roopurt18 Posted October 28, 2007 Share Posted October 28, 2007 So I've been using Win2k Pro for a long time at home and WinXP at work, since it came installed on my laptop. I really don't want to use Vista and MS will eventually stop pushing updates for XP. Also, because of MS stupid "Verified Windows" crap I can't update my legitimate copy of Win2k anymore. So I finally decided, "Screw it!" I backed up all my data and posting this via a fresh install of Ubuntu. Steam is downloading CS:S so as long as that goes smoothly I don't see any reason why I'll switch back. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neylitalo Posted October 28, 2007 Share Posted October 28, 2007 Very cool. It's always good to hear that another person has seen the light, I hope it solves all of your problems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trq Posted October 28, 2007 Share Posted October 28, 2007 Yeah well done. Its a wise decision indeed. Enjoy! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roopurt18 Posted October 28, 2007 Author Share Posted October 28, 2007 Synaptic, where have you been all my life? /drool Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zq29 Posted October 28, 2007 Share Posted October 28, 2007 Welcome (Interested as to how you're running CS: S though - Have they ported that now, or are you running through Wine or something?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neylitalo Posted October 28, 2007 Share Posted October 28, 2007 Steam and Counterstrike (and CS: Source) work beautifully under Wine - here's the "official" guide to installing them on Unix-like operating systems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tibberous Posted October 28, 2007 Share Posted October 28, 2007 I never liked Linux - it runs slow and crashes a lot, most programs are hard to setup on it. It doesn't have text-to-speech (you might be able to add it, if you compile festival from source) or Flash CS3 (maybe you can run it under Wine). Basically, if you are smart enough to run linux, you should be smart enough to go get a cracked version XP - who needs updates anyway? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trq Posted October 28, 2007 Share Posted October 28, 2007 You don't nessesarily need to be smart to run linux. You just need some patience. As for running slow and crashing alot, thats just plain rediculous. why do you think so many servers run Linux? because it is extremely reliable and has many applications available to it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liquid Fire Posted October 28, 2007 Share Posted October 28, 2007 I never liked Linux - it runs slow and crashes a lot, most programs are hard to setup on it. It doesn't have text-to-speech (you might be able to add it, if you compile festival from source) or Flash CS3 (maybe you can run it under Wine). Basically, if you are smart enough to run linux, you should be smart enough to go get a cracked version XP - who needs updates anyway? I love to know what distro was slower and crashed more than windows has for me. Like stated Linux is a very solid OS, more stable than window IMO. I will agree that some of the higher end specialized software does not work for linux natively(mostly games) which is why i still mainly use windows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neylitalo Posted October 28, 2007 Share Posted October 28, 2007 I never liked Linux - it runs slow and crashes a lot, most programs are hard to setup on it. It doesn't have text-to-speech (you might be able to add it, if you compile festival from source) or Flash CS3 (maybe you can run it under Wine). Basically, if you are smart enough to run linux, you should be smart enough to go get a cracked version XP - who needs updates anyway? There are a few of us who think that having an operating system that really works and not having to deal with Microsoft's crap is worth the agony of not having text-to-speech (which, as you said, works beautifully with festival) or Flash CS3. And I'm of this opinion: If you're smart enough to run Linux, you should be smart enough to immediately drop Windows from every machine you don't absolutely need it on, and install your favorite distribution of GNU/Linux. I, too, would love to know what distribution it was that ran slow and crashed more than windows, and when it was that you tried it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jcombs_31 Posted October 29, 2007 Share Posted October 29, 2007 I still don't really like linux as a desktop OS, I prefer using windows. I've yet to really use Vista until they release a service pack. I really need a computer upgrade, and will probably go ahead and use Vista when I do. I'm also a gamer and refuse to use Wine, I also don't think they update Video card drivers for linux like they would support on windows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zq29 Posted October 29, 2007 Share Posted October 29, 2007 Steam and Counterstrike (and CS: Source) work beautifully under Wine - here's the "official" guide to installing them on Unix-like operating systems. Thanks for the link - Didn't have much luck with it though, it was running pretty sluggish (Steam - Didn't actually have the patience to download and run CS: S) so I gave up - I'll stick with my dual boot on that machine. Downloaded "The Orange Box" yesterday - How cool is Portal?! Going to give TF2 a bash tonight I think! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
