With Linux compiled to run on a huge number of architechtures including the power pc 32 and 64 bits, AMD64, Itanium 64, x86, and some that I've never heard of like sparc64, alpha, and hppa, there isn't really a category for it in the forum. I've put it here because it's most commonly run on the x86 (aka i386 too often though not accurate) and the AMD64 and EM64T which are indeed PC's. Today there are still a majority of internet servers, 70% at last count I read about, running Linux and with a minority of desktop users, one wonders just how many more Linux desktops there are than servers but I'm sure that even with 1 in 100 end users running Linux, it's more prevalent on the desktop.
Why do I care? I imagine most people are asking. Most people are content with another system that they run or they are using Linux. Some people have tried it out and had a bad experience and thought it sucked. This was my first experience with it and it wasn't until 2 years or so later that I gave it another serious try.
I don't have a lot of time at the moment but did want to get this thread off of the ground. I intend to come back and post some more info but for now, with the upcoming release of Vista boasting 3d effects I thought I'de post some screenshots of what the distribution I'm currently using is capable of. First I'll throw out there though, that Windows has not in all this time ever had the brains to make virtual desktops to switch between and this has been long supported in Linux. My guess is that 3d effects in Vista isn't going to be about just drop shadows making things look raised above the screen, but that it will impliment virtual desktops.
I've seen screenshots of customisations that make Linux desktops look exactly like a mac... well at least one whole distribution is aimed at looking like Windows but I can't imagine why. Anyhow, by default the look of a linux box is very customizable supporting many themes.
On to the eye candy. The following pictures is the Beryl project recently marked stable on my distro. I haven't gotten it working because I have to sort out an issue with me apparently installing things that I should not have, and that are interfering with my weak shared graphics on my laptop (possibly things I compiled that were not in the distribution package manager and my fault entirely), otherwise I'de be posting my own screenshots.
I'll be back every so often with eventually 1017 reasons that Linux really whips the Llama's a**. This little eye candy is really nothing when it comes to it. There's a multitude of Desktops that run on top of the base system, there's emulation of some common and useful Windows programs (although most have Linux alternatives), a system can dual boot... which has now apparently become obsolete and a computer can not just (also) emulate a windows install inside a running Linux OS, but one can now actually toggle between an actual Windows install and a Linux install. The last bit of that sentance I have yet to hear of being done because it is very newly stable, if completly stable, and most people who switch usually eventually go all the way, one or the other but that may change with hard drives being so damn big and cheap now.
On to the insignificant eye candy that I hope blows Vista out of the water. From what I gather, this is a huge amount of effects such as fade in and fade out, squigly minimise, water effects, all the usual... wait a minute that's only usual for someone who doesn't run Windows You can see in these pictures that it's a GNOME looking desktop, I think there's integration actually but am not sure, with a unique way of switching virtual desktops... virtual desktops rock, none of that running out of space on the taskbar and then having 5 windows grouped together sort of problem. The pictures are clickable links.
Edit: I just got Beryl installed. It's WAY more than I had even hoped. Not sure I can do it any justice without a tool that captures the screen in video though.
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MeanDean
November 5, 2006, 7:10am
Guest User
I've got some of my own screenshots.
First I'll say that I'm using Beryl with the Gnome desktop. KDE is another popular desktop. After that, probably the next... well the prettiest one I've seen is Enlightenment. I've just uninstalled it becuase although light on resources, enjoyable, and so forth, it's still being developed and there aren't all the tools I've gotten used to spoiling myself with.
For ancient systems there are also very good desktops that require very few resources and launch all the same applications equally as well. A word processor, mp3/video player, web browser and lots of other things that is all an everyday user really needs can fit onto a 128 kilobyte memory stick. I've had my desktop booted and running from one... it's a very odd thing to have a 3 GZ processor running off a 128 kilobyte usb stick and not using the hard drive.
Customability... It isn't perfect and perhaps some people think that everything is customisable easily. Some are, some are not. Everything is customisable though, it's just a matter of how much time a person is willing to put into their desires or needs and if it's worth it for them. That can't be said of anything that is not open source. It's likely that some of your household items are running open source software and operating systems. My router is a Linux system as is (I think) my mp3 player. The Xbox was modified to run as media centre for those willing to modify and compile it. I don't know if it still plays games when it's done but it seems that it would be doable. The PlayStation or PlayStation 2 (not sure which at the moment) can now be modified for similar use and considering that there's a lot of info out there on how to emulate the Playstation on a PC, I would think it still plays games.
Maybe next time I have a hair up butt I'll write about software availability. Free software, not the stolen kind either.
Here's some screenshots of my recent Beryl install that I'm really happy with. The cube has four desktops, not the top or bottom but the top and bottom can be rotated into view as well. Applications can be dragged accross and moved, right now in this early release right clicking in the taskbar and selecting to send a window to a given desktop isn't working but it looks like it will be fixed later on. There's four square spaces in the top left corner (i've placed it there anyway, it could go on any panel) and I can click on any and the cube rotates. This is how virtual desktops were used initially except without the cube thing flipping around. Windows can also be dragged accross and when the mouse gets to the edge while dragging the cube will flip to the desktop being dragged to. In one screenshot you can see the ebroadcast window dragged halfway over and then just left there so it's overlapping two spaces.
