Linux for dummies...

[Boerseun]

I've decided that I've had enough of Microsoft. It's like an old relationship which have been souring for quite a few years, and I've finally decided to bring an end to it, and move on with my life.

 

I have decided to explore my options. Seeing as I've got an advertising business and do quite a lot of graphic design, I've been keen to give Mac a go. Problem being, of course, than over here in good ol' SA, Mac's market share is only visible through a high-powered electron microscope, and the machines are rediculously expensive. Support is few and far between, and the pricetag on support for any Mac product here will include a few much-needed limbs.

 

I'd love to go the Mac route, but hey, them's the breaks.

 

So I've decided to see what the World of Linux has to offer me.

 

I used to be in the IT business 'till a couple of years ago, but sadly have never tinkered with Linux. I also don't want to be in a situation where I take the weekend off to rebuild all my machines, and I won't be able to resume production come Monday.

 

Soooo..... anybody here went cold turkey from Windows to Linux, without having any beforehand experience in Linux? How bad was it, and was the results worth it? Is there an online database where I can check whether my software can run under Linux? I've got plenty software that's paid for, including the Adobe CS Suite, financial packages, Orifice 2005, etc., and I don't want to have to replace all of it 'cause I'm divorcing Microsoft.

 

I've honestly had enough of Microsoft. I'm not about to go off Bill-bashing and all that, I don't particularly feel the need nor the inclination to do it. Me bringing an end to my relationship with Microsoft will be a dignified, quiet divorce. We will both go our seperate ways, and I wish her all the best. I just simply never want to see the no-good useless two-timing ***** ever again in my life.

[Tormod]

Sanctus recently went the way of Linux. I think you'll find that Kubuntu may be for you. It's worth a try.

Kubuntu - The KDE Desktop

 

As for running Windows software, there's always Crossover from CodeWeavers:

CodeWeavers

 

One thing I'd recommend is to start off by creating a dual boot system so you don't lose your Windows route. It will let you use those apps that simply won't run under Linux.

[C1ay]

Burn a few LiveCDs like Kubuntu's Desktop CD and Knoppix. These will allow you to boot into Linux from a CD and play with it before you permanently change anything on your computer. The performance is a bit slower than an installed version but you can get a feel for what you like before you install anything.

[Killean]

Soooo..... anybody here went cold turkey from Windows to Linux, without having any beforehand experience in Linux?

Yo! Right here. Roughly a year or two ago, I had Alex and his friend wipe Windows from my laptop and install Gentoo Linux on it. It took me roughly a month to get a grasp on the very basic operations via command line.

 

How bad was it, and was the results worth it?

At first I made due with what was available. After a month I grabbed Wine to run a few of the lower end Windows programs. With 3-4 months of Linux under my belt, I had enough and switched back to Windows. 80% of the applications I run require Windows to run well... Eventually I got a new computer, and patched together some parts to make a server. So the old comp and the server (when it was still breathing) are Gentoo Linux, while the most powerful computer runs Windows. In my opinion, Linux is best for servers, or as a secondary utility computer.

 

Is there an online database where I can check whether my software can run under Linux? I've got plenty software that's paid for, including the Adobe CS Suite, financial packages, Orifice 2005, etc., and I don't want to have to replace all of it 'cause I'm divorcing Microsoft.

You can check out Tormod's suggestion for Crossover Office. I've heard some amazing things about it. If you want to check out Wine, they have a HUGE database filled with applications of different versions.

Wine Application DB - Wine Application Database

You could also try the other emulator like program if you don't mind paying a little for it. It's called Cedega. People mostly use it to run games, but I'm sure it could be used to run intense apps like Adobe CS.

Another program you could look in to (though it's a little on the expensive side) is called VMware Workstation. With it you can create a virtual computer and install Windows on it, and then install your programs.

 

I've honestly had enough of Microsoft. I'm not about to go off Bill-bashing and all that, I don't particularly feel the need nor the inclination to do it. Me bringing an end to my relationship with Microsoft will be a dignified, quiet divorce. We will both go our seperate ways, and I wish her all the best. I just simply never want to see the no-good useless two-timing ***** ever again in my life.

Right-o. A few suggestions:

Gentoo Linux...

