The Linux thread

With other sections of the forum having ongoing threads about assorted subjects, why not one for Linux? Let's kick this off with the classic questions, like how you got into it, your distribution(s) of choice, dual boot vs. exclusive system and what factored into these decisions?

Well, in my case, I'll spare you the litany of how Windows became more of a pest the more I wanted to do with it. About three and a half years ago a friend started getting decent results with his Linux desktop so I gave it a shot as well. At first I toyed around with SuSE, Red Hat and Mandrake (today's Mandriva) for a while, the latter being the RPM-based distro I used for the longest span of time. Hooked but not yet satisfied I started to mess with Debian's unstable branch. Back then, setup was still a royal pain, but the then fledgling Sarge installer showed promise and the very mature package manager coupled with a large software library made it all worth the trouble. Well, at least for something like two years. The way some issues were handled in Debian was still rather bothersome, such as mixed version KDE packages around every new release of the desktop and the eternal struggle with the proprietary Nvidia drivers.
Around that time, Ubuntu was getting loads of good press, supposedly "combining Debian flexibility with ease of use". Long story short, these bold claims weren't that far fetched at all, aforementioned key issues I had with Debian just don't exist in the (K)Ubuntu world and while waiting six months for each new version of the distro is a bit of drag, compared to real bleeding edge, the system just works and that's what I need now that I am a busy student. Windows is still there, but just for the occasional game.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I started with Debian, but failed and didn't come back to Linux for a long time. Then I played around with SuSE, but I didn't really like it. Moved on to Mandrake, had a lot of hardware trouble there. Moved to Debian again, this time successfully. After a long time with Debian I was finally fed up with the old package versions, so I experimented with gentoo.

Now I'm running gentoo / win2k on my Dell laptop (hw except WiFi works), gentoo / win2k3 on my main machine (amd64 - gentoo is a pure 64bit build) and gentoo on a small audioserver (running the music player daemon (mpd)) serving music to my soundsystem.

I only need win for gaming and PSX emulation, coz there is no good emu for linux out there.

Most amazing jew boots

I started with Mandrake (9.1, 9.2, and 10), all failing miserably due to my abilities. That is, I used wireless, but no driver seemed to support it--as it turns out, ndiswrapper was required, but lord only knows a newbie using that isn't much possible.

After a year or so beyond that, getting tired of Windows I take the plunge and format it, installing Ubuntu solely. That was alright, but the bulkiness of Gnome bothered me--two reinstalls later, I finally figured out that reinstalling doesn't do much (as compared to Windows reinstalls).

Finally content to stew in GDM-land, I used it for about four months without too many hiccups, though the repository thing quickly got on my nerves, especially with breakage between universe and the standard repos.

Anyways, it's at this point I back everything up, nuke Ubuntu, and (with much due to Arainach) plunge into Gentoo land. At this point, Gentoo was 2005.1. It impressed me with how easy to install it was... no, really! The documentation was superb, and ndiswrapper seemed to work fine. Granted, the fact I knew how to download sources and make Portage aware was very helpful.

To this day, I use that installation, though it's changed a lot. I run Openbox and Pypanel now, no DE like KDE or XFCE at all. Nice and snappy, too, which helps my various servers and mpd. I have since put Windows XP on a second, smaller drive for gaming, as my computer is a bit weak to run Guild Wars through Wine.

Also, LA, tried using epsxe under Gentoo? It works fine for me, the only quirk I had to deal with was the compiled plugins not working--downloading them from the net worked fine, though.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

The problem is that ePSXe was never open-source on Linux and so there exist only prebuild binaries of the 1.6.0 and 1.5.2 (?) version (the 1.6.0 version isn't capable of emulating FF9 for example, leads to glitches and lockups). But these precompiled binaries are only 32bit and running them in the emulation layer on a 64bit architecture is more than problematic.

PCSX is too old, it works for a few games but has no recompiler and it therefore very slow. PCSX is open-source but not developed actively anymore. Same goes for ePSXe - understandable after you lost the entire sourcecode (this is not official but the only explanation).

