Making the switch [AKA: Killing windows/moving to Linux]

[lynx_lupo]

I suggested gentoo to fireofsoul, who stated he used linux before. Not to the newbie X, mdk for him.

And I can\'t find anything funny or offensive about that site.  ?(

[Zorium]

Kde has to be THE gui of choice for anyone who is serious (in other words a lot of ex-windows people like gnome more ).

Big list of useful programs:

Multimedia:
Xine
MPlayer
Kaboodle (so damn nice for listening to music, even though its really basic)
Real Player
Gimp
Kuikshow

Games:
WineX/Cedega (allow you to play Windows games on linux)

WineX you can download some old RPMs for, but Cedega you will need to pay $5US a month for.

Internet:
Firefox
MLDonkey (havn\'t got this to work but it sounds good)
Thunderbird

Other:
OpenOffice
Kwrite

Most of these will come with your distro but if not they are easy enough to find through websites like these:

Sourceforge
Freshmeat

Another good site is Happy Penguin, for all your linux gaming goodness.

-Zorium

[fireofsoul]

Crossover office is good aswell... but heaps of the games are un tested on it.

you can use things like photoshop.. Microsoft office (cripple\'s over and dies)

[Bogo]

Originally posted by Zorium

 A quick note, if you have two harddrives the first harddrive is hda the second hdb and so on.

This is almost true. A more accurate explanation would be that the first drive (drive could mean harddrive or cdrom) on the first IDE channel is hda, and the second drive on the first IDE channel is hdb, and so on. So the first drive on the second IDE channel is hdc, and on the third channel is hde. Partitions are denoted by a number following one of those (eg: First partition on the first drive on the first IDE channel is hda1, third partition is hda3).

It seems kinda crazy but it\'s way more useful and informative than the letter numbering scheme of A: C: D: etc...

You\'re probably going to have more problems with Linux than Windows, unless you\'re the kind of person that likes that sort of stuff (so they wont really be considered \"problems\"). My Linux box breaks daily, but I use it because I love to tinker with stuff. That being said I haven\'t had Windows on my computers for the past 4-5 years, and it\'s been one aggrivating but fun ride.

[Zorium]

Breaks daily?  How the hell do you manage that?  Mine only breaks when I upgrade my distro or reformat the root partition

-Zorium

[AendarCallenlasse]

Well after reading this thread I was....inspired.  I had thought about running Windows and Linux on dual hard drives before but never got around to it.

I am currently typing this while running Mandrake, the only snag I hit was that I could not boot up Windows....then that hard-drive got corrupted, was formatted and for some reason my XP Restore Disk isn\'t working.  So no Windows for me.

And the fact that I know nothing about Linux is making this slow going.  But all in all I like it so far.

[fireofsoul]

When i first started i had 1 HDD partitioned  one as a linux partition and the other with my windows installation. After a while i formatted my linux partition and wanted to merge it back to my windows part.
problem was i got rid of the boot manager. and someother stuff which ended up mucking up the computer up a bit for some reason.. i managed to get into windows and using partition manager tryed to merge the 2 partitions... it didnt like it.. nothing worked..  it got to like 96% and died so then the whole hdd was stuffed.

so i formatted (i format like once every 6 months caus i muck around too much)

Then i found another HDD so all good now.

[FESFES]

I was wondering how you guys play games on that. Do games like cs, warcraft, ect. work with linux?

[fireofsoul]

you use programmes like Wine and Crossover office which let you use windows things on linux.. and for me the games seem to run faster.

[Zorium]

Well after reading this thread I was....inspired. I had thought about running Windows and Linux on dual hard drives before but never got around to it.

I am currently typing this while running Mandrake, the only snag I hit was that I could not boot up Windows....then that hard-drive got corrupted, was formatted and for some reason my XP Restore Disk isn\'t working. So no Windows for me.

And the fact that I know nothing about Linux is making this slow going. But all in all I like it so far.

So you completely nuked your Windows drive?  If its recoverable or it still exists in some form or another, try insterting Mandrake cd 1 before you boot then hit f1, now type rescue and restore your Windows boot loader.  Now make your bios boot from the Windows hard drive.  All things being equal Windows should be going again but who actually wants Windows anyway .

Of course if you have destroyed your hard drive entirely.....

-Zorium

[fireofsoul]

was formatted  

[XpYtZ]

!BAM! *comes bursting onto the web having finnaly read all the documentation at http://www.linux.org/ and found a destro that he likes*

I got Knoppix 6.3-err 3.6 *forhead slap*
I still have to format the old hardrive and install it, but thanks so far everyone!

[fireofsoul]

I have a Knoppix live cd.. err meaning that i can boot it from the disk and change no files.. i got it about 3 years ago when it came free with a pc mag.. it runs slowly and its basically to show people what its like...

[Boldstorm]

Progs

Mozilla
Xine
MPlayer
Open Office.

Those are the musts.

Partioning one HDD for multiple OSes can be fun. Have RH 9, Windows XP Pro and Longhorn on my laptop right now. Longhorn install got corrupted though and been to lazy to reinstall it since the current build is too damn buggy.

P.S. Think I would have really liked gentoo but no matter how many times I tried to install it (trying all 3 diffrent stages) it just didnt like my box I was putting it on. Ended up just sticking with redhat 9 for now.

[Seytra]

Even though the original objective has been met, I\'d like to say that I don\'t recommend debian for beginners. The install is very inflexible and you occasionally need to use the shell to make it do stuff it doesn\'t by itself.
Furthermore, it\'s not as user-friendly in terms of configuration and hardware detection.

Also, you should consider using the testing branch (\"sarge\") for a workstation system, because the sta(b)le branch (\"woody\") is so outdated that you\'ll have a hard time to compile things on it and chanches are slim to find any recent software precompiled for it. It is therefore mostly usable for servers that don\'t require additional and / or recent software (NFS servers, for example, samba is only version 2.2.3a-13, which works fine with windows 9x and NT, but doesn\'t with the samba 3.x client, I use NFS instead (maybe someone here knows why the two won\'t work together?)).

I chose it because it\'s \"pure\" (in terms of license and support) and because it is easy to keep up to date (especially security-wise, but only the stable branch gets timely security updates).
Note that you\'ll require a broadband connection if you\'re running testing, because it updates quite often and may download >=100 MB depending on how much stuff you have installed. Of course, you don\'t have to update if the stuff you have works for you.

Migrating from woody to sarge is possible, but it caused problems with config files for me so it took a while to get it back to being usable, and still get the occasional \"configlet invalid\" error, so you\'re better off installing from scratch.