anyone using linux? if so which
Hi
At work I have used, Suse 8, Suse 9 and Redhat (various versions).
Redhat have the free version called Fedora, which is popular.
All were pretty easy to set up and use. You can download various free versions, in fact there are probably dozens. Depends if you have broadband and want to wait on a download.
The other thing you can do is but one of the Linux magazines but they are about a fiver (can you tell I’m Scottish? )
If you have broadband you can try downloading a “live” CD which you can boot to and test on your system, before installing.
If you dont have broadband, send me a PM and I’ll have a look at work tomorrow and see what I have. I’ll post you a copy.
I WOULD use it at home but I play a lot of shoot em up / driving games so I use XP.
Cheers
Drew
Have been for the past ten years, made a living out of it for 5 of those.
I used to use Slackware but these days I’m more of a Redhat/Fedora man. I don’t use it on the desktop though, only for server applications. I still use Windows on my desktop and laptop PCs.
Paul
slowboy:
anyone using linux? if so which
yes I’m using Novel Suse 10 64 version. quite good and very fast and
I am also using novell suse 10 version on a P4 2.5 system
big learning curve to get used to it after windows tho
the best part about linux is you get all the software you need for free,
lots of stuff out there games and what ever u need
edited to fix the broken quote - repton
reason i asked just dual booted laptop with pclinuxos it seems to be working ok .thinking of doing away with xp
slowboy:
thinking of doing away with xp
I would think twice about doing that as linux on the desktop is IMO far from ideal in a lot of ways. As I said above I’ve been a linux user for 10 years now and whilst I would never use anything else for any kind of server machine, I still stick to Microsoft for the desktop/laptop stuff as linux still has a large number of limitations. For a start you can’t play most games on it, many webpages don’t work because you can’t get the plugins for browsers to work on linux, none of the office productivity tools (word processors, spreadsheets etc) are up to the standard of MS Office, etc etc. You will find that whilst you can if you really want to manage to get round most of these things with linux, it often involves a lot of messing about whereas if you stick with Windows things just work. This is especially true with Win2k and WinXP which IMO are both huge leaps forwards over anything that came before.
Paul
if you stick with Windows things just work. This is especially true with Win2k and WinXP which IMO are both huge leaps forwards over anything that came before.
Aye right so they do.
repton:
slowboy:
thinking of doing away with xpI would think twice about doing that as linux on the desktop is IMO far from ideal in a lot of ways. As I said above I’ve been a linux user for 10 years now and whilst I would never use anything else for any kind of server machine, I still stick to Microsoft for the desktop/laptop stuff as linux still has a large number of limitations. For a start you can’t play most games on it, many webpages don’t work because you can’t get the plugins for browsers to work on linux, none of the office productivity tools (word processors, spreadsheets etc) are up to the standard of MS Office, etc etc. You will find that whilst you can if you really want to manage to get round most of these things with linux, it often involves a lot of messing about whereas if you stick with Windows things just work. This is especially true with Win2k and WinXP which IMO are both huge leaps forwards over anything that came before.
Paul
I have novell suse linux 9 & 10 runin on a dual boot system with windows XP with no probs at all and I find that my windows office dose work with suse linux.so it must depend on what linux your using. plus open office 2 is a great office software package and for free too. if your going to have a dual boot system you need to make sure windows is on the first partition other wise linux will format all the drive into one partition
MAKE SURE YOU BACK UP YOUR FILES FIRST BEFORE YOU INSTALL LINUX
repton:
slowboy:
thinking of doing away with xpI would think twice about doing that as linux on the desktop is IMO far from ideal in a lot of ways. As I said above I’ve been a linux user for 10 years now and whilst I would never use anything else for any kind of server machine, I still stick to Microsoft for the desktop/laptop stuff as linux still has a large number of limitations. For a start you can’t play most games on it, many webpages don’t work because you can’t get the plugins for browsers to work on linux, none of the office productivity tools (word processors, spreadsheets etc) are up to the standard of MS Office, etc etc. You will find that whilst you can if you really want to manage to get round most of these things with linux, it often involves a lot of messing about whereas if you stick with Windows things just work. This is especially true with Win2k and WinXP which IMO are both huge leaps forwards over anything that came before.
Paul
I have novell suse linux 9 & 10 runin on a dual boot system with windows XP with no probs at all and I find that my windows office dose work with suse linux.so it must depend on what linux your using. plus open office 2 is a great office software package and for free too. if your going to have a dual boot system you need to make sure windows is on the first partition other wise linux will format all the drive into one partition
MAKE SURE YOU BACK UP YOUR FILES FIRST BEFORE YOU INSTALL LINUX
and I have no trouble on the net with mozillar firefox web browser 
prefer opera myself,got opera 9 running on both use linux whenever i can ,wifi works ok been thinking about using suse or redhat
Carling, that formatting whole drive isn’t true. It’s only lack of capabilities on some particular installer.
repton:
slowboy:
thinking of doing away with xpI would think twice about doing that as linux on the desktop is IMO far from ideal in a lot of ways.