Here's that picture as a matter of fact:
These two are of one of the many many graphic effects, I'm minimising and maximising windows and they slide down and up all wobbly like a genie. The screenshot tool is not good at getting animations so these are just roughly what a bad snapshot looks like. Notice also that other windows are out of focus and just slightly transparent when they are:
In this one I have the window maximized on the screen and I'm pulling on it to the right and a little bit downward with the mouse. If I pull down any further it will come undone from the top panel and I can drag it to another location on that desktop or accross to another.
I'm using Ubuntu. It's a really good entry level distribution and what I first started with. I then ran gentoo for a while and through many headaches learned quite a bit. Then I wanted the headaches to stop so I went back to Ubuntu. It's easy to setup and has very good community support with huge software repositories and requires little configuration on the user's part once fundamental things are done such as video card drivers and kernel recompiles for a specific system. The Kernel comes as a binary packages 486 optimised, 686 optimised, and I think for older and newer amd chips too but in my case I have a pentium 4 on the desktop and pentium m on the laptop. The only downside to Ubuntu is that the packages aren't necisarrily all compiled to be tuned for more modern processors. It's frustrating on my desktop in particular because I know that I can get more out of it being a prescott core especially.
Enough geeky sounding stuff though... It's a good choice for a beginner and what I used as a beginner long before I understood what any of the above paragraph meant.
I didn't know Mac had effects like that. I've played with a Mac but only briefly. They really do look like the thing to have as far as commercial OS's go and the hardware is top notch... and the thing with only having one virus ever, I know has much less to do with it being on fewer desktops than what people would think. It's decended from the same system that Linux has and they ARE easily built to be hard to crack and Linux is by default on a normal setup.
Yeah, as for the Beryl effects in the pictures, I've learned that they it actually works better on shared graphics... or is much easier to setup anyway, than on NVIDIA or ATI and that ATI mobility isn't a good choice for it at the moment. Apparently IBM open sourced their drivers and it enabled the project to have better support there. On that, drivers I mean, NVIDIA has good drivers for Linux but I haven't read about their legacy driver support for older cards in a while. I'de assume they still have them available. There are open source drivers for NVIDIA written outside of the company for older cards but they don't utilize the full potential of the cards. ATI I'm not sure of. There are drivers but I don't know if they... well I read of more problems with getting them working. Also the graphics card in question is more important when talking about ATI and Linux. Some people are very happy with them. Linux isn't a gaming system by any means though.. although some things do work with it if it's set up properly. As for everything else like it's very good. OpenOffice still lacks 100% compatibility with MS office in the respect that how I save on one may have the text page breaking in differant locations or if frames are used to make a company header it might not be good to save in one and then open and print in the other because there would be slight differnaces. There's also the lack of internet explorer and being just a little behind in some browser plugins and codecs. There's currently a codec I can't use that I'm not sure what it is... it's an MS something I think. I also can't use shockwave. Other than that there aren't any problems with a recent Flash upgrade solving some sound sync issues.
Another downside to Ubuntu is that it doesn't have any commercial software (even though it's free) on the install disk so it has to be gotten and installed separately, but I guess MS is like that to. Most software installation is done through a package manager though, and searching the web over isn't necicary very often, but most people won't.
The other thing that is not perfect is printer support but it's pretty decent. Dial up modems as well... they aren't really so much plug and play but in many cases they are.
What it boils down to with the cube in the screenshots is that it's not necisarrlly going to go well for everyone just yet and isn't condered being fully developed in that respect. I even had to make a slight change to the way the system loads it to avoid some kind of conflict that was maxing out my CPU at the end of the boot process.
I'de certainly recommend that every man, woman and child (dogs and cats too) give free software a try. I don't think the world would miss much if all those rich people who inevitably own chunks of MS, lost a few bucks and one can always run both OS's if they have disk space or try it out on an old computer.
I have been reading good reviews about Ubuntu, and I haven't tried it.
The first Linux I tried was Red Hat back in year 97 or 98, it was very hard to configure (trust me), at least there was no easy guide on how to get "online". The HOWTO document was very very lengthy.
Then I tried Mandrake in 2003 or 04, it was a lot easier to use. Since Mac OS X is my main OS, I gave up on Mandrake Linux.
Careful with the partitioner on the install disk. Best always to backup just in case. If you use Ubuntu, let me know when you've done it and which version you chose and I can point you at "how to" guides for your video drivers... well a whole website dedicated to 'how to" stuff actually, and also the most current automated tool for installing all the multimedia stuff you'de want like browser plugins, DVD tools and codecs, windows codecs, etc.
The ubuntu forum is a great resource for all users from beginners to hackers http://ubuntuforums.org/ It contains a whole subsection on instructional things as well and it's good... so long as you're careful with outdated things and learn how to recover from when things don't go as planned.
Edit: Hey antony, I was just thinking that linux writes to the MBR when you install it. Ubuntu won't let you skip this step. It does it to add a bootloader for dual booting and booting the same system into differant kernels. There's a lot of information out there on how to restore a boot sector to what a windows install would want, but I've never seen anything on Mac tools to do this. I think you should find out about it first.
I read about a method to backup and later restore the MBR from a live CD, and the ubuntu desktop install CD is a bootable live cd, and I've made backups but I've never had to restore it so I don't know if it works and it was only once that I came accross that information. I can probably find it again but I don't think it's a good idea to bank on it when it may not even work.
