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I'm thinking about getting Linux and wonder what everybody's opinions of it is. I need to know where the best place to download it is. Also, if I am going to get Linux I need to know a few necesities for a new user who'll be using C++ (I heard the compiler is probably included) and some image editing. I am also wondering if the programming is different when using Linux (besides no windows.h :D ).
Thanks to anyone who replies,
fuh
People are going to differ on what is the "best" flavor but I recommend gentoo, from gentoo.orgQuote:
I need to know where the best place to download it is.
you might want to check out linuxquestions.org that community has helped me numerous times. Theeir main page links to detailed descriptions of various linux ditros as well as a download page - my adivce, start your research there.
You would want to buy it online I'd say. The CDs are free, but the shipping/handling is about $15 usually.
http://www.osdisc.com/cgi-bin/view.c...ogle_linux_buy
Downloading would take forever! Depending on the distro of course...
www.linuxiso.org
mandrake
um downloading takes 15 minutes tops for me per distro cd
OMG RoD has broadband he's so sexy!
An easy one to start with is SuSE - you will see it if you go to the link Darkness posted. I am of mixed opinions on Gentoo - their handbook is first rate, and so is the distro, but I am not sure how it would go for someone with zero Linux experience. If you do want to give it a try, just be sure to read the handbook thoroughly before you begin (and have it open when you are installing), and you should have little trouble.
edit:
I am not bashing Gentoo BTW - I use it myself, and I *really* like it a lot.
If I had that speed, I'd be playing online games 24/7.Quote:
Originally Posted by RoD
Check out this thread on LinuxQuestions.org:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5&pagenumber=1
If I were you, I'd wait until the polls close and choose the one that wins at the polls, that way you'll be more confident with what distro you get. The polls end I believe February 3rd or something like that.
Heh,
Slackware in my opinion is my favorite. I get to build everything by source. Just built GCC by source two days ago, kind of fun. Anyway, I use VMware so I have Gentoo, Mandrake, FreeBSD, Red Hat, Slackware, and Debian installed. Thanks to broadband I spent two days downloading them all. After a while, I found Slackware to be my favorite, but everyone has their flavors.
If you like installing with binaries, I wouldn't suggest Slackware. Slackware isn't perfect for the beginner I might add. SuSE, Mandrake, and a few others are more user friendly.
- Stack Overflow
heh - I have an old K7 700 - building KDE takes a loonnng time. But yeah, building everything from source is cool.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stack Overflow
OMG broadband is the standard now. I don't play games on-line. The only ones I could see doing that with are the old street fighters, mortal kombas, and super hero VS fighter games through an on-line game playing spin-off of the MAME emulator.Quote:
Originally Posted by Darkness
My friend and I, both like 9 miles apart, were using a friend's gaming servier like an hour and 30 minutes away from us in the same state. We were usually the only guys playing in the room. 20-30ms ping.
Still wasn't good enough. For street fighter, mortal kombat, and versus fighter games you need lightning fast reaction time. If there is any sluggishness at all, it screws up those precision combos and counters, which is what all of our matches are filled with. We're skilled and a good match for each other.
Thanks for all the replies. I was gone for a couple of hours, and look at all this! I'm going to spend some time deciding on which Linux to get, but still feel free to add your favorites. It would be the best if someone could tell me all the pros and cons of each one, or sum up which one is used for what. Also, I need to find out about what to get programwise and how programming is different in a Linux enviroment. I still don't know why I would get Linux (as in why I wouldn't just stick with Windows) but am extremely curious and am definitetly getting it.
fuh
For the new linux user, Mandrake, SuSE, and perhaps Fedora Core, (in that order) are what I would recommend. They are all built very well for the new user. I would normally rank SuSE as first choice, it's integrated YaST (yet another setup tool) is a godsend to new users, however I am only familiar with the commercial paid for distribution and have never tried to use the free downloadable ISO's. Mandrake and Fedora also both have rock solid installation GUI's which leave little question as to what each step is doing and makes decision making rather simple for the new user.
Gentoo, while is a very good Linux distro I would NOT recommend to a person with little to zero linux experience. It requires too much 'hands on' knowledge, otherwise you will become so frustrated with linux you're prone to give up and go back to windows.
