Any non-Windows users around?

Dead simple is not how I would describe linux. Over the years I’ve successfully installed and used FreeBSD(not linux, but unix based and one of the easiest IMO) Debain, Slackware, Mandrake, Redhat, muLinux, and others. I have the new Knoppix on CD waiting for me to give it a spin … but I know by now that this requires “free time.”

Why does it take long? because I’m a Windows users! :tongue: I like my OS features and configurations to be spoon fed to me … I don’t like to perform a google a search just to learn how to check simple things like disk space! :razz:

It’s not so easy as you claim, and with limited download abilities it’s not possible to quickly fetch dependencies for each new program I want to try. "ooh cool, a 200k Solitare game! … darn, it requires a 50MB dependency!! :grrr: "
Also, the fastest computer I have yet to install linux on is a 200mhz Pentium 1 with 96MB ram. Not a fun machine to compile on, but at least my Windows machine is still free to use Google when needed. :smile:
I have installed linux on countless 486’s, and even on my thinkpad 350 485/20mhz with 20mb ram 300MB HD. No reason but for fun and a hobby. I use my oldest computers because I know I’ll need a reliable Windows machine to google my questions.

I have more programs I use than IM and browsers, those were examples of everyday programs I require for normal computer use. I have a hard time believing anyone spends less than a week getting linux setup to actually enjoy. When I’m on the computer, I’d rather spend my time using it than fixing or configuring it … and this is what linux lacks in comparison to Windows. No doubt about that.

Possibly the System Tools in Gnome 2.8. But I see your point, although I like the everything-as-files-or-directories approach.

It’s as easy as I claim… to me!

Gnome, KDE, and probably other graphical stuff will/probably has run dog slow on that hardware. Ah well.

This is no harder than on windows, it is just different so that you will have to relearn. Both KDE and GNOME includes gui utils that let you show for example diskspace and so on.

Sorry - X Window. :smile:

I guess stability isn’t much of an issue here. As far as I’m concerned, most operating systems are pretty stable by themselves (before you load any third-party software onto them). My Windows box crashes probably once every four to six weeks, and when it does, it’s usually apparent that the problem was caused by an application separate from Windows itself. My experience with Linux was much the same. It was fine after I (eventually) got it all set up, and before I loaded it up with potentially unstable third-party software.

Oh, it did. But the only option I had which included a scroll wheel was listed under “Logitech”. What if I had a Microsoft scroll mouse? Perhaps it doesn’t really matter whether or not your mouse matches the brand of the drivers you select, but it seems a bit messy/clumsy to me. Windows seems to have no trouble auto-detecting just about every component of your machine, and I guess that convenience has spoiled me.

I’d consider everything you listed there to be a fairly major API. I have no problem going out of my way to download the latest GTK, ALSA or OpenGL - but it’s the hundreds of smaller dependencies that drove me two-thirds of the way insane. As an example, one of the first things I did when I got Fedora up and running was try to install X-Chat. I go to the X-Chat website, and download the latest stable version for my architecture. I extracted it into its own folder, and went to build it. Immediately I get the first error, and the process stops because I apparently don’t have something called “libcrypto.so.0.9.7”. Fair enough, I switch back to my browser, and do a search for the libcrypto library. It doesn’t take long to find it, so I download and install the library. Then I try to compile X-Chat again, only to get a little bit further before the next message appears. “libfontconfig.so.1 is needed by X-Chat”. Ok, better go find that one too. Again it’s not so much of a problem (particularly when you have useful sites like RPMFind). But it doesn’t stop there. “Can’t find libssl.so.0.9.7, then libXft.so.2, then libXrandr.so.2, then libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3)” At that point I’m as close to suicide as an operating system has ever pushed me. Long story short, I stuck with ksirc. It was just WAY too much trouble. And that was only one example. I had similar problems with countless other applications, and it made me wonder what you’d have to do if you didn’t have access to the internet.

Sure, those features are useful, but what about the simple things? Why can’t I click on a drive or partition in the “Home” window and see how much disk space it has left? Why can’t I create archives just by right-clicking on the desired files and selecting “Make Tarball”? How do I find files that contain a certain string without having to bring up a console window and type a convoluted set of commands and parameters into that? Some of this might not be such a problem anymore, but just remember that Windows XP is nearing its forth birthday (and W2k its fifth), and it has the ability to do all that stuff. Besides, it didn’t take me long to find a program for Windows that lets me have multiple desktops, and set any window to Always on Top. Those are just gimmicks.

