linux. anyone use it?
 

Ok so lately i've been reading up a little bit on it and apparently you don't need an anti-virus with it? I'm getting bored with my computer and i can't afford a new one just yet but i think i can push a lot more out of it even though its about 4 years old. how hard is it to install linux? if i backup my files on an external hd is everything going to transfer back over with no problems such as music, pictures, office files? are there compatibly issues with adobe cs package, ms office package? i'm don't game at all because i have a integrated graphics card but i'd like to just get more out of my 2.8 Pentium 4 with 2 gigs and seems like linux can help with that.

so i'm just rambling, share your experience with it if you use it.

linux is a whole new ball game compared to windows
Art aka Lagos runs ubuntu which is the best user geared linux distro. windows apps will not install in a linux world, unless you download the linux specific version. While you cannot run MS office, you can download open office, which is free (openoffice.org)

i have been using linux since no one knew what it was. today it seems like everyone is using ubuntu. personally i cant stand that distro, but regardless of my feelings. its probably the best place to start out and learn. i have been using this os for about 7 years. my servers run it.. my laptops run it.. all but my gaming pc use it.. fee free to IM me anytime with questions sn is whaathedilly

rich

I started with slackware back in the day but my favorite distro was gentoo, it was phenomenal. I tried a bunch of different linux distributions, almost all of them. I also tried OpenBSD for a while but couldn't get x86 to run with my graphics card because of no driver support. I may get back into the swing of things eventually. I haven't used linux for at least 3 years now so I'd be a little rusty. I used to know all the commands so I'd have to refresh my memory a bit.

I'm actually working on getting one of my 4gb usb drives to run linux from bootup. You could always try the alternative to wiping your hard drive completely clean and try a knoppix style linux distribution. How knoppix works is you burn the image to a CD and boot from it and basically get familar with how linux works. You'll be presented with an environment similar to windows but that's not actually the underlining of linux, which is all the commands and such.

Dude, your avatar... lmfao!!

Sorry, back on topic now...

so from what you guys say, it seems a bit complicated. is it something i'll be able to install and forget or is it high maintenance. And whats this about not compatible with ms office. how about adobe cs? Is there any way of having it work?

Thanks for all the help!

haha thanks. yours is....interesting....as well.

I'm not sure you're understanding how different the two operating systems are. think of windows being a gas powered car and linux being an electric powered car. if you want to interchange the parts it's just not going to work. there are other solutions to photoshop and ms office like GIMP and openoffice. I'm sure there is a way to get at least photoshop working but it's probably not something for a novice.

If you are asking these questions, you aren't ready for it. I was a full blown computer nerd and going from XP to Kubuntu (what I ran for a while) was pretty damn hard. I thought I knew a lot about the workings of computers, but that was in the windows world. XP is compatible with everything, no tweaking needed. In my experience with linux nothing works right off the start and requires major tweaking.

You are thinking, oh, I can tweak the stuff to work just fine. No, it's more than that. I am talking about editing the kernel to get nothing more than a sound driver to work and recompiling it. It was a bitch. I could do it, I just didn't want to deal with it so I went back to windows/linux dual boot. I haven't booted into linux in like 2 months.

I use ubuntu linux:cool:

Office files will mostly open in open office, if they dont you can install windows and MS office in a virtual machine like virtualbox.

Adobe cs2 (windows version) allegedly works with brand new versions of WINE. but you'd have to DL the newest version of WINE (easy to do).

The only problem you should run into with music is if you have some iTunes m4p (the protected ones) files, those don't play. Also it should be noted that you need to install all the music and movie codecs afterwards to play that stuff, it's not installed by default. (also really easy)

The biggest problem linux gives people is with wireless cards. Those can be a real PITA to set up, but other than that it should be smooth sailing.

yea thanks for all the feed back. I think this is a little beyond me and I am not about to **** up my system out of curiosity. Its just that it seems like people are such avid supporters of it, but I guess those people are one's that have the knowledge and patients to sit around and tweak it to make it all work. I unfortunately don't.

If you want to try it out, its really painless and you wont mess anything up.
Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/ . Download Ubuntu 7.10 iso and burn it to CD. Then you can put the cd in your drive and run the whole operating system without having to install it! This way, you can play around with it and see if you like it, and not mess up your windows install.

There are benefits and drawbacks to every operating system. Here is a cool benefit of linux that you dont get with windows.. http://youtube.com/watch?v=E4Fbk52Mk1w

Gentoo.. great for fast machines.. torture on slow ones. i just installed gentoo on a ultra sparc 2... two 300mhz 64 bit processors.. it took about 8 hrs to install gentoo.. but gentoo was the best i could run on there.. i tried solaris ..freebsd..netbsd..openbsd..splackware...debian...

yep gentoo worked..