It's possible to be stuck permanently with a grub menu on startup or worse, not be able to access your Mac OS... I've never even seen a referance to a Mac OS on the grub bootloader even on the website. I think you should post in more than a few linux forums about this and get more than a few answers before doing it on that system.
Well, I'm a little nervous that Antony didn't read my last post before he did the install because I haven't seen him. Hopefully Grub understands what a Mac install looks like when it sets up. If not, Ultimate Boot CD can fdisk /mbr the way the old floppys used to... if this is needed.
I haven't got time to install Linux yet, been busy. I did install Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP and OS/2 Warp 4 under Parallels Desktop for Mac. They all work great except I couldn't get OS/2 Warp 4 online.
I guess I will install Fedora Core Linux first, since I have the CD.
I was rambling on about security issues and made a point suggesting that although Windows has been apparently engineered to have easy features, that it's been at the expense of security and that the company doesn't look to really care because consumers don't. When I say easy features though, I mean that it would be easy to criticise them, in this respect, by saying that these easy features aren't always geared at the end user, which is most likeley you the reader, but at developers. So basically, much of what they have done has been to make things easier for people to learn to do nifty things with very little effort, but that this tactic has also been criticised as having the agenda of being a method Microsoft empoys to make things more universally Microsoft compatible and despite not being much of a geek, I find validity in the statement "The real Geek can do that without Windows."
What it comes down to is that there are industry standards. Your internet has industry stadards... worldwide standards that everyone trys very hard to conform to because it makes life easier. I'm not talking just yet about your stupid web browser, but about the protocol that data is transfered in, how the cables that lead to your house handle things, how the servers that translate http://www.ebroadcast.com.au into a location that your computer can find and establish a connection with, how the connection is established, how routes from here to there are negotiated. All of that stuff has international protocol. Even the rechargeable batteries that I recently bought advertised "9 hours of digital music*" with the * at the bottom saying "Based on ANSI standards" which is an American standard but better than nothing in the absence of something else when I'm wondering what the hell to buy.
A long time ago, computer science was indeed science in the respect that ideas were shared, code was open, and the endeavor of development was respected. Since it was respected, it was shared and private companies commonly open sourced their code, specs of hardware, how to interface with it, etc etc. As the story goes by many, "Along came Microsoft and they did not play ball." This is plausable to me. I certainly remember... I've used DOS 1.0 by IBM and I remember much later asking "Why does Microsoft make DOS?" and the answer was that they stole the market. Back then MS-DOS seemed better but today it seriously kind of funny, as in lol funny, to think of Microsoft letting another company doing the same thing.
Now I'm on about your stupid web browser... Ditch IE. It sucks a**. I could probably set up some kind of emulation so I could use the Firefox extention that opens IE in a new tab, it would be a huge pain but I'm sure it can be done. Anyhow, it would be a monumental waste of time because it is very, very rare that I come accross a website that needs it... It actually happens less and less and apart from working with MSN profiles, which I don't bother with but have seen my wife do it so I get that I wouldn't be able to, I haven't hit a site in ages that was so poorly designed that it needed something that Microsoft was arrogant and cocky enough to break protocol and keep the source code of closed with.
If your Bank uses something that requires IE, email them a complaint about it. Express your concerns of them using something that is by nature, not completely understood nor researchable by the people who designed the page and by nature a security risk. There's a lot of smoke screen thrown up about this and it's very well documented as being thrown up by Microsoft itself... there isn't any secret there. The whole thing being that if something is open sourced then it can be cracked, the counter to that being that if something is open sourced, fixes are more quickly found. The argument comes to a stand still... it was a little silly, there were even tests done on both closed and open source systems, trying to crack them and no one was a clear winner BUT there is one thing that is clear and that is that a hardened open source system that is more secure can be compiled from the kernel on up and with Windows this will never be possible and this is allegedly of their own doing many years ago.
Where am I going with this is that way on back when computer science no longer became a cooperative science, the Free Software Foundation was born. It was because of the lack of cooperative direction for social advancement that it came about. I don't know if it was called the Free Software Foundation back then or how long it took before the idea was born or when the idea became reality, but to be clear, Linux just refers to the kernel which is the thing that interfaces with the hardware and allows everything else to run. The project name is called 'GNU' and the kernel for the GNU project is actually not ready yet for a release candidate. The GNU kernel is called 'HURD' Linux disributions are more accurately called GNU/Linux.
The HURD kernel, from the looks of it, is a pretty exciting thing. It's suffered many set back and looks like it would be very difficult to debug, but the potential for expansion on it's existing ideas is exciting to think about though I don't know if I'll see it happen.
As it is, with hardware companies also unwilling to release the specifications of their products and not wanting to invest in the manpower taken to write Linux drivers, it is truly a testament to very well skilled and top notch minds participating in open source projects. To me, it seems very likely that it is also very often for commercial political reasons that a hardware company wouldn't write a Linux driver. I can understand that they don't always want to reveal something about their technology which is instrumental in writing a driver, but it seems that the only companies that do it are the big ones and also the ones who can play ball with Microsoft. NVIDIA for example actively updates their Linux drivers and even stops supporting the old ones with download links dissapearing, my guess is of course encouraging people to upgrade their hardware. IBM is on again and off again making statements about their intentions for Linux support of their products after which it is sometimes realised and sometimes not without any explanation despite queries. Sun Microsystems had a lot to do with OpenOffice reaching a faster 2.0 release which saw it at a new level of MS-Word compatibilty. The spitefulness between Sun and Microsoft is old and well documented. One wouldn't think that they would otherwise have anything to gain from a free word processor. They have a version with some additional closed source options to justify everything, but the point is that you've never heard of that word processor, or so I doubt.