I have no problem with the fact that it supports them. My gripe is with Linux’s inability to detect that stuff for itself. Most hardware is perfectly capable of telling the system what it is if you just probe it - but the Linux philosophy seems to be that the user should be responsible for telling the OS what kind of system it’s running on. Again, it’s just convenient when the user doesn’t need to supply all that information (or even know all that information). If my sister can’t install the OS, then it’s not intuitive enough for 90% of people. I look forward to the day when operating systems rarely need to ask the user to supply any information about a particular device, and it seems Microsoft are well on the way to making this a reality.

Again, I’m not trying to say Windows is a perfect system (I could write a book about all the stuff that’s wrong with it) - I’m just saying that it’s very clear to me why Windows is the preferred system at the time of writing this. It’s easy to use, and easy to set up. Sure, it hides a huge amount of information away from the user (a horrible, horrible design flaw), but at least it doesn’t assume you’re a certified technician who knows everything about the inside of your computer.

Haha, I hear that. When I say “configured” in two days, I basically mean it’s up and running. In other words, connects to the internet, sound works, hardware graphics libraries ready to go, and of course, working IRC client. :wink:

But usually there’s one or two little things that stay broken for a few days while I build-up the confidence (and sanity) to go back and fix them. Last time I installed Fedora (Red Hat 10, basically), I got it to the point where everything was working except the wheel on my mouse. In an attempt to fix it (which involved editing a config file) I ended up breaking plenty of other things. First the mouse didn’t work at all, because I guessed wrong about which line I had to change. Then my keyboard stopped working because I managed to screw up the USB drivers in a different config file (all while trying to get the mouse to work again). So, yeah, to get this “house of cards” fully set up and running, we’re looking at the best part of a week at least.

Really? Wow, I’ve underestimated Gnome! I mean, you couldn’t do that in Windows ten years ago or anything… :razz:

That’s pretty silly. For most people, it seems to be essential to have another computer connected to the internet while you’re setting up a new Linux box. Again, it makes me wonder what would happen if you didn’t have the 'net at all.

That’s my attitude as well. I mean, I’m very happy to see how far Linux has come, and it’s great to see just how much time people have invested in supporting it - but it’s not quite ready just yet. Give it a couple more years, and we might see some real competition between Linux and whatever features the new version of Windows will introduce.

Thanks for the link, that looks very promising indeed. Installing new programs remains one of the biggest dilemmas with existing versions of Linux, so if they can just work on conforming to some kind of standard for distributing and installing packages, life will surely become much simpler.

“This application requires the following dependancies, would you like me to automatically download and install them now?”

That’s what I’m waiting for. :smile:

Anyway, as for availability of essential programs, I have no problem with the default “workstation” installation of most major Linux distributions. It comes with pretty much everything you need to get started right away. Open Office rivals MS Office in almost every way (I’ve only found a couple of features that it doesn’t support), the inbuilt browsers aren’t too bad, and Firefox is surprisingly easy to install if you don’t like the default ones. There’s an FTP client, an IRC client, an instant messaging program, and a huge variety of other “essential” applications (calculators, graphical editing software (The Gimp rocks :wink:), sound recording programs, CD burning programs, addicting games, etc). So, no complaints there. For a free package, that’s a very impressive range of powerful office tools.

I wouldn’t really call linux a “hobbyist OS” but I’m having hard times learning all commands, installing all neccessary programs and add-ons to get a satisfying system. My main concern is the overall system speed. KDE is just sooo slow…Xfce4 is faster but it’s file manager is SHIT.

I’m currently trying to get fluxbox to a decent level because it’s just as fast as Windows. Bu I’m having trouble to find rpms fpr my old shitty Suse distribution…So i might switch to something better in the near future…I’m sticking to Windows until then…

I just wanted to shoot you an update. I found something better than Suse. It’s called ubuntu linux and works great I’ve had no problems installing the whole thing and running it is nearly as easy as running Windows. Now I use Linux almost exclusively.