One piece of advice...become familiar with partitioning your HD if you're going to be dual booting from the same drive. Then do all your partitioning BEFORE installing linux. While most linux installers handle repartitioning themselves, none of them seem to make it obvious to the new user exactly what they are doing and often the new linux installer finds themselves destroying their Windows partition as well.
As for partitioning, screw it man, remove all Windows, then you're forced to use Linux :) lol (don't EVEN get that Xp install disk! grrr)
i reccomend slackware. i learned faster on SW than i ever did on RH/Mandrake/Gentoo
i used mandrake 10 for 5-6 months, its good, has all the compilers you'll ever need lol for every "popular" language. but i havent used it now because i got tired of dual booting this thing.
Just saw your replies to my length of download times. Im on a regular old comcast cable connection, around ~3.5-4mb per sec download
My personal preference is Core, but it's not friendly to new linux users.
With whatever distro you get, you can customize your GUI anyway you want:
http://home.centurytel.net/ravenz/buggy1.jpg
btw I'm viewing Dave Sinkula's code from the C Programming forum. He always does a really good job.
The great thing about Debian is the apt-get, it makes it so EASY to install new software. Like let's say one day you wanted a program like Photoshop (theGIMP):
Then once the procedures are done (downloaded/installed) you go like this:Code:apt-get install gimp
The program starts and you can enjoy the spawns of open source beauty!Code:gimp
SuSE and Fedora both support Apt-Get now too with apt4rpm.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kleid-0
Additionally, Synaptic (for Gnome) and Kynaptic (KDE) make apt-get easier to use as it gives you a gui frontend to apt-get so you can look at a glance which rpm's are obsolete, have updates available, already installed, not installed etc... so you don't have to query them all manually.
gentoo also has something similar to that (its been a while since ive used it)
If you are new to linux I would recommend Ubuntu it uses the Debian Linux concept but release you from that crappy installer, also has a shorter development cycle wich means more updates. It was elected the Distro of the Year last year. It surely worth try. Slackware is also great for learning but can be painfull sometimes, I've never tried gentoo (by the way I've burnt it but had no time to install yet).
emerge <package name>Quote:
Originally Posted by sand_man
And Slackware has slapt-get now... Don't have slack, so I don't know if it is all that great. But the name is cool.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scribbler
Stop being nerds and just use Windows like the rest of us! :mad: :D
Did I just troll? :(
edit: 56k lololol; and RoD, I hope "To error is human, but to get even, now thats devine." is intentionally retarded.
Gentoo guy myself. Tried Debian first, but managed to screw it up completely.
Gentoo is really fun even if you have just a little experience in Linux. But you need to be the kind of freak who enjoys messing with configuration files for hours if you want to use it without knowing a good deal about Linux first. You also need to be ready to start over completely a few times. (I believe I'm on my third installation on my Laptop.)
I think that would be fun :DQuote:
Originally Posted by CornedBee
Hey, why are you looking at me funny? I think that might be the distro I get.
btw, pretty much nobody has told me what I should do right after I get Linux. Is that something I'm supposed to figure out myself? Oh well, when I get Linux I guess I'll find out.
Well, that depends what you want to do with that Linux. Do you want to set up a server/router? Do you want to set up a workstation?
I currently manage two Linux computers. One is my laptop, and it's a work computer, but also a multimedia station. I put Totem (a Xine-based video player), XMMS (music player) and a few minor games on it (Enigma is pretty brilliant). I installed Gnome2 as a desktop environment. I put OpenOffice and Gimp on the computer, jEdit, various other programmer's editors that I wanted to try. And I installed a LAMP system, so I could try out web stuff that I was developing.
And then I played a lot with getting the laptop-specific things to work.
On the server, I installed the Samba server, Apache, rsync, Tomcat, FTP, a mail server, ...
All the things that could do things in the background for me.
I didn't play with that system, because I need it stable.
I'm just looking to use it for pretty much everything I do currently on Windows like program, make images, and play a few games. You've already told me a lot that I need to know for this but I am still looking for anything useful or interesting to install.
Games are a problem. Most games don't run on Linux. Sure, there are some cool games, like TuxRacer, but the real stuff usually doesn't work. Quake3 has a Linux version, and I think Doom3 has, too, but Id Software is pretty much the only company that has Linux versions of their games.
Other games sometimes work, curtesy of the WineX WinAPI + DirectX implementation, but that's often a question of luck, and WineX costs money if I remember correctly.