GNU software... well the idea behind it seems very much that of a socialist little digital world. Some people object to this from the perspective of preserving capitalism but again there's debate here. This debate is more and more, as things more and more depend on it, looking like indeed an open sourced world of software would not undermine an economy or mean fewer jobs, it would merely mean that things work differantly. If you follow me that a member of the US Republican party is more resistant to change that the next guy and that Bush is their leader then Microsoft is the comfortable evil idiot.
Anyhow, next time you meet someone that works with servers, especially one that is connected to the internet, ask them what OS's they deal with and chances are that the office machines run Windows for ease of use (what people know how to use) and that the servers run something else that is not Windows. If they do run Windows then ask if the server is located in the same building as them, because it just might also be that it's a Linux machine emulating a Windows server installation all sandboxed within an image file (side by side with other people's little sandbox file of another domain name) on a hard drive set up with as little interface between the actual host's devices as there can be.
I saved a lot of money on my last new computer purchase buy not paying for the bundled software. One day, hopefully, hardware manufacturers will be writing drivers (more quickly than guessing and probing and frying hardware as can be involved with open source drivers) for Linux, games will be written for Linux as well, no one will expect you to use Microsoft formatting for your CV or professional report, and the next time you buy your computer you'lle save hunderds of dollars by not having to pay for an OS, an office suite, antivirus, antispyware crap, a DVD player (don't get me started on the ethics of this one), and whatever else you paid for that's on your hard drive.
Just think of what sort of hardware you could afford for the same price when you add it all up. You've just upgraded to the extreme edition of the latest processor with the extra money you saved.
That there is one ugly looking thumbnail. I put in on a beryl cube wrapped around the corner and put transparent command line terminals on the two visible desktops just for the hell of it. What it is, though, is a very workable way of running the desktop as a server and by using the desktop's gui embedded in the gui of the computer connected to it. If you look at the window carefully you'lle see that it's a resizable window containing one ugly looking gnome session. I haven't really themed the desktop session or added much other than the essentials. I'm still installing things on it and haven't taken the time. This example was done over LAN and the most I can really demand from the network is 1500 kbps so and ADSL2+ connection would make this a good thing.
I'm sure some of those who are still bothering to read are thinking "So what?" and "I can do that on OS-X or windows" using vnc or tightvnc. Right you are. I'm actually using freenx here though, I tried out xnest which was horrible, vnc, tightvnc, which were both better but not adequate even over my home network. I was about to give up and just use ssh and xforwarding for times when I needed a gui. I had already acheived streaming video and audio and fast file transfer doing this. I came accross freenx and tried it out and it's really very good. On the LAN, I can't tell that I'm not at my desktop.
"What's the point?" still I know. First let me add that although it is untested, this is supposed to be workable at ISDN speeds and there's even a setup for dial-up. It's point and click on the side of the connecting computer which was a supprise for me working in a Linux environment. The server required a little bit of setup, just a setting up security keys, users and passwords, and that was it.
The point in me running this on a home LAN is that my laptop is a 1.6 GHz pentium-m with a painfully slow and small hard drive. It's running ubuntu linux which is a good and bad thing. When I say that it's good and bad, bear in mind that everything I say is bad would apply to your XP system. Perhaps vista too, I haven't actually gone and looked at all the requirements for vista. None of the good things would apply to XP. So the laptop runs Ubuntu but despite the ramblings of one or two ubuntu developors claiming that the OS is compiling with the -mtune=i686 option I have a number of times been hacking the flags in the source packages only to screw it up and find that I hit the wrong file and acheived nothing... and see -mtune=i586 fly by when compiling. This is crap and there's no good reason for it. It doesn't break compatibility with prior chips to use -mtune=i686 in general. What this means flag means is that the resulting code is built to run on any 32 bit i386 family processor but is also optimised to use (should they be found) extenstions such as mmx sse and sse2.
I don't feel like looking it up, but even people who have slow old processors would want 686 optimisation. I did look it up. This may have duplicates because it's showing what was supported as the GNU Compiler Collection went upstream, but in order as I can put them. i386, i486, i586,pentium, i686,pentiumpro pentium-mmx, pentium2, pentium3, pentium3m, pentium-m, pentium4, prescott, core-2 This is only a list of the intel side of things, I didn't include AMD here.
core-2 is in the most recent GCC and as far as I know, it isn't maintream if considered stable yet. It's probably still in testing for most distributions. the prescott optimisation is used for core 2 processors since it is very similar and is the hyperthreading processor core.
My desktop is a prescott. My laptop is a pentium-m. On top of that, there's plenty of optimisation flags that can be further used to increase performance but the cost is that bigger code is built. This means longer load times off of the hard drive and more ram cache used per program as well as more ram used by active processes. Ubuntu doens't use much of the extra optimisations so it works well on my slow hard drive and half the ram that the desktop had.
