Let's Talk Linux

You guys are getting me all geeked up... I wanna build a *nix box now!

Only... what do I do with it once I'm done?

Ok, thanks guys.

I just realized we have a forum for OS discussions.. sorry mods!

Nos.

[QUOTE=malibu]You guys are getting me all geeked up... I wanna build a *nix box now!

Only... what do I do with it once I'm done?[/QUOTE]

Use it... lol...

*nix has one of the best mail & news clients: Evolution 1.7

There are quite a handful of web editors. From text only (vi - vim - emacs , etc..) to full wysiwyg editors like Quanta Plus (KDE must be installed and I think the wysiwyg is in dev mode right now)

OpenOffice is a complete - although not as mature as Office, it is pretty close Office suite.

C and C++ compilers are part of the base system.

A terminal that actually does something (not like MSDOS - haha).

You can run any number of servers, like Apache, mySQL, PostGre, etc... Better than on windows (not all php functionality works on windows)

There are 2 main bloated desktops with lots of applications that come with them. Gnome and KDE. There are also many "light" desktops if you are thinking of installing on an older system and are concerned about ram and slowness. Blackbox is a good one.

There is lots you can do with Linux or BSD. But it takes a bit more understanding to maintain them and you have to get used to the command line. But you'll appreciate it more when you do use it.

No rebooting after installing applications or patches. If X freezes up, usually alt-cntrl-backspace will kill it and you can just log back in. No hard booting to fix a windows freeze. No file fragmentation.

No viruses... There are but a few ever written for *nix type OS's. Although you still have to hide behind a decent firewall there isn't any getting around that.

The downside, imo, is you will run into depency issues and also broken apps. With opensource so large and not governed by any sole organization, an app may require something that is not updated yet, then when you update that file it breaks another application... it has gotten a lot better now with apt-get, slapt-get, yum, etc... rpm was a bad concept and is getting phased out. So a good package management tool is a must. The learning curve is a bit more than windows. Especially when you get away from Fedora / Mandrake. But on the plus side is there is a large online community at your disposal that knows just about every problem you run across and can tell you how to fix it. www.linuxquestions.org is my favorite Linux forums.

The main reason for me never going away from windows completely is Adobe and Macromedia. Macromedia is developing for Linux now, or at least they said they were going to and using Wine for applications like Photoshop sucks ass enough to make it not worth the switch. So until I buy a mac or Adobe develops for Linux, I will have to keep using windows.

Nos: Don't know how good this 'paper' is, but take a look >>>

http://www.fedoranews.org/contributors/stanton_finley/fc2_note/

[QUOTE=Marble]Remember that there has been some issues with FC2 and dual booting windows. Some people have hosed their MBR and could not recover their windows partitions, even when using 2 hdd's. Not sure if this was fixed yet or not. But it has been buzzing around the internet for a while.[/QUOTE]

As of 2 weeks ago, it is not fixed. Installed Winxp/Fedora Final 2 on a friends machine and mbr went *fwwiiiiizoooop*. So, it is a little iffy and if you are new to linux, it will put you off a bit...but dont give up on it. But eh, i've been running the same slackware for ages. All I ever do is update the kernel and the stuff that runs my firewall.

Hmm, well then should i even attempt instaqlling it today? I have all the ISO images on CD's, and i'm ready to go.. but there is no way i can lose the stuff on my Windows HD.

Perhaps the fact that they are on different HD's will help, though?

Nos.

The problem with that glitch is it either hoses your windows partition (doesn't matter which drive it's on), or it is an easy fix. It seems to be a 50/50 gamble if you do run into that issue whether you will be able to get your MBR straightened out. But if you can't then bye bye windows.

If you are worried about losing windows you can go into BIOS and disable drive hda (C:\) and boot off your secondary drive and install it's own MBR on that. Then when you dual boot, rather than using Grub or Lilo, you'd be disabling/ abling the hd's in BIOS. Kind of a pain, but if you aren't doing a lot of switching, it's not too bad.

So did you get Fedora up and running Nos?

No :( I tried giving root 512MB like you said, and it said that i have too little space given to the partitions. I tried going back, and it said the partitioning step is already done, please format the drive and try installing again. So i posted a thread over at fedoraforums.org and they said root (/) needs a minimum of 3GB. :o

Anyway, i'll try it out some othertime. In the meantime, i have to boot to windows using the WINXP CD, lol. Too lazy to format that 80GB right now.. :p

Nos.

Boot into repair mode and type at the console: FIXMBR and it will repair the windows mbr with the windows boot loader.

When I said root I meant /root not / ... I have spent so much time with BSD that the subtle differences show - lol... Typically you are given 256 MB for /root, but I like to keep it at 512 as its a good place to store administration crap... (well for me at least)

All you have to do is put the disk in and set up the patitions again.