PSX emulators with (active - more or less) development:
SSSPSX (developer is nagisa, he's currently doing some recompiler work for the PCSX2 project - I spoke to him but he currently has no plans of open-sourcing the emulator nor porting him to UNIX world)
psX - windows only without PSEmu Pro plugin system. Everything based on DirectX framework so you will have a hard time porting this to UNIX.
Xebra - also seems no to be based on PSEmu Pro plugin system.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I was bored one day so I just partitioned off five gigs on my old laptop and installed Slackware on it and had myself a nice dual-booting box. I managed to get it to run, but I had no idea what the hell I was doing so I kind of gave up on it after a while since I couldn't do much with it. Sometime later, I installed ArchLinux onto that partition, and with their package manager (pacman), things got a LOT easier. So I actually only ran Arch for almost a year. After that I had to go to college, and windows was pretty much required there so I switched back.

Unlike a lot of people that switch, I really do not mind using XP, so it was really easy for me to just drop linux and go back to windows (yeah I am rather strange). Linux was fun and I really liked the control I had everything, but it wasn't worth the hassle I would have to deal with to keep using it in college. I do intend to go back to it one day and try out Gentoo and/or Linux From Scratch though.

I was speaking idiomatically.

There's no real point to Gentoo or Linux From Scratch. Even less so for LFS, because you're essentially foregoing one of the huge goddamn nice things about Linux: sane package management.

Just throw in a Ubuntu CD and get stuff done.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Even as an Ubuntu user, I'd have to object to that assessment, well at least part of it: Gentoo, while (probably still) being a pain to set up in the first place, has a very competent package manager.

FELIPE NO

Indeed, it has. Portage can be quite confusing at first, but it's very robust in handling and solving dependencies. It works ok for me, so to speak.

I had a lot of trouble with dependencies on my Debian system, but maybe I was too much a newb back then.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

I have a 10gb partition on my drive with a destroyed ubuntu sitting on it collecting dust.

For a while, we were using a different router than our regular one, and therefore ubuntu could actually connect to the internet, so I installed it. (My thread on the ubuntu forums).

Though now we're back on the old router and until adsl2+ arrives, we'll be on this one.

While I was using ubuntu, I felt pretty limited as to what I could do. It also made me laugh quite a few times with some of the things I had to do to say, edit a text file and be able to save it. Also having to enter my password each and every time to do an administrative action, even though I've proven I know my password by actually logging into the OS was kind of annoying. In the end, I just gave up. I later came back to it and tried to XGL/Compiz it, though failed.

I never really saw the appeal of linux before using it, and after using it, my opinion basically remains unchanged.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Then you're happy with windows, what's the problem? I have the impression that people just see a linux distribution as a better windows - windows without spyware and without viruses.

That's not linux. I want linux because it's free and opensource (i'm a coding freak myself) and because it works (for me). I had so much trouble with hardware (and not even hardware) on win - devices that stopped working with no noticeable reason, etc.

That's different with linux. You (sometimes) have a hard time to setup your entire system (I laugh when I hear that the windows guys setup their system within some hours, I need at least a day of compile time and a lot more for the fine-tuning) but after that it works. If I want it really reliable then I use FreeBSD/NetBSD/BSD-style-distribution

small example:
I operate a linux router (fli4l) at my parent's home, providing access to the net for all the machines inside the house. The router is a normal personal computer, running the fli4l distri. It had an uptime of a bit about 2 years when my mother accidentaly pulled the plug. Now it should have around 1 year of uptime. That's some reliable piece of hard- and software

EDIT:
It's an P100 with 48MB of memory, and is overkill for this type of operation (you could also use it as audio playing device))

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I've run the gamut with Linux distros. Like many, I cut my teeth on Red Hat. That...was fucking painful. It did at least give me a taste of what running the penguin was like, though.

After that I went through a number of all-in-one graphical distros. Mandrake, SuSE, XandrOS, JAMD, etc. All of them had some shortcoming or another that precluded my being able to comfortably use them. Also note that these installs were all being done on an eMachines M6805 laptop with an AMD64 chip which was, at the time, relatively new in the consumer arena. Add to that the fact that it had a lot of new/weird/proprietary hardware, an ATI graphics card (Y HELO THAR shitty driver support) and a WXGA screen (Y HELO THAR nonstandard resolutions) and getting Linux working was something of a bitch.

Then I tried Gentoo.

Stage 1.

With shit in the way of prior experience.

You can imagine how well that one worked.