effigy Posted October 29, 2007 Share Posted October 29, 2007 Great news. I made the move about a month ago and am quite pleased. There were a few hurdles, but, as aforementioned, with patience the pieces fall in place. Audacity now handles my recording, Grip my ripping, and Gimp my imaging. Although my gaming is minimal, I do play TF2 with friends. Attempting to use Steam itself is a mess, but creating a script that launches straight into the app works fine, as does the in-game play. My next challenge is attempting to use Ventrilo at the same time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roopurt18 Posted October 29, 2007 Author Share Posted October 29, 2007 I first learned of Linux around 1999 or so and always wanted to try it out. I made several attempts in the past to get it going but always hit a block when it came to my network card. A computer without internet does me no good. Probably 80% of all my time on the computer is spent in internet-related tasks, not counting online games. So in the past I'd spend several hours trying to find drivers for my card and figuring out how to install them, but always losing patience and going back to windows; keep in mind my last real attempt was around 2001 so it was a while ago. The other major downfall of Linux in the past was the lack of gaming support. I'll be honest, I used to play lots of video games. A lot more than most of you do; I think my freshman year in college I played RA2 (a quake 2 mod) no less than 5 hours every day. Now, in the past, I would have been perfectly happy with a dual boot installation where I used Linux for computing and windows only for games. However, since I couldn't get networking to work properly in Linux, what would be the point? So like I said, I'd always go crawling back to windows. As I mentioned previously, I was on win2k at home, which meant I was pretty due for an upgrade. Between Vista and XP, I'd go with XP. However, in the grand scheme of things, I'll some day have to go to Vista or some other MS OS based on Vista. I really don't like the idea of Vista. Just look at the hardware requirements, I don't care if its an OS or not, it requires 15GB of disk space. Also you have the fact that windows is windows, over time your install becomes bloated and sluggish and you have one of two choices: re-install or use a myriad of utilities to clean it up. Looking to try new software? Hunt on Google and install 4 or 5 trial versions which won't completely uninstall and sneak other crap onto your system. We all know the drill. Anyways, as far as Linux is concerned a few things have happened to me personally that make the transition easier. The first is that I play less games; in fact I've been intentionally taking up hobbies and activities that involve me not sitting in front of a computer screen, simply because I'm tired of staring at one by the time I get home from work. So even though my CS:S is sort-of-but-not-entirely-working I don't really care; I'm not going to die if I can't play CS:S tonight. The second is that I'm not in school anymore so I don't have to worry about not having a PC at home. I don't have to worry about being able to open every file that comes my way and if I can't print something that's OK too. The third is that I'm involved in web development, which can be done on any platform. The last thing that made the conversion possible happened in the Linux community. Ubuntu has to be the easiest installation of Linux I've ever dealt with. It picked up my network card so my biggest Linux hurdle was instantly overcome. After that it informed me that it was using a standard video driver instead of the nVidia one because the nVidia driver was not open source and the community had no way of updating it; but it gave me the option of installing it, which I did. So within a few minutes I had video and network support. Now I had read about Ubuntu's apt-get utility and the praise associated with it, and I'm particularly in love with the GUI interface provided by Synaptic. This is the greatest thing ever. For those of you that don't know what it is, let me explain. You can obtain everything in Linux via source code, which you have to compile by hand; this is a major PITA for newcomers. The next step up, you can obtain pre-built binary packages and install them on your system; the downside here is packages are dependent on other packages. So if you're a newcomer you probably don't know which packages you have installed and which ones you need, with patience you can overcome this easily. However, Synaptic takes care of it all for you. For example, I wanted to install a basic LAMP server. On windows I'd probably just go with XAMPP, which I'd download from the XAMPP site. With Synaptic, I just ran a search for apache. It then lists anything and everything having to do with apache. I scroll through the list, "Ah! Here it is, the main apache2 package." I mark it for installation. A box pops up telling me that additional dependencies will be installed as well. "Sure, install those too." I click a button labeled "Apply." It starts downloading files, then it tells me its installing stuff, then it says it's done. I start FF and go to localhost, I get a page that says "It works!" I do a quick search on my system and find apache's htdocs is in my /var/www folder. I wrote a basic phpinfo() script and refreshed my browser, it prompted me to download a .php file. Ok, PHP wasn't installed, I'll have to do that. I fire Synaptic up again, search for PHP, look through the list, check off a PHP5 package, again it tells me there are dependencies, then it proceeds to download and install everything. I reload the page and yes, there it is, a phpinfo() page. I search and see that I'm missing MySQL. You guessed it, I use synaptic and within moments my phpinfo() script reports MySQL is installed. How about phpmyadmin? Ah good old synaptic. I later go to watch a DVD. I insert the disk, some movie player opens up, but reports an error in playing the DVD. Damn it! Everything was so perfect until now. A quick google search: "ubuntu 7.10 watch dvd" Numerous hits, apparently a common problem. It seems