Remember that I said that everything bad that applies to Ubuntu should apply to XP, so no need to get smug, and the screenshot, I'm guessing that aside from the spiffy graphics, the networking utility might have been ported to windows or was a windows project ported to Linux. I haven't looked to see.
I hate these long posts, they get confusing.. did i say the good things about an Ubuntu install would not apply also to XP. That would be wrong. The bad things (and the good things) that apply to an optimised system would not apply to XP. I hope that wasn't confusing. And as for vista. It may have been released with last minute support for core-2 processors but if I was a windows user I'd surely wait for a service pack to be released.
Linux now as of Sunday has support for the core-2 in the kernel itself for those who want to compile the newest source.
Back on track.. My desktop is a prescott core, it has hyperthreading, it's a 3 ghz processor, one of the good prescott cores, prescott2 and with speed penalty bugs worked out. It's a good workhorse. Piping the output of one thing into the input of another process works out the hyperthreading pretty good while still giving awesome responsiveness under load. I pipe process output into process input when converting video. It's very effective. The compiler can also sometimes decide to take full advantage of both virtual cpu's.
There is nothing though.. nothing that you can just install and say "there it is, optimised for my system" and as you can see even i686 (provided by arch linux) is pretty low on the pecking order when it comes to explicity compling executable programs such that they take full advantage of what they are run on. Fortunately there is gentoo Linux. Gentoo allows a person to do an automated Linux from scratch installation. There are live CD's to automate the initial install but I've twice had them fail and had to do it all by hand. The CD's are considered experimental so that's no supprise. The distibution doesn't have any executable programs except for 65 tools that you start out with (and can then recompile to optimise further) including a complier, network stuff, a text editor... just very basic tools, also a text based web browser for reading the online handbook which was about 200 pages when I printed it out. The installation part is only the first 50 pages and it's big print. Long story short, you start with the very basics and end up with a desktop environment compiled from source code to your specific architecture and using your specific optimisations. It occurs to me that a very, very old laptop is just fine as long as there is a very very fast internet connection to your home server... and THAT is why. That answers the question "So what?"
It's always kind of annoyed me to know that I wasn't running to my hardware's potential except for where my hardware felt like it and never where the software could demand it. Most people don't know. If you're still reading and you didn't know, now you do.
I should include that this has more been a rant of mindlessness than anything. I still recommend Ubuntu for new and old users of Linux. Gentoo can be a pain sometimes and can require a lot of time and patients. I reckon I'll build it up with as much as what I can think of before the baby comes because I won't have time to maintain it after that... just continue to use it. Gentoo is a distribution that the packages always go upstream and not the OS itself, which means compiling updates all the time. It really is very impressive though... Linux from scratch but almost all automated and entirely optimised... how cool is that? I've built everything with -march=pentium-m -mtune=prescott so the code will run on the laptop if I choose too. Getting suspend resume hibernate wireless and all the other extras are difficult on a laptop and a large part of the reason that they generally come with preinstalled windows and a restore disk or restore partition and almost never with just a windows install disk. Ubuntu has impressive laptop support but one should research their laptop before trading in their Windows for it.
Yeah so the thing up top, I'm running my Desktop from my laptop. I can disconnect from the session and reconnect later. It's not as likely to need doing as on a Windows box but a remote reboot is pretty straightforward and getting back in is easy and can be set up securely. I'm really impressed... I just last week learned what the hell ssh was and it was for that reason alone I decided to put gentoo back on the desktop. Who would have thought I would find something to also run the desktop remotely.
One thing that windows does not have, is handling of multiple simultaneous logins. It get's kind of weird not in that various remote machines can log in and use the server as a desktop at the same time, which isn't very impressive, but that multiple users can log into the same shared session. I think I'd be frustrated with other people's mouse pointers on the screen.
I must admit that I too am very curious about the Vista release and how good it is or is not. That said... "Stick it to the corporate scum... it's not even the people but the machine itself. Viva Linux. Think of the economic boost the transition would provide" There is always, always something more to learn about a computer even where it is an apparent outdated persuit.
great too see peeps using linux, i use win xp pro twin boot linux syse 10.2, using lilo, ive included some screen shots. word of warning, use a external modem (yes im one of the poor buggars still on dial-up), the agere win modems are no good.
does anyone know of a rpm of wine so i can use windows programs on it-im still a linux newbie-like paltalk etc
does anyone know how to do the boot functions to resize the partion of suse in my twin boot, ive tried, but no luck.
by june i will have a new comp, 1 terra raid 0 + 1 hardrive, 512 dedicated graphics card, 4 gb corsair RAM, vista home premium, and 2 x samsang 21'' lcds, running on kvvm switch with linux fedora 6, ubuntu, mephis. should be awesome. just need the right case. cant wait to install my 26 first person shooters lol
does anyone know if knoppix is installable or just a live dvd, got mine from the linux mag
cheers
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EDIT: Sorry if this is too simplistic or too advanced. Thought I should put this at the beginning and not the end where I typed it originally.
If you can find a Suse forum then the people there can probably point you in the right direction as far as finding a WINE rpm and with help on setting it up for the particular programs you want to use. I haven't used it in ages though and have found linux apps that have the same functionality for everything. Help with that also will be best found in the Suse community unless a Suse user turns up.
