Got Linux?

[bmcmeen]

Hmmm - they left off SuSE...

 

[rmunday]

And CentOS

I just got Asterisk setup at home on CentOS this weekend. Why? I'm a geek

 

[racolton]

Those are hilarious - Slackware was my first and still remains my favorite Linux Distro.
(For some reason I'm having an urge to try out Ubuntu, though..)

 

[bnolte]

I'm actually at sort of a computer crossroads at the moment. My old Win2k box died about a week ago (it was brutally murdered by the gods of Thor), and I cobbled together a friend's 3 year old Dell (2.4 Ghz Celeron/ 512 Megs of RAM) and switched out its dead hard drive for one of my spares. I loaded Ubuntu 6.06 onto it, and then Ubuntu 8.04 onto it. It actually does everything I pretty much need it to, with the possible exception of a few Windows apps that I don't have good substitutes for in the Linux world.

For the last 10 years (since the RedHat 5 days), I've dabbled with linux, usually on cast-off hardware, and even took a course in Unix at the local Community College. I've had mixed results, and usually have ended up back with Windows for my main box, with most of my frustrations tied to trying to actually get downloaded applications to work.

I've ordered a new big hard drive for this box, and planned to reload Windows XP onto it, but after working with Ubuntu, I wonder if I can actually do without XP entirely.

Anyone out there that has thrown off the shackles of the the Borg's operating system entirely, and what can't you do in the Linux world that you took for granted in the Windows world? OTOH, what works better in the Linux world?

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Ubuntu
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[klindstedt]

Bruce,

The only thing holding me back from taking the plunge at home is the lack of a Linux version of Quicken. I know there are work-a-likes, but none I've tried so far work "like" Quicken. Has anyone had any luck using Wine to run select Windows programs in Linux?

Oh yeah, I'd like to have an AutoCAD equivalent as well - free and opensource, of course!

 

[bbranstetter]

Kevin/Bruce; Why not just make your computers dual boot?

Seems like I've seen an application some where, that will allow you to boot your machine up in what ever given version you choose. I'm not a computer wiz but just a thought.

 

[bnolte]

Brian,

It took me all weekend, but I've finally got XP set up on the new box and the data and applications either moved over from the other system or reloaded. I've talked to my brother, the real computer geek in the family, and he said the easiest and least risky strategy is to dual boot with 2 hard drives, by making my XP drive the Slave, and loading Linux onto the Master drive, then using GRUB to set up a dual-boot situation. I put a brand new 320 gig drive in the new box and I have 80 and 60 gig drives that are only a year or two old that I can play with.

The other option is to find a motherboard that will go with my old CPU, video card, and RAM and rebuild my old box as a Linux box. It was a 1.6 Ghz P4 with a gig of Ram and a 128 MB Nvidia video card, so it should run most new distributions fairly well.

 

[bnolte]

I decided to do some investigating on my own, and using our friend Google, found this link for setting up a dual-boot system: http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_windows_xp_and_linux_xp_installed_first.htm
The instructions were simple enough, even repartitioning a single drive for Linux. So heaving a sigh and disconnecting the USB connection to the drive from my old box, I stuck the Ubuntu 8.04 disk in the drive, and hoped for the best. The install guide talked me straight through, the install went without a hitch, I gave XP about 200 gigs and Linux about a 100.

When I was done I booted into XP and the Chkdsk utility came up, and I let it run. The only hitch so far was some type of driver that needed to be reinitialized with a single reboot, but it looks like I'm up and running on the XP side at least.

I'll reboot again and see how things go on the Linux side of the box

 

[bnolte]

In over on the Linux side. Firefox looks a little different, but it seems to work fine!

 

[klindstedt]

Dual boot is one way to approach the "where's my favorite program" blues. However, it reminds me so much of the golden days of computing - DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 Had to open Windows to run the word processor (the only decent windows app at the time) then drop back out to DOS for CAD and/or Lotus 1-2-3. Ugh! My, how far we've come.

I don't have to run Linux, just thought it would be nice to run an operating system that doesn't require frequent patching and is free to boot (no pun intended - well, maybe a little one).

 

[jegstad]

Dual-boot,

If you have multiple drives with different OS's and you only want to use one OS at a time and never need to prowl around the other system from the one you are running, a simple way to have dual (or any number of) boots without trying to manage OS's that compete with each other to be boot master is to put a power switch on the drive power cables. Then when you turn on a drive and leave the other ones off, you boot from it without dealing with a boot manager. My son is a sw developer and needs to test on a wide variety of systems that are "clean" and this allows him to turn off everything that might muddle the test. It simplifies the boot management and he can load new OS's without worrying about messing up older ones installed on other drives. Windows is particularly bad in the way it always wants to write its own signature on the disks that it can see, which might modify something on a drive belonging to another OS.

I have a rotary switch on my box so I can select the drive power pattern easily and do not have a boot manager. If you don't want to put in switches, just disconnect the drive power cables on the drives you don't want the boot code to see.

JimE

 

[kide]

Jim: I assume you're running 80 pin cables with CS selected on the drives? I've thought about it, but always seem to come up with a mobo that's fussy about CS and drive location on the IDE cable....

Kevin: I used to run DESQview and QEMM on top of DOS and then run Win 3.1 in a DESQView window......

 

[jegstad]

Kendall,

You're right on the CS setting but it also works for sata drives, at least on my pc. A side note: I recently tried to install XP on a 7200 rpm SCSI drive with a fairly new controller and it simply would not boot. It would get as far as the first Windows screen and die. After retracing my steps many times and muttering a lot of bad things I finally slipstreamed my very old (2003) XP install cd with Service Pack 3 and installed that with no problems. It booted on the first try and works great.

I had originally intended to install the old version as a test of the SCSI settings, etc and then do a wipe and re-install from a slipsteamed CD. So if your master disk is very old I suggest everyone should create a new one with the SP integrated so that newer hardware is supported during the install.

JimE