Posted: 9/9/2007 7:16:38 AM EDT
| XP died on a 3yo laptop, thinking of burning free Linux to DVD and installing it on that laptop. Suggestions? |
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If you want a simplified, computer moron version of Linux, go with Ubuntu. If you want LINUX, one where you can su to root, or heck, even log in as root, get something else. I like the Fedora Linux versions, since they're the closest to to what I support at work - RedHat. |
sudo -s |
Ahh, but therein lies the great thing about linux. Each flavor is the same engine (kernel), some with different paint jobs (GUI) and some with different fuel requirements (package management). For the true geeks out there, yes there are differences in kernel amongst other things, but at a high level my comments are correct. But if you are looking for ease of install and hardware detection, Ubuntu is probably the best at the moment. |
Given that requirement I would say lean towards SuSE due to their better than average laptop support (wireless, etc). |
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Loads of Ubuntu hype without reasons behind the recommendation. Not knocking Ubuntu - a good distro, probably what I would us if Mepis didn't take a good thing and make it better. Mepis gets my vote for a desktop. Why? I prefer KDE. Ubuntu is Gnome focused. KUbuntu is available but is missing the "Magic" of Mepis (does have loads of support, forum activity etc). Mepis has worked out of the box in most installations from desktops to laptops with wireless that I have installed, unlike Ubuntu (ndiswrapper is a PIA for a noob). Currently Ubuntu repos are used (makes it a derivative) and are a bit bleeding edge. 7.0 will be using the more conservative Debs - a move in the right direction for the masses. Beryl works super out of the box. Best installer around. http://www.techsupportalert.com/review-linux-for-windows-users-part-3.htm Have fun with whatever you choose. Edit: Ubuntus attitude in regard to logging on as root sucks, I don't appreciate the shackles. Just another annoyance for me. |
| I am not that familiar with linux, and have tried a few distros to try to find something that's user friendly for someone more familiar with windows. Recently I've used Ubuntu a little and I also just installed linux mint which seemed very cool. |
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I started with Ubuntu and overlayed XGL/Beryl. The legendary Linux Cube. ETA: If you're going to use Linux as your main OS you're going to have to learn how to tweak it. It will never be as easy to use as Windows, but you can do a lot more with it if you're willing to learn. |
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I was trying to figure this out recently myself, I downloaded several versions of Linux: SimplyMEPIS32 Ubuntu openSUSE Fedora First I want to say that Live CDs are fucking awesome. It would be AWESOME if Windows could work the same way. Live CDs let you boot into Linux without installing a single thing onto your hard drive. In essence, you're running the OS right off the CD and a RAMDisk. You can get on the internet and do anything you want as you install the OS to your hard drive. So I tried two versions that I downloaded. Ubuntu is pretty user friendly for the most part. I had some issues trying to get my Nvidia 7950GT graphics card driver installed properly, but other than that, it worked well enough. Ubuntu uses the GNOME interface, though there is a version that has the KDE interface as well. I also tried SimplyMEPIS (32bit version), which uses the K Desktop Environment. I liked this one a LOT more but I also had bigger problems with my video card compared to Ubuntu. SimplyMEPIS doesn't setup Nvidia cards properly despite having an Nvidia driver. You can use the VESA driver, but I didn't like how moving windows around resulted in poor rendering speed with it. Properly setting up the video driver is actually technically easy to fix, but can be difficult for somebody like me that was just using Linux for the first time. The forums and knowing what to search for are a big help. I like this one a lot more than Ubuntu but the graphics card problems could turn some Nvidia users away if they are newbs like I was. I worked past them and I'm happy with it. If you don't have an Nvidia card, it should install without a hitch and you'll be quite happy. I still have a LOT more to learn as I only dabble with SimplyMEPIS. I've read that Windows users usually have an easier transition to KDE as opposed to GNOME. There's probably some truth to that as MEPIS seemed to be more natural to me than Ubuntu. |
That's bullshit. There isn't anything I can't do under Ubuntu. It's still a Linux distro, and you're only limited by your own technical ability. And while yum is nice, apt-get is MUCH faster. And in my opinion (and everybody's got one) it's easier to make .deb packages, not that I have to to that often. And seriously...do you actually think a distro can keep me from logging in as root, just because some dude decreed it? Come, now. 
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+1 sudo su Ubuntu is as good as any other release. The beauty of Linux is that you can make it do pretty much anything you want. |
That is called "I can't figure it out, so it is crap!". :/ I vote Ubuntu as well. Great OS. But if you want to be totally ub3R 733T, FreeBSD FTW. |
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I've been trying Ubuntu so far I kind of like it. However, it took about two weekend for it get working on my new box. I had to turn of APCI/APIC for ubuntu to work on my machine because I have an Nvidia card. Thats the one thing I absolutely hate about open source stuff. Installation is a bitch! I guess I've been spoiled with Windows. |
I picked up Ubuntu Linux for Dummies this morning, it comes with the CD... So far, I'm dissapointed! All the "open source" programs are the same thing I'm running on my XP laptop! Open Office... Firefox...  I think I'm going to try to partition my hard drive and run both on here... if I can do it without screwing it up royally!!! 