I found something really interesting, I bet most of you have heard of it. It’s called Knoppix. It is a “Live CD”. This means that it makes absolutely no writes to your hard drive, what so ever. It uses just your memory (creates a ramdrive). The company that developed it used transparent decompression to put 2 GB of info. on the CD. I don’t know too much about it as I am not that knowledgeable in Linux, but it is Debian, uses KDE, and it works great. It autodetects almost all of your hardware devices. I used my Windows XP drivers for my LAN card in Knoppix (using Ndiswrapper), configured my card, turned on wireless DHCP broadcast…lalala…conected to the internet using FireFox(included on CD), and AIM (GAIM is also included). The CD contains over 2000 executable progs., too many features to list. This OS is meant to be one that you can just walk up to any computer, stick the CD in, and reboot into Knoppix. This may not be very practical for most users, being that it does not write to the hard disk, but it works great. Also, you can save your knoppix settings to the hard drive (it just doesn’t write to the hard drive by default, but you can just like Windows ie. copying files to hard drive, saving, etc.) Theoretically, you can install Knoppix on to your hard drive instead of CD, but I haven’t tried. Also, it uses the FAT file system, so if you ever use it to write to your hard drive, it doesn’t mess anything up. However, make sure that you shut down your computer properly from Windows before running Knoppix else there could be errors on your hard drive which would cause Knoppix to write-protect it. Knoppix is available from many download sites, just Google it. It’s worthy at least checking out. It is a 600 MB download, or you can order it on CD. The utilities and software are amazing!!

Live Cds are great for trying out Linux Distributions. But it’s not very usable because it cannot utilize your hd to write and copy files.

Mini-Linux distributions like feather linux or damnsmall linux might interest you, because you can run the whole system off a USB stick! This gives you the ability to WRITE files (on the stick) You could take your whole customized system with you…with all your email, browser bookmarks, important documents…

All you need is a stick with at least 256 MB size and a machine that can boot from USB

featherlinux.berlios.de/

You can, in fact write to the hard drive, it just doesn’t by default. Yes, it would be nice to be able to take email and such between machines, i’ll try that out. I wonder what would happen if you put a live cd on a CD-RW? There probably wouldn’t be much space left… Is it possible to make a bootable DVD??

Some distributions are as small as 64 MB…
I really like feather linux because it runs very fast even on slower machines. It’s based on knoppix and debian.

But I really recommend you to try installing ubuntu linux onto your harddrive. It’s really easy. You just need some unpartitioned space left (Space which is not assigned to any of your windows partitions such as C:)
and some time to run the installer…that’s all…

ubuntulinux.com/

You can even request free ubuntu cds (shipping included) if you’re on a low line…

Linux here
Got to say that I didn’t install Linux by my own motivation, but my father is very much into free-software. I don’t know a lot about computers, but on the subject of free-software I wholeheartedly agree to him and I am very glad not to support microsoft anymore.
Besides I like that you can just download very good programms (for instance GIMP, the Adobe equivalent) without having to browse through illegal sites or anything like that.

Well in Winblows you dont have to search through alot of illegal sites, but I do agree OSS, (or i guess they are calling it FOSS now…) is the best alternative to Microsuck. I run three computers in my room, the one I am typing on is Gentoo, the one to my left is debian and the one to my right is slackware. Slackware seems the fastest but I dunno its kinda buggy…

One thing that I have been REALLY impressed with lately is ubuntu, this distrobution does pretty much everything for you, and its program to install and compile things is really nice. When you are first learning linux the most painful thing to learn is dependencys and what not, especially by trial and error. Ubuntu has a nice package management system, I would recommend that before I recommend Gentoo… (Even though gentoo = awesome)

If your new to linux be sure to put this in your .bashrc !
alias ls='ls --color=tty && echo “Do an RC!!!” ’

My favorate phrase is this:

“Dei Gates Dei”

I found it in a copy of “Wigetry” demonstrating the capabilities of sphere. I totally agree with the phrase. I have way too many reasons to hate Windows (Including a million problmes with Windows Update: it needs to use VBS, as well as Internet Explorer, the crappiest software ever [which is based off of NCSA Mosaic, which never seemed to work, either], you have to restart for everything, etc) Ironically, I’m using it now. I need it for many things.

