Linux. Going to take a serious look at it.

[Rick W]

Going to give Linux a shot.
Never laid eyes on it but hey, what the heck. Besides, I'm thinking there just might be something better for me out there somewhere. I'm a techie sort of fella and used to doing things to my computer I know nothing about. :-D
I have 4 HD's so one I'll dedicate to Linux. I can multiboot to any of the 4 drives so that's no problem.
Oh, I've selected Ubuntu for no reason at all except I've read that's it's the most popular of the distros. Gotta start somewhere I suppose.
Ok, download completed.

 

[kenan]

I used Ubuntu for a bit, just make sure what you're doing before you do it because with one mouseclick I managed to screw it up and had to reinstall it. But yea definitely do your reading before you install it, and if you don't know how to do something then don't try, just get some help on it ;)

 

[stovebolts]

Ubuntu is pretty good, and easy :-D
Actually, you can boot Ubuntu from a flash drive or the CD and have a portable OS :-D

I'd actually run Red Hat or Suse if I could figure out how to install my Sprint card to it. Man has Linux come a long way in the past 5 years!

 

[Rick W]

Man has Linux come a long way in the past 5 years!

I wouldn't know :
Should have started looking at Linux long before this.

I'd actually run Red Hat or Suse ...

So many distros, so little time. :

Nah, it'll just take some time to settle on one.
Why Red Hat or Suse though?

 

[Vic C.]

Here, add another Linux GUI to your list:

http://www.linspire.com/

 

[stovebolts]

Back when... Suse had had the most packages (10 discs to load em all onto a 6.4 gig bigfoot) and it was pretty solid while Red Hat offered the biggest variety of hardware drivers and had the best support.

I suppose I mentioned both Suse and Red Hat not only because they are the ones I've played with in the past, but also cause the company I work for supports both as a corporate build and I've been toying with the idea of making the switch on my corp pc. (I'm chicken...) They also support Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux, but I'm sure that the ones supporting and developing Linux in our corporate environment hooked onto Suse and Red Hat a long time ago and stuck with them for stability reasons. Of course, it's just a guess.

Ubuntu's good though. I've got a pc next to my desk that I loaded it on just a few months ago. Unfortunately, it's now unplugged and placed on a shelf.. I really wish I could get my Sprint card loaded on it 8-) Maybe I could try Red Hat :splat: (duh)

Hey, if you want to have some fun and run some windoz apps on Linux, try some wine :-D

http://www.winehq.org/

 

[Rick W]

Currently burning the downloaded ISO for openSUSE 11.0 (DVD)
12 minutes to go. 8-)
Man, the thing is big! Over 4 gig
lol

 

[Rick W]

Finally got something running.
Wasn't getting a GUI interface... X server would not run. I'm a total newbie to this stuff and it took a while to find out something that worked.
Anyway I'm posting this from openSUSE 11.0 X64. I still have a bunch of things to do, the first being learning how to install drivers for the Nvidia cards I have in SLI.

 

[Vic C.]

I don't have any experience with openSUSE. I have only tried the Linspire GUI.

 

[stovebolts]

Well, how's Suse going? Having fun yet :

I was able to install Red Hat (x86 64), but I've been having a hard time getting my Sprint 5740 EVDO card going :-? Man, what a pain Oh well, I'll tinker with it some more next week...

Red Hat installed amazingly well and didn't miss a beat with any of my hardware.

I know this is going to sound stupid, but I can't wait to load Wine and run some windoz apps :turn-l:

 

[Rick W]

Currently I'm still trying to get the desktop at the resolution and refresh rate that I like. I don't know if the nvidia drivers are working or not or even if I installed them properly. (I hope this supports SLI) I had to edit the xorg file to get the GUI going while stuck in command line and haven't been able to modify anything since.
Once I get that under control I need to find out how the "see" those other three drives. I think I can do that but right now my desktop looks like the totally default desktop right after installing a version of windose.

 

[stovebolts]

Hey Rick,
Accorging to the Nvidia site, as long as your running Linux 64-bit (AMD-64/EM64T), it should work.

BTW, which desktop are you running? Have you tried KDE? Currently, I'm just running the default Red Had desktop, but I remember from days past that KDE was pretty nice.


As far as your resolution, I'm running an HP LP2065 LCD and I couldn't get my resolution where I wanted it until I told Linux which specific monitor I was using. Thank goodness it was listed :

I still don't think the display looks as good as it did under Vista, but then I didn't reboot the system after I installed my video driver. Maybe I'll come back on Monday and it will look better : What I'm really worried about is getting my sprint card to work. I browsed the web and it can work... but man, it's a lot of work.

As far as you having to edit the xorg file, I'm surprised you had to do that. When you installed the OS, it should have asked you if you wanted to install xwindows. Is it possible you clicked no or didn't select a desktop? You've probably already found this article, but if not, see if it give you any help.
http://fixunix.com/suse/126080-lcd-xorg ... ation.html

Just out of curiosity, are you running one or two video cards and are you running multiple monitors?