I've finally stabilized on a day-to-day use configuration of Ubuntu Edgy, and a server/tinkerer configuration of Slackware 10.2. I find Ubuntu does a very good job of abstracting the lower-level activities of the system such that I'm able to focus on work and not on actually making the system work. When I want to get to those inner workings, Slackware is really good at staying out of my way and not throwing me curveballs where I don't expect them. i.e. most of the guides on doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot somelinuxwalkthroughcrap dot com actually apply accurately to the way Slackware does its thing.

I'd like to try a Stage 1 Gentoo build or an LFS install again at some point. Just not right now, too many other projects going on.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I started Linux by using Knoppix several years back and enjoyed using it. However, I didn't really consider using it as a primary OS. So I toyed with another Linux distribution. I don't remember the name of it. I just remember that I hated it with a passion.

A friend of mine recommended Slackware. I decided to try it out. Lo and behold, I fell in love with it. Eventually, I fell in love with it so much that it replaced Windows for nearly everything. I don't do gaming on computers often since I have a handy dandy PS2 for that sort of thing, so moving away from Windows was no heart-breaker.

I got curious as the months went by. I decided to try other distributions, including SUSE 9, Gentoo, and a few other Debian deviants. I didn't like SUSE very much at the time and Gentoo didn't work out because of a poor configuration on my part. So I switched back to Slackware and stuck with it.

Later, at work, I tried out SLED 10. This turned out to be a VERY nice distribution. In fact, I haven't used Windows at work since I installed it. It works well with our Novell network.

So...Slackware at home and SLED 10 at work.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I'll assume that SLED is SuSE Linux Enterprise Distribution or something to that effect. That said, have they trimmed down the bloat at all? I remember looking at ISOs for SuSE...8 or 9, I think, on my school's software FTP and seeing something like 2-3 DVD-R images for it. It seemed really excessive at the time, about 3 years ago.

I've never been fond of distros I can't fit on a single CD-R (or two if I want source packages etc.). If I want more stuff I can always download it via aptitude/portage/$ONLINE_DISTRIBUTION_SYSTEM. I guess for those without broadband or living in areas where it isn't available (spoiled Chicagoan here) having everything pre-burned would be nice, but I fancy a quick install and a bit of patchwork here and there later on.

Nevermind the fact that I'm working on batch-scripting all of my apps into my WinXP install media and will likely wind up burning it to a DVD as it'll far exceed 700MB. Whatever. Principle or something. Shut up.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by CelticWhisper

I'd like to try a Stage 1 Gentoo build or an LFS install again at some point. Just not right now, too many other projects going on.

With great fear of flaming from someone more knowledgeable, I don't see the use of a stage 1 install. It's always been easier to me to do a stage 3 install and then recompile/update everything once I've created a "working system."

Now, on to my story:
My first Linux experience was with RedHat 8.0. At the time, I thought it was positively awesome, mostly because it wasn't Windows; I installed and ran this on a computer at school for awhile, albeit I didn't have time at school to "practically" use the operating system. After that, I soon moved to RedHat 9.0, because a teacher of mine let me use the 9.0 CDs that she had somehow acquired. I installed it and had some fun playing around, but, as with 8.0 before it, I never got too... involved in using the operating system.

Most of my early experience with Linux was in that class. I eventually had enough time to set up a small web server on the thing, but--as might be implied--it was never truthfully used for anything outside my own amusement.

After that class ended, I wanted to experiment more with Linux, but I couldn't do much since installing anything different on our home computer was out of the question. Later, however, a solution fell into my lap. The next semester, my "network essentials" course was given the ability to give away the computers we used for the course; there was something of a surplus. I won one of the better machines in a raffle of sorts, and I knew exactly what I was going to do with the thing: I was going to install Linux of some sort on it.

I had heard about Gentoo from Arainach's signature here on GFF, but I had never attempted to install it. This time, however, with much help from the install guide, I was going to attempt to do a stage 3 Gentoo installation. Unfortunately, I ran in to a major snag: the hard drive in the thing was too small for even a stage 3 Gentoo installation. Even more unfortunately, that was not actually the case--the drive had plenty of space, but most of it was marked as bad by something or other. (Shortly after discovering that, I also noticed clicking noises coming from the drive.)