I use OpenBSD, mostly because it has drivers for my WI-FI card. Still, nothing seems to have drivers for my Audio Card (Montengo Turtle Beach II; PM me if you find a driver)

Well, it’s that time again. A few days ago I pieced together a new PC out of some spare parts, and figured I might try my luck at installing Linux on it. My first priority this time was to find a distribution that was universally acclaimed as being easy to install and configure. After my horrible experience with Knoppix, and nightmarish encounter with Fedora 3, I thought I’d take a step in a different direction and try my luck with Woody (aka, Debian 3.0).

Debian is often praised for it’s super-intuitive “apt-get” system, which definitely seemed like a brilliant idea to me, as it would (in theory) remove a lot of the pain associated with tracking down and installing obscure dependencies. But the problem is, “apt-get” isn’t much use to you if you aren’t connected to the internet, and to my dismay, it became immediately apparent after the OS was installed that things really haven’t gotten any easier in that regard at all. The very instant my Debian install was finished, I ran an “ifconfig” to check the status of the network, and everything appeared to be functional. But alas, I couldn’t use the net, and I couldn’t ping my Windows machine. I kept getting a “Host name lookup failed” error.

Eventually I resolved this by editing some ambiguous config file using Vi (the world’s stupidest text editor, that has no place anywhere in this or the last decade) and changing what it thought was my hostname. My question is, why the hell can’t the config files be created right in the first place? Why do I always have to wade through twenty pages of cryptic configuration script to change some values that should have been correctly initiated in the first place? Why do I have to tell it exactly what kind of mouse I have (only to find that the scroll-wheel never works anyway) when Windows will detect all this stuff automatically?

I love the concept of Linux, I really do. But I’m convinced that it won’t be suitable for desktop use until every computer user in the world is a qualified sysadmin. Or until they take a page from the book of MS and learn how to set things up correctly by querying the devices themselves instead of asking the user to supply every bit of information, only to discard it later in place of the non-applicable defaults. It drives me crazy!

I guess I’ll wait another year, then try it again.

Debian woody is a very outdated distro now anyways, so it is not weird at all that it did not work out of the box. Debian has never been a very userfriendly/newbiefriendly distro to setup, but once everything is working it runs like hell and is very easy to update.

Maybe you should try out ubuntu as some suggested?? Is supposed to be based on debian, but much more userfriendly.

I started out using mandrake, and i doubt i would have been able to use debian today if it wasnt for that learning experience with mandrake first.

I have not tried installing new debian sarge, but i have heard that the installer has improved atleast.

Hmm. I have heard a lot of good things about Ubuntu (my boss is a big fan, as he grew up in South Africa), so I guess I could give it a try. It’s interesting that you say Woody is outdated, as I only downloaded it from the Debian website a few days ago, and it was listed as their most recent release. Oh well, maybe Sarge has a different homepage, or something.

Right now, my Debian box is up and running, along with the network and X11 (which wouldn’t work until I edited a config file and changed my colour-depth from 24 to 16, even though my vid card and monitor can easily do 24-bit). So, for the moment I’ll probably just mess around with this, and find out a little more about how it works. I like playing with Linux, because there’s so much you can do at a level that Windows usually hides from you–but I’d never use it as my primary OS.

Thanks for the reply, Tomas.

Yeah, they have been slow… Sarge has been in beta/testing stage until now, so it was not listed as the current one… And the even more funny part is that sarge was officially released today! So if you only had waited a few days… :wink:

I also installed using woody, but i updated it to debian unstable"sid" using apt-get and also grabbed a new kernel. But this is also alot of extra work and i can imagine you can run into a great deal of troubles with very new hardware, since it is so old.

I have tried Ubuntu and it is very nice but as far as I can remember you still need to edit /etc/X11Config to get the mouse wheel up.

Maybe not - I can’t find a guide for it. Incidentally, Ubuntu’s documentation is excellent for all the common stuff you might want to do. It really is.

Ubuntu is a distribution I’d even recommend my mother.

I use Windows for gaming and software development (don’t ask). FreeBSD for my servers. I also have an old DEC Alpha running VMS.

When I first started in computing, Linux was in its infancy. Back then, it was a small project starving for developers. Boy, has it come a ways!