…
I still stick to Microsoft for the desktop/laptop stuff as linux still has a large number of limitations.
…
You will find that whilst you can if you really want to manage to get round most of these things with linux, it often involves a lot of messing
…
Linux in desktop isn’t that far from ideal. It’s just what you want to have, how much time you’re ready to spend and what you think is ideal. I agree that Linux isn’t ideal in desktop use as it requires quite much of messing around to have things working properly but after that it’s quite usable.
I have recently put Gentoo Linux on my sisters laptop because you can’t “broke” it without serious trying when incoming traffic from Internet is blocked. She is perfectly happy with his laptop as (almost) everything works (WLAN, flash-animations, sound, sleeping, automatic mounting of removable media, videos on web pages, etc.). Almost means that I didn’t even try to configure winmodem (possible with this modem) and automatic sleeping isn’t fully configured and I don’t know what happens if I remove USB-stick while laptop is sleeping but most of these can be done with adequate work. What can’t be done easily (or I don’t know about) are choosing some particular Wi-fi network from available with some nice GUI utility or swap easily between predefined network settings like in Mac OS X. Windows games are also bit on the hard side 
Now I must say that playing with command line utilities is propably too much to expect from average computer user thus rendering full potential of linux in desktop/laptop use beyond reach of most computer users.
My sister for example is happy when he has word processor (OpenOffice 2), access to Internet with various programs (mail, instant messengers, web browser), some games with which to kill time, music ripper&player and DVD-player for example.
I use win2k in my desktop because of I wan’t to play games. If that weren’t the issue all my needs would be satisfied with proper Linux installation (which I had on hard drive that broke down last week 
). It was Gentoo Linux as I like it’s configurability when installing (compiling) software. It takes quite much time to do first install but after you have just that kind of system you want.
SuSE 9.2 on my desktop machine, SuSE 7.2 on my mail and network server, and IPCop 1.4 on my firewall.
Kyrbo:
Carling, that formatting whole drive isn’t true. It’s only lack of capabilities on some particular installer.repton:
slowboy:
thinking of doing away with xpI would think twice about doing that as linux on the desktop is IMO far from ideal in a lot of ways.
…
I still stick to Microsoft for the desktop/laptop stuff as linux still has a large number of limitations.
…
You will find that whilst you can if you really want to manage to get round most of these things with linux, it often involves a lot of messing
…Linux in desktop isn’t that far from ideal. It’s just what you want to have, how much time you’re ready to spend and what you think is ideal. I agree that Linux isn’t ideal in desktop use as it requires quite much of messing around to have things working properly but after that it’s quite usable.
I have recently put Gentoo Linux on my sisters laptop because you can’t “broke” it without serious trying when incoming traffic from Internet is blocked. She is perfectly happy with his laptop as (almost) everything works (WLAN, flash-animations, sound, sleeping, automatic mounting of removable media, videos on web pages, etc.). Almost means that I didn’t even try to configure winmodem (possible with this modem) and automatic sleeping isn’t fully configured and I don’t know what happens if I remove USB-stick while laptop is sleeping but most of these can be done with adequate work. What can’t be done easily (or I don’t know about) are choosing some particular Wi-fi network from available with some nice GUI utility or swap easily between predefined network settings like in Mac OS X. Windows games are also bit on the hard side
Now I must say that playing with command line utilities is propably too much to expect from average computer user thus rendering full potential of linux in desktop/laptop use beyond reach of most computer users.
My sister for example is happy when he has word processor (OpenOffice 2), access to Internet with various programs (mail, instant messengers, web browser), some games with which to kill time, music ripper&player and DVD-player for example.
I use win2k in my desktop because of I wan’t to play games. If that weren’t the issue all my needs would be satisfied with proper Linux installation (which I had on hard drive that broke down last week
every time I partitioned my hard drive and installed Novell suse 9.2 and 10 it it would just make my the hard drive one partition, so what I did is repartition it again, install windows xp on c:\ then install Novel suse on d:\ partition, no probs that way, tho I’m new to linux and do realy know it very well, but I do like it and the desk top is very good,
I must say Linux is alot faster on the internet than windows xp is. and faster booting up my only problem is the file names and extentions. like in window it is ++++.exe. or ++++.com
I know windows inside out. after 20 plus years of using it. but linux just can’t get my head round it with the file names
I think every installer, including Suse, has mode called advanced user mode or expert mode or something similar. That should give better control over partitioning. Creating one big partiotion over old existing partitions is IMHO quite bad desing of the installer. Btw if you install Linux on your first partition and Windows on second you can’t boot to Windows anymore 
Win2k for example want’s to write it’s bootloader to first partition during install if I remember correct.
Kyrbo:
I think every installer, including Suse, has mode called advanced user mode or expert mode or something similar. That should give better control over partitioning. Creating one big partiotion over old existing partitions is IMHO quite bad desing of the installer. Btw if you install Linux on your first partition and Windows on second you can’t boot to Windows anymore
Thats what I said… Installed win xp on first partition then Suse on second partition it works that way… and being a sues novice i did not install in expert mode… did it in auto install mode