EXUP Worldwide

I've about had enough with Big Brother.

nope, too much setup work for me and no ability to play new games

silver wrote:I've about had enough with Big Brother.

We'll need some more clarification on your complaint before before offering any solution sir........................
I'm running Linux a'plenty these days. It isn't perfect either, but you can change and crash it as you wish.
I have Linux on one home desktop, a laptop, and a shop/work desktop as well.
You can run games if you want, it's just more work to do so.
There are some really active forums for support, and a lot of information and community support for it - but you will have to learn some things.
Take the leap I say, buy some old box cheap and start learning - M/S stuff will seem pretty boring once you get into it.
Look at linuxquestions.org for a place to start............you can download a full distribution ISO from one of their mirror sites and you'll be ready to go.
I'd suggest Debian or Suse to start with, Suse is pretty much plug & play once you have a bootable C/D. Debian will teach you a bit more.
If you feel brave try Slackware...................it's really neat stuff, and the C/D will boot, but depending on where your at P/C knowledge wise - you may be a lot smarter by the time you finally see a desktop..............Don't let that dissaude you from trying it though, it's possibly the steepest learning curve you'll find in Linux outside of building a full distribution yourself............(which you can do BTW).
Good luck, and post back on how it goes.

Bob,

Any experience with RedHat, or in your own humble opinion, what's the best O/S running on a linux platform? Thinking I'm going to make my next box a dual boot with a bunch of virtual pc's so the actual O/S will only go to the MS site for updates and that's it. All other computing will be done through a VM, I get issues, I just blow up the VM and not the box.

Nice thing about linux is you can get most distros free.

I have Suse on 3 and Ubuntu on another (testing its wireless). Still have M$ though. My Suse testing server (I use it to test out forum mods for another site I backAdmin on) is temp down right now (needed teh DVD and floppy drives to test out Windows Home Server which wont install due to how old teh DVD drive is.. )

Friends tried Suse and have a fit because it "wasnt simple" like M$. Never mind he makes things hard on himself. Wont close a browser until he puts it back to the home page, uses ctrl+O instead of just using the address bar to type in a new website addy, has to move the cursor to the end of the sentance before hitting return during searches....

If you can already set up a virtual machine you shouldn't have any problems Mike.
Rob certainly has more Linux experiance than I do...............I'm not running a server.
We all seem to go slightly different directions in the matrix
Ummmmm.....Ok, on Red Hat - Since the Fedora project started with those guys you don't hear much about "Red Hat" anymore.
I did try one of their distro releases - that being Fedora core 5.
It was one of the stranger distro's to work with IMHO.
None of the Linux flavors works perfect out of the box - which means the very first thing done is to customize settings etc. to get it to run to the users liking.
FC5 was very hard to work with in that respect, at least for me. It was earlier in my learning curve to be honest so I was a bit more limited in what I could do, but FC5 seemed locked up to me.
One thing you will notice is that Linux is Linux when viewed from the desktop.
They all look pretty much the same untill you start looking at package managers and update utilities, then they can vary widely.
Here's a start - there's two main variants - BSD and initV - BSD is the small branch containing "free BSD" and Slackware. They are hands on variety distro's and stick very close to the original Linux conventions.
IntitV (init five) is pretty much everything else, especially with the 2.6.xx kernels. These may have their own propreitary kernels and file structures, not everything in the generic Linux how to books will apply to them, and if they don't work out of the box they may be a challenge to tweak.
Then there's bootloaders. There's only two - Lilo and Grub. They both work, and they both have an upside and a downside. Lilos' the older one, more basic, a little clunky, but it doesn't rename your hardware. Grub you won't need to look at much, but when you do need to it will be a language you don't speak.

That's enough to start, but how you choose between those options will influence your Linux experiance greatly.

