Going to try Linux
 

On a spare PC my brother gave me a month back.
Read about Ubunto in the latest Maximum PC mag.
http://www.ubuntu.com/
They have both CD & DVD installs and live testing from the discs without intalling.
To get the DVD version, you have to install Bit Torrent, and I am not going to try that right now.

I will go for the Intel based Live CD setup here.
http://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/5.10/

I have never seen Linux on a PC before, so this will be very interesting to say the least.
It will never be on my main PC, just as an experiment on a spare box.

I like playing around with linux. Make sure you enable the KDE desktop, but most distros use it as their primary desktop anyway nowadays. A very nice addition is openoffice as a office suite. I gave up on MS Office and use Openoffice for both windows and when I had linux installed.
You have to approach linux witha n open mind, and appreciate what millions of volonteers have contributed for free all over the world. It's quite amazing how it has matured over the last couple of years to a fairly complete desktop.
I also found it easiest to hook up all the things to your computer what you want it to recognize. At one point I added a printer and ran into some troubles to get it installed properly later. The admistrator (root) user had to add priveleges to the users to use the printer which wasn't organized automatically.
Those things are not a big deal when you gain better understanding how linux operates, but can throw a curve ball with frustrations to the beginner.
When setup detects your printers, usb devices,scanners, digital cameras, etc., it takes care of all that and they install usually properly from the bat.

I hope you will enjoy it and find a new challange.

i just switched over to ubuntu (from gentoo) as my primary distro at home. the simple single cd installation is the easiest. this is a good distro to start with as almost everything "just works" out of the box. the standard desktop from ubuntu is gnome (not kde as arjan suggests to use). i'm much more a fan of gnome than kde, but my only advise it to try them both out and choose what works for you. everyone elses advise will just devolve into a holy war nitpicking about the differences between them.

OK, a question.
I got the "Live" version, not the install one.

I want to boot up the old PC in the other room with the CD so I can see how Linux looks before actualy intalling it.

How do I burn this to a CD?
I have both Record Now, and Nero 6.
Do I have to tell Nero to make it a boot CD so it will put some system files on it first?
XP Pro is on the spare PC.

I know about changing the BIOS to look for a CD ROM drive first for the boot order.

I would try out the live CD on my machine, but I do not want to take a chance it will screw something up here.

Most of them you can get as an iso file. You can just simply burn those to cd with Nero. Just burn an image and when nero ask for an image (it first looks for nero images) change the extension to iso. When you burn an iso file and it came from a bootable cd, it will be automatically a bootable cd again. The bootable settings are contained in the iso file.
Looking again at your first post, I just realized you're looking at the iso file so you'll be fine.

I have to admit that I haven't used gnome in a long time. I always found in the past the the KDE desktop was installed with the KDE office suite and a whole bunch of other handy KDE programs. At that time it just looked sharper, and it has more of a ms windows feel to it. I guess it feels more comfortable to start out with.
When I have some time, I'll try this distro also as I am curious what this one is like.

No luck.
I used Record Now, and it is not bootable
Will try to record with Nero next.

As soon as I popped the disc in the PC though, a window came up with options to install Linux software such as Office and Firefox, and other stuff.

It is alive :laugh:
OK, Record It Now did work.

I did not use my brothers PC he gave to me, I am using my old PIII 500 that I leave hooked up all the time in the spare room except for when my son comes over, then he hooks up his in here.

I had to go into the BIOS again and tell it to boot from the CD ROM drive, not the F drive, even though they are the same.

In fact I am typing this from Linux with FireFox version 1.0.7.
I did not have to install anything, it is all running off of the CD ROM and some temp files I would imagine.

It even has the Office application loaded too, plus some stock games and other stuff.

It did not detect my old Creative ISA slot AWE 64 sound card though.
It may have if I had the Creative Live 5.1 in here.

But, for anyone wanting to see how Linux looks, this is most cool.
I may install it on another PC here at a later date.

It even detected my network and is online with my main PC and laptop in the other room.
Pretty cool.

Give it a shot if you have never seen Linux before, it is pretty cool.

Corey's got the bug :D Pretty soon there will be a dedicated PC running linux 24/7.

Ummm... Just to be a purist...

What you're seeing isn't "what Linux looks like", it's what a desktop shell running on TOP of Linux looks like. :D

THIS is more of what "linux looks like":
http://www.midiwall.com/4Runner/misc/telnetSS.jpg

Just like the 16 bit windows ran on top of DOS.

Yeah, I know it is just a shell.
The Linux underneath is boring ;)

Gotta have our GUIs.

OK, what if I do install this at a later date on the older PC which has two hard drives.
Will Ubunto see the other hard drive (D drive) even though it is fomatted in the NTFS system?

Reason being, it has several GB of MP3 on it, and I would still like to access them over the network to play on my good PC.

Yeup.. Like I say, I'm just being a weird purist.


(you know this, but to babble on for others...)
The draw to linux is to have a more stable core OS, that requires less RAM, less disk, runs more efficiently, does much more much better than that thing from Microsoft.

No small feat, and linux delivers on all accounts. There are downsides of course (driver support for new devices being at the top of the list) but it's quite a nice core, and with the wide variety of distributions available these days, there's a lot to chose from in terms of how much work you want to do to get up and running, how you want to interact with the OS (ala desktop shells).

From the Linux PC I am able to see my network which has a name, and I can see the shared folder for my main PC and the laptop which runs 98.

But still from my PC I can not view the Linux PC from my Network places.
There must be an area to input the workgroup name on the Linux one so it will show up.

I like linux, but my problem is that I service/sell/install climate control & irrigation systems for greenhouses. The software which monitors the climate control of course runs on windows.
I also do quite a bit of PLC (process computers for running equipment) programming, and the same goes for that software, it only runs on windows again.
If it wasn't for that, I would be running linux all the way.

I used to always startup into the console and just start the windowmanager by using "startx". I have no problem editing text files, I've just never like vi. Dosedit under dos used to be a nice texteditor imo. There might be something out there for linux also, I just haven't come accross it yet.

Corey, you might have to start up the Samba server. The software to view shares on another computer (smbclient), and to share files are two different things (same under windows, you just don't see it).
When the samba server is setup and running then you can create shares on your linux box. Go to www.samba.org to read all about it.

Yeup, i hear ya'.

I also "like" how easy it is to find apps for Windows... a lot of the time I'm looking for something quick and dirty and a few seconds in Google will get me something I can use - in Windows.


If you're back from the Old Days and remember the Wordstar control diamond (CTRL SDEF for Left, Right Up, Down etc) then checkout joe. I think it's part of most distributions, just not talked about. jed's another one.

Here's joe's homepage:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/joe-editor/

And, here's jed's:
http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/

I used to used wp5.1 in the old days, can't remember the keystrokes. Jed's looks like what I need: text style dropdown menus when I forget the keystrokes.
I just don't use them enough to remember all the keystrokes.
You guys got me going, now I feel like digging up a computer to install linux again.

I actually managed to get the climate control monitoring software to run in wine under linux. It wasn't 100% stable, but it worked.
It's not practical when I have to work with it when I am trying to earn a living though.

Arjan, I installed some Samba software when fooling around with the shared folders thing.

I will have to mess with that later.
Time to go play some UT2004 right now ;)
Afterall, I am on vacation until the 3rd.
Gotta get some good gaming in http://www.pnw4runners.com/gaming/ut2004/shock.gif

yes, you can read ntfs and sometimes you can write to ntfs. the trouble is that microsoft keeps the details of ntfs secret so that the open source coders can't figure it out exactly. the best would be to put the drive with mp3s in a windows box and then copy them over to the linux box over the network.