With resizing the partition, all I can say is that always with repartitioning, backup before you go. For the Suse install you can use the Knoppix DVD or CD or whatever it is you have and throw it all into a tarball or just copy it using the -a option
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cp -a /source* /destination
keep in mind that if you are backing up to any of the fat filesystems that they won't retain your file permissions properly unless you put it all in a tarball or zip file or whatever you'de use, and that fat32 also has the 4 GB file size limit. I made a tarball on an external hard drive and thought it was fine only to later realise that it had stopped at 4 gigs and that I didn't have all my data.
If you need help specifically on how to back up the Suse install from your Knoppix disk and can't get help from the Suse community, I'll need to know what your partition layout is, where you are backing up to, for example a primary partition that you aren't worried about during the resize, an external media device, etc. For the partition layout you can post the output of
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cat /etc/fstab
and also state where your windows partitions are. If you only have one hard disk then that makes it much simpler and instead this would be the thing to list the output of this as su or using sudo:
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fdisk -l /dev/hda
or possibly and depending upon your drive type
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fdisk -l /dev/sda
It will be easier and safer to post on and search the Suse forums first though. Also, how things get assigned in Knoppix is important to know, so the output of
Code
cat /etc/fstab
from knoppix and if you intend to use external media, where it is mounted which typically shows up on the desktop as the device name such as sda1 or sdb1 or sdc1 for example.
I've heard that a tool called partimage can make backups much like ghost does, looking at the description in my package manager though, It looks like it's not entirely complete for NTFS filesystems. If you have the newest Knoppix then it should have the newest NTFS filesystem tools as well that might work for the same sort of easy backup that could be done in Linux but they are only just considered safe yet I don't know if it's for that sort of large scale support. It's worth looking into.
Also much easier and worth looking into is the Damn Small Linux site. There is an option to type in a boot time which will load the whole OS into RAM (it's damn small) and I've heard that this allows the cd to be removed from the optical drive and used for storage, in case you don't have any place to back things up. I'd personally want to have a run through the forums for Damn Small before trying though and you wouldn't have access to the manual pages if you needed them because they've been stripped out to make room for the small size of the OS.
The partitioning tool on the Suse screenshot, the program itself is called gparted, I don't know what the Suse menu would call it but you'de probably need to isntall it and any mounted partition can't be changed, this seems to include changes to adjacent filesystems. The live CD or DVD is the way to go for this sort of thing. On the Knoppix disc it will be called Qtparted. Quite honestly, I'm more inclined to recommend partition magic for windows for working with NTFS, or for a computer that has any windows and Linux on it, the Linux tools get confusing and Qtparted get confused with descrepencies between what is actually the case after a change and what it detected and wrote on boot. It can also have troubles with things mounting themselves after a change is made, which isn't good if you have a bunch of operations queued up.
I think I should have just said that, "have a look at partition magic, it does the same thing but is less confusing." You can probably get a free trial of it. Unrelated, since you use Windows, look into qemu for emulating it in a mostly sandboxed environment running inside of Linux for those programs that are found on sites that tend to have viruses such as astalavista
You can install Knoppix but it really isn't meant to be done, or wasn't the purpose, some people have figured out how and some people do, but the problem is that the package management after installing it makes it difficult to install new things without being unsure of those programs or dependancies installed don't break when running against the initial Knoppix because although mostly based on Debian, it is not entirely based on it and it is an issue with a hard drive install. If you're computer can boot from a USB drive and you have a 1 gig drive that works, you can install it to run on one of those and it's not as fast as a hard drive but much, much better than an optical drive. If you try it out, make sure you're using the guide for the right Knoppix, there was a new one released in January. I was actually looking at this just which is why I know all of this, but I reckoned that Damn Small Linux on CD was the way to go.
It sounds kind of difficult what I'm typing about backing up your data. Normally I wouldn't bother to say to even do it often at all or worry about it but that is the one thing that I haven't had luck with. And it really isn't that hard, it just sounds it. That said, I don't know if you're very new or more the veteran than me.
The screenshot is my desktop install running screen, run from my laptop which has a terminal attached to the terminal on the desktop running screen... running on my laptop, bound to my desktop... all secured down and well encrypted. I'll be incorporating my wife's stupid Windows machine into the setup in the next day or 3 when I get to it. The desktop has sort of become the household server, I feel sort of bad wasting energy but... meh the planet's already dead and just needs time now.
More Editing: It looks like WINE has been compiled specifically for Suse http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6241 run winecfg after it's installed. It will give you a very basic setup. I found a very good how to on setting up WINE and if I bump into it again I'll let you know. It's not from a SUSE site but it shouldn't have to be specific. I did have to google for a few windows .dll files but other than that it worked very well. Also, is agere the same as the Lucent LT Winmodems? Try to see if it will dial from Knoppix. There may still be hope with that.
I don't think their will ever be any undeniable proof of what 'the best' OS is. XP seems to be the highest selling OS, but then again people could say it is due to it not being superceeded for over 5 years. I run XP MCE at home and Pro at work and am very happy with it, MS haven't put anything in Vista that's urging me to upgrade to it at this point
If you're doing this for a school project, then you need to come from the angle that Windows is the most used operating system and is best supported in that respect. That you can ask your co-worker how to use a software tool, that in the case of the computer illiterate, office skills can be picked up easily and quickly in a short period of time and that those are essential skills in many jobs. In comparison to other operating systems, they are more difficult to learn and can be a major frustration for someone who is very knowledgeable about Windows.. that folks who have learned programming skills or even simple system hacking in one OS will have a frustrating and difficult time when changing to something foreign.