It looked like my "Linux escapades" would be over at that point. Alas, however, I had a spare 10GB hard drive sitting around. Gentoo would be installed yet!

I learned quite a bit about Linux by running Gentoo for awhile. I was able to discover, thanks to Gentoo's documentation, how to get all sorts of things working.

From there, I decided for quite some time that Gentoo was far too slow for my sad little P3 box; compiling took too long. I then tried out other distros. I learned very quickly that RedHat had become, for my purposes, Fedora. I tried it out as well, and, appropriately, it reminded me very much of RedHat. I don't remember liking Fedora too much; it didn't seem to like my ethernet card at the time.

I didn't dabble in Linux for quite some time after that; I simply didn't have a proper machine for it. I then got a P3 server from someone, and ran Gentoo on it for a good time. I have since made Gentoo my main OS, only keeping Windows around for games, because I have not had much success with winex.
Don't misinterpret me, though: I don't outright hate Windows; I simply prefer Linux at this point.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by CelticWhisper

I'll assume that SLED is SuSE Linux Enterprise Distribution or something to that effect. That said, have they trimmed down the bloat at all?
.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. They've trimmed down the bloat a lot. My biggest problem with SUSE 9 was the size of it and though you can choose to not install certain things, a first-time user may not know what they're going to need and what they aren't. (YAST? What's YAST? Who needs it? )

It performs very nicely. My only real beef with it is the menu interface which is really a love-hate relationship. I love it because it's simple, easy to use, and is pretty sexy. I hate it because it's not customizable and it doesn't list every app that I have installed on my system. But then again, that's my issue with Gnome in general. It seems that Gnome loves to, by default, display only gnome and X11 related apps as opposed to KDE which gave me a list of everything. I'm sure there's a way to add other applications to the menu, but since KDE does it already, I really don't think I should have to. Maybe I'm just spoiled.

FELIPE NO

I first began dual-booting Gentoo Linux with Windows XP Professional around November 2004 or so. However, I practically picked XP every time so nothing really came out of that.

In February of 2005 or so, my notebook got stolen so I got myself a new one. This time around, I wiped the computer after I confirmed that it booted (into Windows XP Home) and installed Gentoo on it without a dual-booting option (yes, by wipe I meant a complete wipe). I've been using Gentoo as my primary operating system since then and have never tried any other distributions, so I can't really comment on them.

I recently split off a section for dual-booting purposes since I was getting prepared to play Dreamfall. Unfortunately, the game doesn't run on my crappy notebook. :P The XP partition is still there though, but I don't boot into it much.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Hello,
I have an old crappy computer (using Windows ME) that is very slow and freezes all the time.
I read somewhere that Linux would work well even on an old computer like mine, but I don't really know much about Linux, and I'm hoping someone could answer some questions for me.

Would using Linux instead of Windows ME make my computer more reliable and faster?

I connect to the internet with a wireless Netgear USB device. Would this still work with Linux?

Would MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger work with Linux?

Thanks in advance.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Using ANYTHING other than WinME will make your computer more reliable.

The wireless device most likely will work fine.

MSN I can pretty much guarantee you will NOT work. It ain't called MICROSOFT messenger for no reason, you know. Not sure about Yahoo. So what you do is you install Gaim and use it to connect to your MSN and Yahoo accounts, and you're back in business.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Zuare

Hello,
I have an old crappy computer (using Windows ME) that is very slow

Processor speed isn't that important, most of the time the amount of RAM is a problem. I mean you can even use a 100MHz pentium for MP3 playback (according to mpg123 even for two streams and the mixing daemon).
Amount of RAM also dictates if you can run some 'fancy' GUI, like KDE or Gnome. Personally I don't like this windows-like GUIs and use xfce and fluxbox instead.

Originally Posted by Zuare

and freezes all the time.

If the freezes are symptoms of a hardware problem then installing linux won't make the problem go away. Better do some system check before installing a new OS.

Originally Posted by Zuare

I read somewhere that Linux would work well even on an old computer like mine, but I don't really know much about Linux, and I'm hoping someone could answer some questions for me.