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If you have a graphics card that will handle it, install XGL and Beryl into your Ubuntu, they have a how-to in their forums. That is something that Windows CANNOT do. www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3p8IBNNd88 The above isn't my machine, but I have the same Beryl/XGL setup. ETA: Here is a screenshot of mine, but I run it in 1360x768. 
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Very cool! Well, thanks to this thread, I learned about Ubuntu Linux... I picked up the Dummies book this morning, and just completed a partition of my HDD and installed Ubuntu on my laptop. It took awhile... but I'm on XP right now, and everything is running fine. I gave Ubuntu a 6GB partition, 500MB of which is the swap partition... Learning new stuff, but it's all good! 
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i am a windows guy through and through, but i am not opposed to trying new things it has been about 2 years since i tried a linux desktop, last weekend i tried to replace a unlicensed copy of XP with ubuntu fiesty fawn. this XP install had 3 years of crap and no mantainence built up, mind you. the machine itself was at least 6 years old. you would think the OS could include and properly set up video drivers for a GeForce 2, right? WRONG. the freshly installed ubuntu runs much more slowly than the crusty XP install. you want to listen to MP3s without screwing with extra software? WRONG! how about looking at normal graphic file formats? WRONG! sure all of this could be fixed, but why? this is just a major headache for me that i really don't feel like working on. my experiences always end up with some piece of hardware not being configured correctly and a non-intuitive interface (at least for me). its probably just laziness on my part and i should be able to figure out driver installations in linux distros, but i gave it an hour or so and wasn't making any progess. for being "community driven", there is a huge lack of properly written documentation that normal users or former windows sysadmins to use. i end up feeling like this is some piece of software jumbled together by thousands of different unpaid people all across the world with no real organization or purpose and no main standardizing body (maybe because that is what it is???). linux guys like to just keep on working with the OS and they never seem to go through a release process where they get everything to a good stopping point, test it thouroghly, write thourough documentation, and do all the other small things nessecary to get it ready for public consumption. linux will never suceed on the desktop until they get their act together here. i know windows stuff from top to bottom, and i am beginning to learn mac os. i have no problem giving something a fair shake. every time i try linux on the desktop, i end up saying "this is a complete waste of time". i could make enough money to buy a full version of windows with my time long before i will ever start to grasp all of the intracacies of linux. and i can garundam-tee you that if i don't have the patience for it, your average corporate desktop user or home user won't. |
Linux has never been about commercialization. It's open source, which means it often IS a big mix of things made by thousands of unpaid people. That doesn't make it inferior to Windows. If you want ease of use go with Windows. If you want something powerful go with Linux. It's not for everyone, and if you're too lazy to read through lots of Linux forums during your initial install and hardware configuration you may not want to bother with it. ETA: I'd be willing to bet that MOST servers, both corporate and otherwise run on Linux. |
And if you want 'user friendly' *nix - get a Mac with OS X. Not all of it is 'open source' - there are commercial versions of *nix available - I use Solaris on servers (although I guess there is now an open source version of Solaris...) |
Well, I use Ubuntu about 99% of the time here at home, but I will admit that it isn't for everyone. Linux is not Windows so some things are different. If you're not willing to invest a little bit of time to learn those differences, then by all means, stick with what you're using now. Ask yourself this and be honest with yourself though: how many years has it taken you to get as familiar with Windows as you are now? I'm sure you weren't just born with all of that knowledge. Yes, you won't be able to learn as much about Linux in an hour as you already know about Windows. I have recently done both Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP installations. It's amazing how much easier and faster the Ubuntu installation was. For me, the Ubuntu installation took about 30 minutes, and all of my hardware "just worked". I did then have to spend another 5-10 minutes enabling the nVidia driver in the restricted driver manager and installing some codecs to do things like listen to mp3s. If that's too hard for you, you can use something like Mint where this is already done for you. The Windows installation on the other hand took a lot longer. First there's about 45 minutes to copy files and do the main part of the install. Then I had to install video card drivers to get a somewhat normal looking display and you better have them on a CD or flash drive because there's a good chance you don't have a working Ethernet driver yet to download them (I didn't). Then, install Ethernet drivers, sound drivers, chipset drivers, etc. Now that all of the hardware should be working, you better hurry up and install Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware software since Windows' security (XP's anyway, I hear Vista is better) sucks. Of course, you'll have to reboot after a lot of these installations. Don't forget to run Windows update a time or three