 

[Rick W]

You make some interesting points that I will check into.
One monitor, two cards BFG 7800 GTX OC in SLI. openSUSE does "see" the two cards.
My monitor isn't listed for linux as far as I can find. And I believe that's the hitch. The brand name is Elements "Vision 9H" model E19BL. It's a 19" CRT and has an excellent picture as far as my preferences go. So far it's lasted for something like 4 years and is still doing great. Actually I've been hoping it dies soon so I can have an excuse to get 22" wide LCD. Or maybe a 24" : Maybe I can string a thin wire from it outside and up the large maple out back just before a lightning storm and tell the wife I'm trying to get better reception. :-D
Nah, she won't buy that at all. lol
I'm using Gnome desktop. I just might try a reinstall and switch to KDE. And yes I'm using the 64-bit flavor of openSUSE. I've read that the nvidia drivers within the distro should work but for some reason the X server won't run and shuts down during installation thereby I'm stuck in command line until I edit the xorg file... or more accurately select from a list of preferences given after typing in the command xorgconfig (Or something like that).

OK, I'll do a complete reinstall some time today and see if anything changes.

 

[Rick W]

Reintalled openSUSE and made some progress in that I was able to figure out how to get the Nvidia drivers working, at least the default drivers in this linux distro and got the screen resolution and refresh rate set that I like on this monitor.
Still more to do on the video side but right now I've got to get the other drives going. When in Linux I can't "see" the other drives and when in windows I can't "see" the Linux drives.
Anyway, Firefox looks just fine now in Linux. No problems there at all.
And I'm getting to know my way around Linux a little. Very little perhaps but that's progress. :-D

/edit
I've found seeing those drives and using them as I always have isn't going to happen. But that's alright. What I really needed to do was share files between the two. It seems the safest way is to create a common Fat32 partition that both can read.

Yeah, once all the system stuff is settled I'll be trying some of that Wine. :

 

[stovebolts]

Good to hear you made some progress!

Believe it or not, I've got two 24" CRT's I'm getting rid of :

We'll, my goal for today is to get Wine installed and putz around with my Sprint Card. Linux has actually come a long way. If I can get Wine to run all of my wife's Apps, I might try building one of my pc's at home with Linux again.

As far as seeing your windoz directory, you should be able to mount an NTSF drive and have full access without having to create a Fat32 partition. Here's a forum discussion I found on read access.
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-13257.html
Here's another one that gives you the ability to write in NTSF from Linux.
http://www.linux-faqs.com/faq/misc/ntfs.php#3.2

I almost remember Wine allowing either read, or read write access to NTFS partitions... I'm a little rusty, but I also remember the last time I ran Linux I mapped a network drive to my XP box and had full read / write access to the share.

 

[Rick W]

I can now see the windows drives and I've managed to setup a working network between the Linux box and the XP box, file sharing both ways.

One observation though.
I don't believe MS has much to fear from Linux in the way of competition. The command-line is very dominate in Linux and the commands are very cryptic. I don't think the general public is ready to go back to DOS style computers. The command-line mindset within the Linux community seems to be a mainstay for some reason and it's that mindset that I believe is holding Linux back. It's almost like "point and click" is frowned upon.
During my adventures in setting up the network I found many would rather use command-line when there was a point/click application readily available that accomplished exactly the same thing... and I mean many lines of strings of code... sometimes a full page or more. These guys seem to revel in their command-line prowess but to the newbie it's a big turn off.

On the up-side though Linux comes bundled with many fully functional applications. (At least this distro does). MS on the other hand seems to truncate their app's function requiring you to buy an application, usually their own, to attain full functionality.

My next endeavor must be harddrive maintenance, manipulation within some specific utilities. I need to get control of these drives and partitions.

 

[stovebolts]

eee gad on the command line! I'm trying to get my corp VPN setup and I needed Java :-? Took me 20 minutes to figure out how to install it after reseting permissons etc from command line. Still havn't figured out how to update Firefox to 3.0... but hey, I'm downloading via command line now and going that route :o

Hey, have you updated your Firefox yet? If so, how did you do it?

 

[Vic C.]

Now see what you guys did to me? Ya made me go get my linspire ISO file and burn it to cd. :-D I might as well give it a second look. I don't know why I stopped using it. Now with Sun's free distribution of OpenOffice http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US , MS Office users have no excuse. If I can't find a way to run my PSP, I can muddle through Gimp. Meebo has all the IM bases covered, since it's Java based. http://www.meebo.com/about/ ...and it incorporates itself into Firefox very well.

 

[Rick W]

Now see what you guys did to me? Ya made me go get my linspire ISO file and burn it to cd. :-D

:smt044

eee gad on the command line! I'm trying to get my corp VPN setup and I needed Java :-? Took me 20 minutes to figure out how to install it after reseting permissons etc from command line. Still havn't figured out how to update Firefox to 3.0... but hey, I'm downloading via command line now and going that route :o

Hey, have you updated your Firefox yet? If so, how did you do it?

I'm already at version 3.0b5

openSUSE 11.0 X64 came out several weeks ago I believe.

 

[Vic C.]

Hey check this out. CnR (click and run) should be available for other versions of Linux GUIs.

http://www.linuxforums.org/applications ... t_why.html

OpenSuse is listed among the versions.