celeron 400, 192 MB RAM). Also, there is no great ChemDraw clone, and as an organic chemiist (what? my major says biochem? BLAH!), its a program I use a lot. My SO found something a couple of weeks ago, but I haven’t really looked at it. Besides, a lot of journals REQUIRE ChemDraw format, so that could be a problem anyways. If only VirtualMachine was free…
I say in a couple of years, OpenOffice (or, better yet, gnumeric) will have chart support nearly as good as what Micro$oft has.
And I have GOOGLY-EYES! I love the eeyes applet (that sits in your taskbar and watches the mouse move). THATS the sole reason (initially) why I let my SO install this OS to begin with!
At work, we will probably switch all the workstations to Mandrake with OpenOffice. That’s fine because the servers are Sun boxen, the e-mail machine runs FreeBSD and the firewall is OpenBSD. Besides, the couple of Windows apps we need we managed to run using Plex86.
At home there are 6 boxen of various vintage. The newest one runs Windows and is my SO’s haunt. My main box runs Debian, so is the http server. There’s also the firewall, a ftp server, and one that’s scattered all over the place.