If you want to dual boot and know upfront that you will be "under the hood" a lot go for BSD or Slack booting with Lilo. You will learn a fair amount of basic sys admin stuff right from the get go, but then you will know what your doing too.
The initV distros I've used are Suse 9.2, 10.1 and 10.2 (three different distro's there) and then Fedora core 5 for a bit also.
What I can say about those is when you break a child process that affects hardware booted by Grub you can end up with a lot of how-to Linux books and still not get it fixed..........
Suse is the best "Finished Distro" I've used.
I recommended Debian in the previous post, I know, and if you've suffered this tiraid to this point it doesn't look like I've used it.
Here's why - Debian and Slack seem to be closely aligned in package/software management, not the same, but some similarities.
I like Slack, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone as a first distro.
I also know how frustrating it can be to work with a distro that claims to be plug and play but isn't.
So I think Debian might be a good middle of the road starting place that will get the job and let you do what needs to be done. That's why it gets my recomendation.
I'll try it soon I promise.....
Ok, that's my rant - I'm off the air.
Good luck with whatever you choose.

Ok, I said I'd try Debian so I have now - and here 'ya go.
The hardest part was finding the actual download mirror for the ISO image.
( I guess free means "with your time". )
I won't waste your's, here's the page you'll need................... *Debian*
Get the ISO C/D or ISO DVD depending on what your burner is like, and see how that goes.
I haven't had a lot of luck burning bootable ISO's with windows machines, your mileage may vary. I wouldn't use the Rock Ridge extensions or any other murky options if offered by Nero, just burn the ISO file.
The install program was one of the easiest I've used to date, it will help a lot if you can tell it some info about your network hardware during the install - the installer will get updated packages as it goes through the installation that way. It will want to know what NIC card and chip version, so do a little homework on that stuff first.
Be prepared to supply a root password, a user name and password (write that stuff down!!!) - and the install will go pretty smooth.
Debian does use the Grub bootloader by default (Grand Unified Bootloader BTW), but it should detect and be able to play nice with your winder's installation. You can always change to Lilo later if you like (The Linux Loader.........).
The default desktop is Gnome. Not my preference, but as with all Linux I'm aware of - anything you don't like can be changed or crashed.
P/S - I'm writing this from the new Debian installation I just did.
Once the DVD image was finished downloading it took about an hour and a half to go through the install and get to first boot.
I think I would recommend this distro to anyone really................I sure have had to go through more to get one up and running.
Besides, I'm so used to having four desktops now, I feel like I'm all boxed in on a windows desktop....it's claustrophobic in those things.........'cmon, jump!

Thanks for all the comments. I should qualify one thing. I'm not exactly a n00bie Been playing with Linux off and on since RH v.4.5. I've tried Vector, Ubuntu/Xubuntu and many, many others. Unfortunately I never found it to be user or hardware friendly. Also when I did get it running, it simply wasn't as fast as Win2K Pro or XP. Here's a list of my hardware :

System

Proc : AMD 64 X2 4600+
RAM : 4GB DDRII Super Talent
Mobo : MSI K9A Platinum
Video : ATI X600 w/256 RAM
Displays : Dual Dell 17" SVGA CRT's
Audio : M-Audio 2496 Delta (Note that this is a secondary card for audio capture and not used for audio output.)
Drives : 2X160GB Seagate drives currently in RAID0, 1X320GB Seagate as a backup drive and a 20X Lite-On DVD/RW drive.

Peripherals

Fuji FinePix camera
Epson Perfection 4490 film/paper scanner

Generally speaking I do a little web design, word processing, spreadsheet work, a lot of email and web browsing and occasionally author a DVD and video CD's. Oh and I listen to lots of music. I have about 1500 CD's and all are ripped to the WavPack lossless audio format. If I had to list my most-used apps, it would be something like this :

Foobar2000
MS Office
Paint.NET
Paint Shop Pro
Roxio Easy Media Creator 9
MS FrontPage
CuteFTP

The biggest problem I'm having currently is that none of the distros will setup my RAID properly. I've tried Ubuntu 7.04 (almost worked), Debian Etch (crashed during loading) and several others. Haven't tried Suse yet. The only one that I've successfully installed and ran with the RAID is Fedora 7 and I don't care for it as it's too slow.