What's useful to install is the correct OpenGL implementation for your graphics card, otherwise you won't get any proper games. And the ALSA setup is very important; that's what's making your sound work (or not).
Finally, "poly" means many in Greek, not Latin.
I'm just looking for "okay" games, like solitare and whatnot. The only advice I need now is on extras. Also, I should have mentioned this before, but I'm sharing a computer and need to convince the other users to let me install Linux. What would be some good effects of Linux? I'm probably going to get my way since I know the most about computers and my desisions are coming from a computer god from their point of view, but I need to back up my claims.
You're absolutely secure against 100% of the common virii and worms out there. They all are designed to infect Windows computers, so they won't work on Linux.
More games :) Gnome and KDE both feature a very wide variety of these small games, like Solitaire. You may want to install Frozen Bubble, for example. Highly addictive.
Linux is also more directed towards the multi-user environment. In other words, it's just about impossible for any of you to screw up the others' accounts.
Finally, it prevents your friends from screwing up the computer so that it won't work at all, because they simply won't have the permission to do so. Admittedly, this can be done with Win2k upwards, too, but it's the default in Linux.
All UT2004 retail versions come with Linux binaries, and UT2004 is kick arse. But I can't get my nVidia drivers to install! No matter what happens, it always gives me some error. I'm using kernel 2.4.22, I mean c'mon!
Though when you're on Linux, it's best to be optimistic as possible, so I believe that it's good that I can't get nVidia drivers to work, because then I won't be playing UT2004 all day!
http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?s...30222&from=rss
Here's an article about Windows virii in Linux. It's entertaining as well as informative.
Muahahahah!
dont completely remove windows like klied or whatever hsi anem is said. Then if you have problems, how are you going to get online and figure them out?
as far as speed, my old k6 500 w/ 764mb ram runs is 24/7 without a hitch, and installed slackware in about 20 minutes.
I say completely remove Windows, but you have to have a really good walkthrough in your hands that you trust. If you screw up, you can go to the library and use their computer to research your problem. Make sure you have a lot of free time too, because you may screw up a lot, and the more you screw up, the more you learn about troubleshooting.
There is no reason for a beginner to remove Windows altogether. Dual boot.
Something that will help tremendously is to actually learn linux as well. Just pokin around as you go (as some would like to believe) simply will not cut it. At best you learn how to navigate your particular distro, and perhaps a trick or two. But to be really effective, you should know how linux works.
If you wish to be self taught, don't look for a book/tutorial based on your particular distro or desktop environment. Start from the basics of linux/unix. I recommend Unix Made Easy. Straight forward, simple lesson plans, and written in a manner you're not scratching your head in confusion all the time. And it doesn't take a year and a day to get through the book. Despite it's thick size, you go through it pretty quickly. (and don't gloss over the section teaching the VI editor).
and most of what you say is either blatently wrong, ignorant, half arsed, or difficult. For a linux newb that makes NO sense at ALL. If it was up to you we would all be running linux like chickens with no heads using goto's and watching carebears.Quote:
I say completely remove Windows
Completely remove Windows, I was a Linux noob about 2 months ago. I didn't know anything about Linux, installed Linux, worked with it, now I'm using goto and watching the carebears, I'm successful! lol
Yes at being an idiot.
That's not what your mom said last night
After you go buy a new book of jokes ill let you in on the fact that my mom is an overweight crackI am sillyI am sillyI am sillyI am sillyI am silly with bladder problems.
I'm with RoD on this one. A newb should not just wipe windows off completely. That would be insane. Most people need at least a few months to get used to linux and validate that they no longer need windows. And going to the library to research a problem is not a valid option for most people.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kleid-0
Grrrr....(my turn to vent and this thread is perfect)...
If you're still looking for new user advice on linux...Don't be like me. Resist the urge to keep up-to-date on bleeding edge technology. I just upgraded to kernel 2.6.10-1.741, for which there was absolutely no need since everything was working properly. Now a few services have stopped working, or are flakey at best.
Stick with stable releases! Even if you like to tinker, tweak etc...there's a difference between getting the opportunity vs being forced to.
Rant over. I can breath now.
lol Scribbler. Can't you just switch back to your older kernel?
I'm going to keep Windows until I'm comfortable with Linux. Oh, that was a really funny article (page before this) Rouss. It'll help convince everybody to start running Linux.
Or just keep windows and your antivirus software up to date and have your firewall configured properly.