I'm using an 100MHz pentium for routing functionality, CPU load is somewhere below 5% - so yes, you can put old hardware to use with linux.
An underclocked (from 1400Mhz to 550MHz, I can't underclock any further) Thunderbird is used for music playback (my so called audioserver). Does include a webserver (apache), running some web-interface to control the sounddaemon; does real-time mixing of different audiostreams; PulseAudio enables me to use the sound-devices on the machines remotely (so I can playback some music on my local laptop using the sound-device on the audioserver - very cool if you don't want to use your low-quality laptops speakers at home); can even playback DVDs (if a videocard was installed); does currently bridge two networks (audioserver has two NICs installed, one connected to our 8 port GBit-switch which is full), enables us to connect another switch to the audioserver expanding the network (useful when inviting friends for some quake-gaming)
Ah yes, MP3 playback uses around 2% of the CPU. And I know, this system is way overpowered for the tasks it does.

Originally Posted by Zuare

Would using Linux instead of Windows ME make my computer more reliable and faster?

Some specs please? At least what type of CPU and how much RAM?

Originally Posted by Zuare

I connect to the internet with a wireless Netgear USB device. Would this still work with Linux?

Wireless devices are always trouble when it comes to Linux. So I would check the web first or take a look in the linux kernel. I'm currently using the windows drivers with ndiswrapper for my Broadcom wireless card, the integrated NIC is supported by kernel-drivers. Native wireless drivers for the BCM-chipset of the WiFi are developed, but are in experimental stage - resulting in very low transmission power which leads to very short ranges I can move from the access point; something the device does not work at all. With the current ndiswrapper everything works like a charm, even the VPN tunneling at the university is stable (the first ndiswrapper versions always produces timeouts after 5 minutes of connection time).
What I want to say: ndiswrapper does work (sometimes really great), but if you can get some decent kernel-drivers, then stick with them.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I recommend Xubuntu for low-end computers. Check the Wikipedia article for requirements and if you decide to use the alternate install disc, you might want to do the partitioning beforehand.

Most amazing jew boots

Well, define "low-end". I mean, plain old Ubuntu flies on my P3 800Mhz / 256MB RAM.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Xubuntu might still be a bit more responsive due to the Xfce desktop and the selection of applications, which are intended to run on older hardware. I wouldn't know the actual difference between Ubuntu and Xubuntu for sure, since I'm not very fond of GNOME's design philosophy, hence I don't use it and subsequently recommend either KDE (Kubuntu) or Xfce, depending on how beefy given computer is. That all being said, I probably wouldn't run today's KDE on anything below 1ghz and 512 gigs of RAM, in order to really have fun with it.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

Some specs please? At least what type of CPU and how much RAM?

Intel Pentium III, 450 MHz
64MB RAM

So basically, Linux probably would be better, except for my wireless USB thing which I might have problems with.
So Xubuntu would be the best choice for me?

Thanks a lot everyone for your all your help.

FELIPE NO

@WiFi device:
The kernel devs are currently doing some major hacking concerning the linux WLAN stack (finally the Devicescape stack comes into use), so you may find a kernel-driver sooner or later.

What kind of stick is this Netgear one? Exact model number would be best, and if you already have a distribution installed then you can provide us with a lsusb output.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

My first real attempt to use Linux was with Mandrake, back before it became Mandriva. I found it to be a little too limited (I had a lot of trouble installing applications and the like... it was almost as though it shipped without make). Anyway, it's been a couple years or so, and I'm using Ubuntu 6.10 right now.

One of my teachers had us perform an Ubuntu install on some machines in a class, and I really liked how it turned out. That class has focused pretty heavily on learning Linux (probably due to the leanings of the teacher), but a few days ago, he had us boot into Windows and things started going nuts. Keyboards and mice weren't being recognized, the network bogged down due to all of the machines downloading spyware and antivirus updates all at once, etc. It was pretty funny.

I've been using Ubuntu for something like a month or two now, and I'm still learning new things (esoteric terminal commands and such), but I've gotten pretty accustomed to it. Aptitude and all the various repositories are such a great idea. Imagine how much people would love to have something like that for Windows--but it will never happen due to licensing conflicts. I wish I could switch over to Linux completely, but there are a few things that I just can't do in Linux that I can in Windows, so I'm dual booting Ubuntu and WinXP. I really only boot into Windows when I need to rip a DVD and encode it to XviD or when I want to play some Windows-only game.

Jam it back in, in the dark.