Gentoo is by far not the easiest system to learn, but it has a wonderful package management system that I thoroughly enjoy. The base system comes somewhat bare and so you need to build it up yourself (this is why I said it's not the easiest). So depending on the speed of your computer it could take several days to grab, compile and install a Desktop Environment.

 

Slackware Linux...

Slackware is a very sophisticated flavor of linux. Its built in package management system (pms) is a little lacking. It does however have the standard RPM pms, and if you want something a little better you can always install YUM which let's you download and install binaries. Slack I read somewhere has a very simple and easy installer. Some nut installed slack without a monitor without any problems. Some also say that Slackware sticks the closest to core Linux and the way it was truly meant to be.

 

Fedora/(K)ubuntu/SUSE Linux...

These three in my opinion are pretty much the same. They all have fancy installer GUI's, standard pms' with the option to use YUM, and a repository of additional programs to download and install. Not much more I can say for them, they are the less colorful (therefore least surprising and easy for a newbie) versions of Linux. I recently installed Fedora, and had little to no problem adapting to it. Installer went by painlessly... Though having a background in Linux helped speed that process along...

 

Desktop Environments...

This question really comes down to, which desktop graphic style would you prefer? Windows or Mac?

KDE (K Desktop Environment) is the Windows look-alike. It is the most bloated and full of features (some of which I have yet, to this day, to even try). But there is nothing wrong with that per say. Being bloated won't slow down your system by much. My preference is with KDE...

Gnome is the Mac look-alike. They provide you with one universal bar that acts as your menu, taskbar, and when maximized as the programs menu bar. Gnome comes with its own fair share of applications, but only a quarter of the volume that comes with KDE. Gnome can be lightweight and fast.

You can of course always go with a Window Manager instead of a Desktop. A WM's only give you a context menu to list your own programs and run them as usual. For this I would suggest looking into Blackbox. I used that on my server.

 

One suggestion however. When you have everything installed, try out the graphics program called The GIMP. It's not as special as Adobe CS, but it is slowly becoming a very powerful face on the market.

 

And that's my two cents. Do a little more research on each before you take the plunge. Because that hole can be pretty deep, or shallow.

[Boerseun]

Thanks for the replies, guys. I'm gonna be checkin' in on the matter pretty soon - I just need to make a list of all my critical software, and find out how it performs (or if it performs at all) under Linux. I'm launching a new magazine in the next few months, and if there's any software hiccups, it will be disastrous! That's actually another reason why I desperately want to go the Open Source route, and pretty quick: Any setup tends to build momentum with usage. You end up setting everything up the way you're used to it, and pretty soon you're so tangled in the mess that cleaning up or starting over becomes a mission of note. I'd like to go Linux and build on that before this familiarity that people mistake for loyalty drowns me in an endless see of blue screens.

 

Regarding Windows, I discovered the truth in an old adage. It seems that familiarity does, indeed, breed contempt.

 

Just another quick question: I generate Gigs and Gigs worth of animations, sound editing, static graphics, magazine page layouts, high-res .pdf's that take up enourmous amounts of space, till I'm done working on it and the clients are happy - then I move the final product to my server (which gets backed up) and delete it off my workstation. Now this constant creation and deletion of files makes a brand-new 200Gig harddrive fragment from 0% to 30-40% in a matter of weeks. Yes, I know. Having prostituted myself to XP Pro, I'm sitting with NTFS, which blows chunks. My workstation's data drive literally looks like swiss cheese after just a few weeks. What sort of file system options would I have with Linux? I have three physical drives in my workstation, one dedicated to my soon-to-be ex sadistic 'ho, XP Pro, another as a dedicated data drive, and the third as a dedicated drive for photoshop's scratch pad. All three run NTFS, solely for security and no other reason at all.

 

You guys are really helping me out quite a lot here - this issue have been sitting in the back of my cranium for a few years now, but being the Great Procrastinator that I am, I've successfully ignored it till now, a few months before I have to launch.