More later, Right now I have a 3 year old to feed !

silver wrote: I'm not exactly a n00bie

I guess I'm not surprised to hear that, sometimes I just get enthusiatic about this stuff.
I'm not doing that much with my digital time wasters, so I learn the stuff I find most interesting.
It's not user friendly yet though, just not.
I think it's a lot better than two years ago, but not what I would call friendly.
Mabe hardware raid is the way to go?
That I don't know, I've not been down that road yet.
Is it carrots or peas this morning?

ExupElvis wrote:I guess I'm not surprised to hear that, sometimes I just get enthusiatic about this stuff.

As am I to a certain extent however my enthusiasm is tempered with a huge dose of experience. I still have my "Red Hat Revolution" shirts from the RH6 tour in NYC.

I'm not doing that much with my digital time wasters, so I learn the stuff I find most interesting.
It's not user friendly yet though, just not.
I think it's a lot better than two years ago, but not what I would call friendly.

I think it's come a long way but they're still workin' out major shortcomings. They've done an excellent job for the most part. I writing this from Fedora 7.0 by the way. I had it download and install XFCE 4.4 and it's working quite well. Just downloaded an iso of Xubuntu and burnt it with no problems at all.Connected my 2GB USB stick and an icon popped right up on my desktop. No joy on getting my scanner to work yet though. I know there's a hack for it in Ubuntu.

Also note that one of my disappointments for Fedora/Red Hat is that it (like Slackware) is still compiled against the i386 iso. WTF ? It's 2007 for heavens sake !

Mabe hardware raid is the way to go?

No doubt. I'll keep that in mind but my financial priorities are in getting the valves, forks and bodywork on the FZR done, getting my truck repaired and back on the road and then working on my house. Hoping to get some insulation and a vapor barrier in before winter hits this year.

Is it carrots or peas this morning?

Bananas ! I can't believe the way this one is growing. She's going to blow right past her brother. He'll be 6 this October and she's only 0.5" shorter than he is. She outruns him easily. She's played on noggin.com since she was just (and I do mean JUST !) 1 year old. At 9 month she was crawling up the steps. At 1 year old she could toddle into the dining room, climb up in a chair and play on noggin.com. I'm going to be in a whole lot of trouble soon !

silver wrote:one of my disappointments for Fedora/Red Hat is that it (like Slackware) is still compiled against the i386 iso.

Yeah I know, I'm running Slack 11.0 as the daily test bed/workhorse O/S.
It assumes 33mghz bus at boot, but once started and configured I seem to remember lots 4xx 5xx and 6xx specific packages, with arch independent packages labeled a such.
I can't tell much difference in how it runs compared to any other flavor.
It was one of the few distro's I looked at that had the Jmicron drivers I needed for the Duo Core box I built a few months back.
I would've expected better performance from the sata ll drive, but no.
There's more rumbling's about true 'Nix BIOS's on the way, but 'till they get here I think were stuck.
Good luck with the little carbon units though, I can't help there.
I know they grow like weeds. I've got a teenage niece now, and it seems like she was a new raisin just last week.

Thanks for all your Help Bob,

Got it then, no FC, use debian or suse, thanks man!

What the heck are you guys TALKIN bout?????

I had Linux on a server about 6 years ago, but it was not even remotely user friendly. Had to write a script just to turn on a modum. Now, I run Win Server 2003 R2 nad XP Pro on the 9 or ten other puters here
We have eight or nine network printers a couple of scanners, adn I'm working on putting all the music on the server, pipe it through the shop tunes.

Plug and pray man...plug and pray

Jim the new distros are more user friendly. Suse 10.0 and up pretty much sets up like a windows machine. Dont even have to compile kernals or write scripts for most setup. Some things still wont work with linux (ie wireless prism chipsets. never could get the one for my laptop to work).