On the desktop, the Mac is the only serious competitor at the moment and it's not very much competition. An employer would have a less efficient way of doing things if they limited job openings to people who had a knowledge of Mac or any other OS unless the job specifically called for those skills.
Windows is user friendly, meaning easy to learn and use, and has for quite a while been developed with that in mind. This is the case with Mac as well, with Apple actually putting the ball into motion initially, but again not many people can use a Mac and sitting down in front of one without being able to use it for lack of being able to easily ask someone "Now what?" sort of makes it irrelevant for now. One day we might all use Macs and we'll all have a cousin who knows how to dynamically handle 1700 tweaks for 42000 situations, but for now our cousin that does that does that usually does that on Windows and if he can do it on Mac or Linux then the only place he's sharing that info is online because he likely only knows 1 or 2 other people who even use his OS in real life.
The latest Mac and PC commercial is pretty funny, the one with the security agent asking for authorisation of everything that happens. I think everyone is aware of the horrible flaws that Windows does have and where its inferiorities are. When you read posts on a Linux forum, and I know very little about Mac so I'm sticking to what I know, there are certain things that are pretty much absolutely true. One is that if someone was exploited, If they don't at least know how it happened and why it was their own fault for overlooking something and how to fix it, then they really don't need to be pointing their server toward the internet in the first place. With Windows your machine might have nasties installed on it before you have the chance to download the updates designed to keep it from happening. Another thing that is certain, is that if a person solved a problem by reinstalling their OS and they didn't have a hard drive failure or unrecoverable filesystem corruption, then it's because they devoloped a really bad habit from their experience with Windows. I think that in the long run, solving problems on Linux is the less time consuming approach because even though it might take a lot of time and a lot of patients, every big problem brings on a new wealth of knowledge that makes it easier and easier to look at what was big things as small things and getting things to jive with one another becomes easier and easier. I've decided that overall, time spent learning/troubleshooting Linux is more efficient when put next to time spent just reinstalling Windows and removing malware and so on.
Back to your question. Windows is a better desktop system because it's what people use. When enough people know how to use the Mac, it would then be worth asking if it's a better OS, but until then it doesn't matter if it is or not. Windows is the best OS because it is the most used and most supported and most practical. The Mac may be better in many ways and equal in many ways but it is not a practical desktop in the business world. It's sort of a shame that it's like that but it is. Here's my analogy: If I had a robot that could anticipate my mood, make me breakfast, clean the house, and was so freakin smart that it could write an OS that ran cleaner, safer, and faster than Windows or Mac on 1/10 of the RAM, graphics, power, etc, then that robot would be a pretty sweet machine... but what good would it do me if I didn't know how to use the damn robot? So the robot becomes irrelevant and is outclassed by the playstation.
Edit: Editing to put the analogy in Dara perspective... The robot is the Mac and the playstation is the PC.
I am saying like yeah way more software avaliable for xp than os x etc it's bad becuase it says no using emotive language but thats my best way to write argumentitive essays!! lol
its due tomorrow.. im almost done.. i cant resist putting in a paragraph insulting macs though
By the time Win98 was out of date, there were so many hardware drivers that had been written for it and it ran reasonably stable. Considering it ran on a DOS shell, it was pretty good.
A 'fresh' install of Win98 with up-to-date drivers was as stable as anything else out there.
The 9x line really went downhill the whole time to the point where ME was just a joke, yeah with one PC at home you may have got lucky, I ran a Packard Bell from late in 95 that had the original 95 OEM release on it and I ran without blue screening for almost 3 years but 98SE on a top of the line HP Pavilion was less stable than XP's release candidate. For both home and work I was very gratefull when XP arrived (and for some of my customers to finally drop 95/98 ).
"To the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained. " The Doctor
98 and ME worked out well for me for some reason. I ran 98 for a ridiculously long time too and had almost zero transition to XP before being curious about Linux and finding out that my addiction to computer stuff could take on forms I hadn't even thought of. 98 worked well for me because for whatever reason and with the hardware setup I had, it ran sort of stable despite a board full of messed up capacitors and what I think was a dirty power supply. It was pretty frustrating when I couldn't get XP to work well when I didn't realise how bad off my system was. I didn't much look at it until I got a new one but when it got to it I was supprised it had been running anything at the end of it's life.
I know this sort of thing must be getting redundant but I can't help it. I saw this one in someone's signature and I hadn't come across it before. Thinking in terms of older Windows it's sort of funny:
"A 32-bit extension and GUI to a 16-bit bug fix for an 8-bit operating system designed on a 4-bit processor, made by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1-bit of competition."
You should contact Microsoft about your success with ME, you might be the only one and they can do a case study
In other OS news, IBM's OS/2 turns / would have turned 20 this week, extract from Wincustomize
Quoted Text
OS/2 was incredibly advanced in its day. In 1992, when I started to really get into OS/2, it was a 32-bit, multitasking, multi-threaded operating system with an object oriented environment. By contrast, Windows 3.0 barely could run, was ugly, had a terrible shell (Program Manager), didn't really multitask.