[Jay-qu]

I installed ubunto on a secondary hard disk to play around with, its nice, runs better than windows (smoother, faster) but when surfing the net and getting apps I find I often have to boot back to windows to make them run (probably because I havent spent the time to set it all up properly!) so bottom line, I am ambi-OStrus, toy with a little of both

[Killean]

I'm gonna be checkin' in on the matter pretty soon - I just need to make a list of all my critical software, and find out how it performs (or if it performs at all) under Linux.

I wish you luck, but there is bound to be tons of problems unless you use the virtual machine. You shouldn't let this stop you however.

 

Just another quick question: I generate Gigs and Gigs worth of animations, sound editing, static graphics, magazine page layouts, high-res .pdf's that take up enourmous amounts of space, till I'm done working on it and the clients are happy - then I move the final product to my server (which gets backed up) and delete it off my workstation.

I would just like to point out that sound editing in Linux really sucks. I have had nothing but bad luck with it and the few native programs available. PDF support is also very limited using the native software, but I think Crossover Office should take care of that.

 

Now this constant creation and deletion of files makes a brand-new 200Gig harddrive fragment from 0% to 30-40% in a matter of weeks. Yes, I know. Having prostituted myself to XP Pro, I'm sitting with NTFS, which blows chunks. My workstation's data drive literally looks like swiss cheese after just a few weeks. What sort of file system options would I have with Linux?

You will have several options available to you, the most common of which are EXT2 and EXT3.

ext2 is the tried and true Linux filesystem but doesn't have metadata journaling, which means that routine ext2 filesystem checks at startup time can be quite time-consuming. There is now quite a selection of newer-generation journaled filesystems that can be checked for consistency very quickly and are thus generally preferred over their non-journaled counterparts. Journaled filesystems prevent long delays when you boot your system and your filesystem happens to be in an inconsistent state.

 

ext3 is the journaled version of the ext2 filesystem, providing metadata journaling for fast recovery in addition to other enhanced journaling modes like full data and ordered data journaling. It uses a hashed B*-tree index that enables high performance in almost all situations. In short, ext3 is a very good and reliable filesystem.

 

ReiserFS is a B*-tree based filesystem that has very good overall performance and greatly outperforms both ext2 and ext3 when dealing with small files (files less than 4k), often by a factor of 10x-15x. ReiserFS also scales extremely well and has metadata journaling. ReiserFS is solid and usable as both general-purpose filesystem and for extreme cases such as the creation of large filesystems, very large files and directories containing tens of thousands of small files.

 

XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling which comes with a robust feature-set and is optimized for scalability. We only recommend using this filesystem on Linux systems with high-end SCSI and/or fibre channel storage and an uninterruptible power supply. Because XFS aggressively caches in-transit data in RAM, improperly designed programs (those that don't take proper precautions when writing files to disk and there are quite a few of them) can lose a good deal of data if the system goes down unexpectedly.

 

JFS is IBM's high-performance journaling filesystem. It has recently become production-ready and there hasn't been a sufficient track record to comment positively nor negatively on its general stability at this point.

[alexander]

Oooh, i'd be careful with recommending gentoo, as of lately they have been becoming more and more unstable and unrealiable....

 

For beginners i would recommend Ubuntu (any variant: ubuntu, kubuntu, edubuntu, xubuntu whatever suits you)

 

it provides you with a loadable cd that you can toy with before really jumping in and installing stuff.

 

i'll try to find you some literature as to the structure of linux, because i really have no drive to write it all up here (and that would be like 3-4 pages of random stuff)

 

later guys, i wanna go sleep

[sanctus]

So Borseun I'm now writing from linux so it is not so bad the passage, but:

1)I know about only 10 comands to use in the comand line so far....

2)I'm on the net, but only with a cable: I tried to make wireless run (with the big help from Killean) but eventually I gave up and bought the said cable

3)Luckily I made a partition to have the two OSs on my computer so I could come onthe forum to ask questions and make for example a shared partition between windows and linux

4) it's now 6 hours that I'm figuring out how to write latex with emacs (actually since 1 hour it works, now I just have my problems with latex code...)and without having to use the mouse!

5)The partitioning and installing took me all the chrismas holidays

6)Since newyears I have reinstalled it 5 times, simply because I didn't know how to fix something I had done (or the solutions found on the net were to hard). Now, I don't touch too much and it runs very well.