that my media player is using the gstreamer back-end and there are problems, some users suggest switching to xine and installing some libraries to watch encrypted DVDs. I fire up Synaptic again, search for xine and these libraries, selecting to install xine tells me it will uninstall gstreamer, "Sure, it didn't work anyways." Within minutes I'm watching a DVD. How about eclipse. I tried it on Windows for a bit, it's ok. It's probably my best bet at a PHP IDE in Linux. I'm hesitant since it's Java-based; Java-based programs always suffer poor performance in my Windows systems. In any case, with synaptic its easy to install or remove, so again using this wonderful tool, within minutes I have eclipse running. What's more, it appears to be blazingly fast. My fiance has been watching me intently this entire time. I've been explaining Linux to her, she has a hard time believing what she's hearing. It's free? She notices how easy it is to install stuff. We're going to move her onto it later this week. She's borderline between a basic user and an advanced user. She understands basic computing principles, such as directories, files, and programs. She's more tied to the MS world because she's an accounting major; all of her finance classes require Excel and to some extent Access. She also uses Quicken, which there is an equivalent called gnucash, but apparently it's not as nice. I figure if we can't find a Linux equivalent we'll try wine. If that doesn't work she has a second drive and we can turn her system into a dual-boot, although I don't think we'll need to. I'll report back later in the week on how the transition goes. Anyways, to make a long story longer, I think Linux is almost ready for prime-time. Keeping a Linux system up to date as well as installing new software is much, much easier than on Windows. I think 9 out of 10 windows users would want to switch instantly if they saw how easy Synaptic is to use. IMO, the folks over at Ubuntu have done a wonderful job. They're just shy of a mass conversion and here's what's missing: * Better support for dual-booting. I'm sorry but there are still too many people who can't afford to lose their PC for a few days, a week, or who can't always have the patience to figure linux out. This audience needs to know that if they can't get it to work in linux they can go back to their comfortable windows environment very easily. If the ubuntu installation program were able to resize windows partitions or if there was an easy to use, windows-based GNU utility that could do so, I think more people would be willing to risk installing Linux. * A better gaurantee that certain windows programs or files will work. Everyone uses windows at work, which means if they try linux it will be an experiment at home. But they need to have access to work files and stuff at home. It can all be done with patience and effort, but it needs to be more seemless. There's just a certain level of uncertainty about "Can I complete this project at home and then bring it back to work?" which causes fear. Of course, with better support for dual-booting this can be avoided. In addition, game companies need to make an effort to creat games that run on Linux. Ironically, gamers are probably the biggest audience that are willing to convert but don't because the one thing they require is not supported. It will be a while before this ever happens, if it happens at all. Perhaps if a distribution decided to gear itself towards gamers and make setting up their software easier more of that audience could be captured as well. On the flip side of things, MS could learn a bit from linux. If Microsoft's Windows Update also updated 3rd party software, that'd be huge. IMO, it would be wise for MS to "pull an Apple" and abandon windows in favor of a *nix core that they just develop a shell for. If I pulled any sway at MS, I'd be pointing out that MS is slowly losing market share to alternatives that they could be supporting. MS has seemingly unlimited resources, it would be interesting to see what they could accomplish if they decided to become involved in linux. In the long run I don't think any of it matters. More and more businesses are looking to web-based applications for their custom software solutions. These applications are easier to support, maintain, and deploy than stuff installed on individual workstations. In the next 20 years or so, it probably won't matter which environment you run as you'll just be doing all of your work in a web browser anyways. Also, I suspect that some of the things we complain about most in windows will start to rear their ugly heads as the linux user-base grows to accomodate non-tech-savvy users. Whew, long post! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GingerRobot Posted October 30, 2007 Share Posted October 30, 2007 Wow, that must be the longest post i've ever bothered to read! And i certainly notice a couple of parallels with my own problems with attempting to use linux. About a year ago, i installed ubuntu (which i agree, is very nice)but i was using a rather crappy USB wireless adatpter, which i just couldn't get to work in linux, despite the useful information i found about achieving such a thing. Now, i have a proper network card, and so would like to give ubuntu another try. However, i've since chucked away the second hard disk i installed ubuntu on, and so would need to reformat my hard drive to make a linux partition - not something i particularly want to do. I keep telling myself that either next i do a clean re-install (when windows, as you mentioned, grinds to a halt - though i have to say, to it's credit, it seems to be working well at the moment), or when i get a new hard disk/new computer, that i'll make a partition to install linux on. I only hope i remember! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel0 Posted October 30, 2007 Share Posted October 30, 2007 On my old laptop I had Ubuntu installed as well. I like it very much - no problems. Two weeks ago I got a new laptop (old one got stolen >_>) and since I knew that 7.10 would be released within short time I waited. I downloaded it, installed it and everything seemed to work, but it does for some reason refuse to recognize my sound card and no sound means no Ubuntu for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zq29 Posted October 30, 2007 Share Posted October 30, 2007 Bit of Linux related comedy for you... It was only last night that I learned that 'Gentoo' was actually a breed of penguin whilst watching the film 'Good Luck Chuck' - Up until that point, I thought it was just a made up word! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azu Posted October 30, 2007 Share Posted October 30, 2007 I never liked Linux - it runs slow and crashes a lotI hope you're aware that almost all of the biggest non-microsoft servers in the world are powered by Linux or a Unix variant. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
effigy Posted October 31, 2007 Share Posted October 31, 2007 ...non-microsoft servers... That really trims down the possibilities, doesn't it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roopurt18 Posted October 31, 2007 Author Share Posted October 31, 2007 So I just discovered sshfs; it's pretty hawt. For those that don't know what it is, it allows you to mount a remote directory to your local file system via ssh. Here's a tutorial: http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/10/28/how-to-mount-a-remote-ssh-filesystem-using-sshfs/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zq29 Posted October 31, 2007 Share Posted October 31, 2007 So I just discovered sshfs; it's pretty hawt. For those that don't know what it is, it allows you to mount a remote directory to your local file system via ssh. Here's a tutorial: http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/10/28/how-to-mount-a-remote-ssh-filesystem-using-sshfs/ I use that quite a bit, really cool, isn't it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neylitalo Posted October 31, 2007 Share Posted October 31, 2007 So I just discovered sshfs; it's pretty hawt. I've used it, but I dropped it in favor of NFS, and I don't really like userspace filesystems in general - but I will admit, it's a pretty cool piece of work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zane Posted October 31, 2007 Share Posted October 31, 2007 Yeah, I'm about to say screw it as well. I'm waiting for laptop power adapter to come in the mail so I can use MY computer again and I figure once I get it...I'm thinkin Ubuntu. I've been stuck with Windows since..man. I was probably around 8 or 9 years old with Windows 3.1 I've tried putting Ubuntu or RedHat on and using it but I hadn't the slightest clue what I was doing at the time. I've been completely content with XP and 2003 Server but like a few people I refuse to go to Vista. Once it came out many of my friends decided to buy a computer and I was the first one they asked to check it out and to "fix things". Probably isn't a bad thing, but Vista is designed to restrict it's users in every which way. If not by restriction, by scaring the user that he/she will mess it up. I try to open an executable file, just a regular installation and the entire screen goes dim, appearing to my observing friend as though I'd just destroyed something. I guess it's great for a person whose known for installing viruses onto his computer without knowing, but I couldn't deal with such a thing happening all the time. I'm ready for an OS that I can type in a regex command and find the exact file I'm looking for. Reading that long post of roopurt makes me even more curious. Synaptic and Wine look interesting. Let me ask you this. What do you guys think of Crossover Office. I've never used it but I know what it's for. Just wondering if it's good or not or if there is something better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neylitalo Posted October 31, 2007 Share Posted October 31, 2007 Let me ask you this. What do you guys think of Crossover Office. I've never used it but I know what it's for. Just wondering if it's good or not or if there is something better. I'm not sure how much you know about Crossover, but just in case, I'll tell you this: It's just an improved Wine, so it's definitely not perfect. However, I've used it, and while not everything works, the software that they Support works beautifully. I've even heard people say that MS Office on Crossover behaves better than MS Office on Windows. And as for the second part of your question - there are three implementations of Windows that I know of. Wine, Cedega (also just an improved Wine, primarily for gaming, and also known as WineX), and Crossover Office. I've never used Cedega, since they don't have a trial version, but Crossover is definitely better than the vanilla Wine. If I had any Windows applications (none for me, thanks ), I would definitely pay the $40 for Crossover. It was only last night that I learned that 'Gentoo' was actually a breed of penguin whilst watching the film 'Good Luck Chuck' - Up until that point, I thought it was just a made up word! The Gentoo is one of the smallest, fastest penguins (fact), which is why they named it after Gentoo GNU/Linux. (not actually a fact ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azu Posted October 31, 2007 Share Posted October 31, 2007 ...non-microsoft servers... That really trims down the possibilities, doesn't it? Not really. The majority of servers don't use microsoft products. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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