Only through IBM's incredible incompotence and Microsoft's hardball marketing strategy did OS/2 end up blowing its incredible lead.
News nugget of the week (thus far). Microsoft are planning for the next release of Windows to arrive in 2010. Lets hope it will include new features not to mention a GUI that will actually make it a worthwile upgrade from XP
"To the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained. " The Doctor
News nugget of the week (thus far). Microsoft are planning for the next release of Windows to arrive in 2010. Lets hope it will include new features not to mention a GUI that will actually make it a worthwile upgrade from XP
Microsoft cannot be 100% happy with Vista if they a planning a new OS in only 3 years. I may give Vista a miss, just like I did with 2000 and ME.
Microsoft cannot be 100% happy with Vista if they a planning a new OS in only 3 years. I may give Vista a miss, just like I did with 2000 and ME.
Microsoft's game plan with OS' changes almost daily. They propose to have new client and server systems released every three years. When XP was in the workshop they didn't plan a major release for five - six years; XP was codnamed 'Whistler' and it's replacement codenamed 'Blackcomb', there would have been an interim release codenamed 'Longhorn'. Longhorn became Vista which after 5 years in the making has to be considered a major release all though all the new and exiting features were scrapped so they could get it packaged.
Blackcomb / Vienna / Windows 7 could be delayed until 2020 for all I care and I wouldn't run Vista it offers nothing over XP media center edition except a clumsy interface
"To the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained. " The Doctor
Well... I stumbled onto the site again and I also ended up buying a computer with Vista preinstalled. It's a laptop so I couldn't really avoid the software bundle and get a rebate. I shrunk the partition down but holy crap it really is a lot on the drive for a clean install. It doesn't really have any extra's except for Norton and the laptop utilities but there's no way they can take up all that room. I actually did like the interface. It looked pretty neat and it wasn't better than the beryl or compiz projects on Linux but... well some animations were and there's one effect I like better but it's more limited in reality. I guess it's always fun to play with a new computer and I was using XP earlier today now that I think of it and it was kind of neat just to have a change.
Large installs don't really make a big differance today considering how much hard drives hold now, but thinking that Vista was sort of neat didn't last very long. Most of it was just as I said, a new interface and a refreshing change for a short period. First, I'll complain that I did on first boot have a window freeze and that furthermore the window was the Norton nag screen. Nag screens piss me off and those bubbles that pop up in Windows saying "Your computer is now connected to the cable that you just connected it to" and "You have turned off your firewall", those things are really annoying. Vista appears to have more of them than XP. Lots more I think. More on the intitial things I didn't like... mmm no I can't think of anything. Oh yeah I know, I was wanting to install the grub bootloader to a partition instead of the MBR, then copy those bits into a file and have the Vista bootloader pass me over to the Linux one so restoring things for resale later on would be that much easier. I wasn't able to do it right off and went looking on the internet. I came accross alot about how Vista has one of the most powerfull bootloaders there is and so on and so forth. So to set up this powerful bootloader how I wanted, instead of just editing the boot.ini file before, I had to download a program by another company, run it and have it do what these articles were raving about... copying the boot info from a grub install to a partition table that was not the MBR. The syntax of the bootloader's file was really confusing so... meh. Anyhow the stupid thing didn't even work but when I copied the info myself using Linux then overwrote the file that the other utility had created and crossed my fingers, it worked... so what do you know, it's powerful because someone pulled some crazy trick that's been around as long as XP and in my case using a tool that's been around as long as... well I watched to geeks argue about the best way to clone a drive and one of them was claiming to be using the utility for 25 years.
What the hell was I talking about again? Oh yeah. The Vista menu is a pain in the a** but then once you get used to it, it actually seems more organised that the XP menu. It's prettier too. And the panel is prettier, and the button is prettier, and IE7 is pretty neat looking. Everything is great until you have a program run that for whatever reason makes the OS say "A program requires the Vista be run in 'basic' setting" and then everything is all of a sudden just really ordinary looking and I thought to myself "Holy Crap! This is what it would look like if I didn't have a GPU in the computer? This really sucks! What a peice of crap OS! What a rip off, I'm glad this junk was bought in bulk by the computer manufacturer because I'd be pissed off if I payed full price for this." And I sort of realised that Vista doesn't really have all that much extra and that where it does have extra things, the really good things I've heard about it, they all of a sudden fall through and I'm thinking that if Microsoft couldn't have made a service pack that implemented better security, options for nifty well thought out filesystem encryption scenarios, and then also given people the option to turn on some nice eye candy then they really... oh hell I thought Microsoft had more than a handfull of smart people working there for a second, but with graphics that are uglier than XP and other implementations that can be easily added or integrated or upgraded into on other operating systems... I'll just say that I thought Vista was kind of neat and then all of sudden I found myself saying "Holy s**t, it's all smoke and mirrors!" and felt dissapointed... and that from a guy who doesn't really use the OS except for.. well that's another long story and my time here is limited to one post every 3 months. 2 posts this time though because I have to go find a thread Dara posted in and call her a hottie.
Yeah, so Vista actually was sort of dissapointing. It was pretty neat... I even for a second put meandering thoughts into learning some basic Windows coding stuff which of course means using and familiarising myself with the OS again, but it lasted as long as the eye candy and then it was gone in a puff of smoke.
I just got Beryl installed. It's WAY more than I had even hoped. 
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