 

Anyway as you come from the IT business you may be more used to such things and it will be easier for you...

[alexander]

AAAH, there are 2 reasons to reinstall linux: harddrive failure and damaging the system partition (like using mkfs instead of fsck) everything else can be fixed!

 

and emacs can make you coffee, so don't complain about not having a mouse

 

also if you are in a gui environment you may very well use either emacs X interface or use another editor (like kdevelop) if you want synthax highlighting and dont wanna learn emacs. P.S. i hope you have synthax highlighting enabled in emacs, otherwise why use that powerful of a text editor...

 

And your wireless, can you open up a command prompt, type in lspci -vv and post the results or send them to me in a pm or email, i'm curious as to why you could not get it to work :cocktail: (because even if there are no linux drivers for it, you should be able to use ndis wrapper for windows drivers and get it to work just fine)

 

ps if you dont have lspci, it is a very nifty thing to have around anyways, so install pciutils, small and very useful :rolleyes:

[Killean]

Alex, you're a little behind mate. There ARE drivers (it's even built into the newer 2.6.* kernels) for his wireless. Obviously he has had problems with them.

 

You're not doing programming are you Boerseun? If not, then I would HIGHLY suggest Koffice or Open Office for word like editing abilities. They are top notch when compared to Micro Office.

[alexander]

I may be very behind, Kill, but i have also made over 50 installations of linux for over 40 people and have configured wireless for some of them and many times more for myself (infact my wireless collection includes 3 different atheros cards ar5211, ar5008e and another one i cant recall, but it comes in a cisco a/b/g card, you can look it up if you want. Also Cisco 340 and 350 series cards, a Buffalo gold card, bunch of older spectrum and spectrum24 cards, and finally an airport card (not extreeme) from the older G4 laptops. Then i also setup wireless on my friends amd64 compaq laptop and my other friend's turion64 acer. And last and probably least i setup wireless for one of my friends Chaos on this little tiny toshiba she had, that was sorta neat actualy, like smaller then an x series IBM...) so i mean i have some experiences where drivers built into the linux kernel did not work well, some instances some patches helped, others ndis did. Do you know if it was a hardware issue at all? Wireless drivers can be quite finnicky... Besides are it could be something simple or stupid, i mean i see that at work like every day... Anyways, not saying you dont know what you are doing Kill, by no means, just casualy asking for information that i may or may not be able to help with that sanctus may or may not provide...

 

I would suggest OpenOffice, not a big fan of abi word or koffice, but its way better then MSOffice, all $150 bucks better at least, and it does everything MS Office does...

[Killean]

so i mean i have some experiences where drivers built into the linux kernel did not work well, some instances some patches helped, others ndis did. Do you know if it was a hardware issue at all? Wireless drivers can be quite finnicky... Besides are it could be something simple or stupid, i mean i see that at work like every day... Anyways, not saying you dont know what you are doing Kill, by no means, just casualy asking for information that i may or may not be able to help with that sanctus may or may not provide...

http://hypography.com/forums/computer-science/9608-less-than-linux-basics-2.html

Read the entire thread man. It takes a while, but you will get the whole picture.

[alexander]

jai see, i forgot reading the thread to tell you the truth... FC is a very weird implementation of the linux kernel and redhat drivers and differs from any normal distros... yup, i would be of little help there as i try to stay away from red hat as far as humanly possible.

[C1ay]

Sanctus,

 

You'll understand this after you get more familiar with Linux :hihi:

[Boerseun]

Alex, what's the matter with Red Hat Linux? I thought the difference between the distros was simply the look and layout of it; does the actual low-level command structure of it differ as well? For instance, a driver written for Red Hat, will/won't work for Ubuntu? 'Cause if it doesn't work, then I'm gonna have to haul out the big bux and invest in a few Macs - I'm honestly not that in love with my computer that I'm willing to battle looking for and fine-tuning drivers every time I install a device or software. I am, however, fed up with Windows, and, more specifically, Microsoft's business approach, so I am gonna switch - only question is wether it'll be Mac or Linux. And depending on the answer to the above, Mac will take or loose the lead by quite a distance, regardless of cost.

[Tormod]

I think the issue with Red Hat is more a political one than functionality one. :)