Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, SecretSquirrel, notfred
Krogoth wrote:Care to enlightenment me?
Airmantharp wrote:I want to get into this too; I downloaded the latest 64bit versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, and tried installing Ubuntu, and failed. Ubuntu decided to install it's bootloader on my 'first' drive, which has my Windows 7 install on it, which had the only effect of me having to wipe and reinstall Windows 7, do to a GRUB error, and the drive I installed it on showed no operating system.
For this reason I'm a little perturbed with Linux right now, but I've used it in the past; the difficulty arises from trying to install it on a system that already has two other operating systems on separate drives, with four drives total.
brain frog wrote:also what kind would be best for an older machine with about 1gb of ram and 3400 amd64 cpu and for a machine with 64mb of ram with amd 500mhz?
titan wrote:Ubuntu is a good distro.
Ubuntu is a terrible way to "cut your teeth" on Linux. There isn't much of a learning curve to it, and most of the stuff it does happens behind the scenes. Not much unlike another popular OS.
To really "cut your teeth" on Linux, you need to experience the command line, figure out which applications actually do what, and how things work the way they do.
Airmantharp wrote:browsing, instant messaging, watching TV shows, and listening to music. I'd also like to explore OpenOffice
titan wrote:And, Grub doesn't actually detect other OSes on the system and add entries automatically. There is another application that does that. It's probably only included on the Ubuntu install disc. (Much like the autodetection of LiveCDs only run on a LiveCD and not on an installed system.)
Airmantharp wrote:My issue is getting Linux to work with this setup, basically, without touching anything else. It can have it's own hard drive, and that's where I want it's bootloader if it needs one; I just don't want it messing with the other drives at all. My Gigabyte board has the 'Press F12' option to select which source to boot from, and to get to Linux, or to Vista if I change the priority, I simply load up this menu and select the drive that it is installed on. This is how I'd like to continue to work, as it allows me the option of completely nuking or removing one operating system's drive without having any effect on the others.
brain frog wrote:i am amazed i havent already asked this but what are the differences between Ubuntu and Fedora?
Krogoth wrote:Care to enlightenment me?
grantmeaname wrote:brain frog wrote:i am amazed i havent already asked this but what are the differences between Ubuntu and Fedora?
Ubuntu is marketed by and for the most part developed by Canonical. It's goal is to be user-friendly, so many things are hidden under the hood, there's a huge support community, and it's primarily geared to be a desktop OS.
Fedora is developed primarily by Red Hat, and while it too is free, Red Hat is best known for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which isn't. It's an extremely advanced server operating system for giant corporations' needs. Therefore, many of the things in Fedora come from things in RHEL or CentOS (which is similar but free). Fedora is less "user-friendly" or easy to switch to, but it also forces you to learn more about Linux to use it.
cheesyking wrote:Just install it with wubi or in a virtual machine and forget about the boot loader. I seem to remember that there are some advanced options at the end of the ubuntu install process that allow you to choose where the bootloader ends up but why bother when there are easier ways of achieving your goal?
EDIT: I think the only way you can keep them completely separate with no risk of accidentally damaging one OS while messing with another is to remove the other OSs' drives from the system, preferably make the drive mutually exclusive. Any other method carries a risk that you'll forget to change something and accidentally damage the other installations.
brain frog wrote:i want to get into the world of linux but there are so many variation i am unsure what to choose
what kind of linux do you use or recommend trying?
also what kind would be best for an older machine with about 1gb of ram and 3400 amd64 cpu and for a machine with 64mb of ram with amd 500mhz?
Airmantharp wrote:I want to get into this too; I downloaded the latest 64bit versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, and tried installing Ubuntu, and failed. Ubuntu decided to install it's bootloader on my 'first' drive, which has my Windows 7 install on it, which had the only effect of me having to wipe and reinstall Windows 7, do to a GRUB error, and the drive I installed it on showed no operating system.
For this reason I'm a little perturbed with Linux right now, but I've used it in the past; the difficulty arises from trying to install it on a system that already has two other operating systems on separate drives, with four drives total.
Beyond that frustration, I'd like to try my hand at using Linux for daily recreational computing, such as browsing, instant messaging, watching TV shows, and listening to music. I'd also like to explore OpenOffice and it's compatibility and applicability toward working with Access databases, as I'm starting an Access based database management course tomorrow!
titan wrote:Ubuntu is a good distro.
Ubuntu is a terrible way to "cut your teeth" on Linux. There isn't much of a learning curve to it, and most of the stuff it does happens behind the scenes. Not much unlike another popular OS.
To really "cut your teeth" on Linux, you need to experience the command line, figure out which applications actually do what, and how things work the way they do.
axeman wrote:- DVD playback - ignoring the legal questions, there isn't anything that works as well as commonly available (even bundled) DVD playback software for Windows. The best you can hope for is for it to work well for basic playback, and forget about getting DVD menus to work well
axeman wrote:Does anyone else even MAKE graphics cards anymore ?
Airmantharp wrote:Downloading and installing Virtualbox right now. Thanks for the heads up jabro!
jabro wrote:Rather than install a Linux/UNIX distro directly on your main system in a dedicated partition and dual boot, I second cheesyking's recommendation to go with either Wubi or virtualization as a more painless method to install and experiment.
PRIME1 wrote:You could also run a "live CD". Running the OS off the CD drive without affecting whatever you have on your hard drive.
just brew it! wrote:PRIME1 wrote:You could also run a "live CD". Running the OS off the CD drive without affecting whatever you have on your hard drive.
I've generally found live CDs to be rather frustrating if used as anything other than a glorified rescue disk. It's not that they don't work, it's just that they're too damn slow. Waiting for the CD to spin up every time something needs to be loaded from disk makes for a very stop-and-go computing experience.
MarkD wrote:Fedora could be a bad choice. New versions come out every six months, and support stops after the "n+2" version comes out. If you don't mind the upgrade/reinstall every six months or year, and the open source absolutism, as well as the bleeding edge issues, Fedora is a good choice. I use it on my own laptop at home - an IBM R50e which has Intel hardware for the NIC, wireless and video which means I don't have the problem of third party drivers that sort of work or don't work at all yet. I don't mind tinkering to get Flash, the requisite codecs, etc to make it really usable.
If it were something that had to work reliably, I'd look for a distro I didn't have to fiddle with as often. Either CentOS or openSUSE would probably be my first choices, because they are what I know. Ubuntu is easy to learn, but it hides some of the UNIX/Linux complexity as well.