to make sure you've got all the latest updates too. Yet another reboot is probably required. Now, if we want to do actually do anything useful with this Windows box, we need to install some software. Notepad and Wordpad aren't great text editors so most people install an office suite (something like MS Office will cost you a few hundred more dollars assuming you don't just pirate it). If you're going to do image manipulation, I doubt you'll be using MS Paint. So you'll have to install Photoshop (another few hundred dollars if you're not pirating it) or install the GIMP. For CD/DVD burning beyond the most basic data backups, you'll have to install something like Nero. If you want to look at PDFs, you'll have to download and install Acrobat. The list goes on and on. On the other hand, Ubuntu comes with Open Office, PDF readers, CD/DVD burning software, the GIMP, etc. pre-installed and it's all completely free. Granted, I still like some of the Windows apps better than their Linux counterparts, but for what you're paying for them (or should be paying for them if you're pirating), they should be better. I agree that there are things Linux could do better and certainly clear documentation is always welcome, but I'm not so sure Windows has great documentation either. You just don't need it as much since you're not new to Windows and therefore, already know what to do. To accuse Linux of releasing software too early while giving Microsoft a free pass is VERY unfair. How many service packs do they usually need to put out before they finally get a lot of the bugs worked out? Ask some early Vista users if they think Microsoft probably should've waited a while longer before releasing it too. The biggest problem getting "regular home users" to use Linux isn't that it isn't a viable OS. The problem is that they can't buy a PC from Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. with Ubuntu or some other Linux distro pre-installed like they can a Windows based PC. There's no way my parents would be able to install Ubuntu, but they wouldn't be able to install XP either. If people could buy PCs with Linux pre-installed like they could Windows PCs, I think Linux would be just fine as a desktop for home or corporate users. It's not that much different, that people couldn't still figure out which icons to click to read/write email, browse the Internet, and use office productivity software. But anyway, I should wrap this up. Linux isn't for everyone. It's not Windows, and it's not meant to be. There are differences that you'll have to learn if you want to use Linux, especially if you're the one that's going to be one doing the installation and configuration. Just remember that it took you some time to learn Windows at some point too. |
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UBUNTU I'm not a computer geek. I have a good friend who is. He has a PC repair business. We have a deal. I fix his guns / he fixes my computers. I tried unbutu last winter, it was so easy to install and run, that I installed it on 3 computers on our house. With it, I can surf the web, work in excell, MS word, and PDF files. burn and play MP3's, watch DVD's etc... Download ubuntu and burn it to a CD, you can drop it in your DVD rom and reboot to take ubuntu for a test drive. It's pretty cool, even a caveman like me can figure it out. |
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The reason I don't really like ubuntu is not that it's easy to use. Sure, for noobz with desktops that just want to surf the web... fine. I come from running Linux in server environments. I learned how to do things logged in as root, or su - to root. In ubuntu, I can't do that. So it's 'take everything you know how to do in Linux, and then put 'sudo' in front of it'. I never dug into it much, because I don't support it on servers. When I get a customer having problems with it, I flat out tell them it's nerfed as far as administration goes. To me, it's like trying to fix your sparkplugs by going in through your tailpipe. I just prefer the straight forward style of Linux. I want to go in by popping the hood. Call it personal preference. I won't call you an idiot for liking ubutu, so don't call me one just because I like Linux the way that 90% or more of the distros out there run. |
I just don't get why people are so hot for it. "But ours go to seven" is not a selling point IMHO.
Send a PM to Max_Mike and watch his head explode.
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I've been using Linux since 1997. Started with RedHat and stuck with it for a few years. Then moved on to Slackware for a few more. Tried almost every distro out there, but in the last couple years I have moved towards Debian based Linux distros. My servers are Debian, my laptop is dual boot Debian + WinXp. I also have a VMWare vertual machine installed from Ubuntu(Debian based) that I use within Windows when I need to work both OS's at the same time. With VMWare Tools installed it runs almost as fast as a dedicated Linux Install. I will agree that Ubuntu is a decent starting point for new Linux users. Fedora sucks balls. Centos is a good choice for Enterprise/Server usage. Slackware is great, but can be a little confusing for new users. But Debian...it is my goto choice in Linux ditros now. Easy to keep up-to-date, easy to configure (for most things), and not much bloat. Just my $0.02, and my own opinion. |
You can setup Ubuntu so that you can login as root. It's not setup that way by default, but you can do it. We could argue all day about whether it's a good idea to actually do that or not, but it can be done. For someone with a lot of Linux experience, it should be easy to figure out how to enable root logins. If you need help though, there are all kinds of threads at ubuntuforums.org that explain how to enable root logins. |