Thread: Linux users

Old School, try downloading a copy of PCLinuxOS, it's about 700megs so it fits on a CD. I've found that out of all the more popular *nix's, PClos is the most complete and friendly to set up. The downloadable cd is a live cd so you can boot to it, bring up the desktop and check things out before you actually install anything. Most of the codecs are included so if you surf to a website, no need to go looking for this and that, just to play a little video etc.

I've tried the buntu disks here but none of them were capable of handling my hardware, PClinuxOS recognized them all and drivers were correctly installed. I do have one scanner that is *NOT* supported by Sane though there is a non included driver that sort of works if you compile it. I have more than one scanner so for day to day stuff I just use my little HP all in one printer/scanner/fax and my high end scanner that I rarely need anymore can be used by starting XP in VirtualBox. I really like how Virtual box can take direct control of a device connected to a USB port rather than trying to communicate with the device via linux and it's drivers.... this solves a lot of problems for the time being though I must say that hardware support is growing by leaps and bound for linux.

There are games available for the Linux platform, Valve is apparently being ported to Linux and there are some quite good native games as well... The biggest poke in the eye was UT3 who claimed to be bringing out a Linux client dropping the ball for whatever reason and the client never has shown up... too bad really, I quite enjoyed an occasional battle in UT2004 which did run just fine in Linux.

There are third party derivatives of Wine such as Cedega that specialize in getting Windows only games working in Linux.... These things are not free or open source but they do help getting linux users into the game so to speak.

Linux is here to stay and as more and more people make the switch, we'll see more and more hardware and software catering to us. Dell and HP both offer Laptops with Linux as an operating system, AMD with ATI have been releasing vast amounts of documentation to the Linux community this past year in an effort to get better support for it's hardware, Asus is now including an *instant on* linux operating system built into some of it's motherboards so you don't actually have to boot your machine up, just to check your email or grab the latest updates for your bios etc.

And I think most importantly, you don't have to be a Nerd or a Geek to run linux anymore... it's just as easy as Windows... no wait, I take that back, it's way easier to install than XP or whatever else it is that MS is flogging these days...

Try a copy of PClinux, if it works as a live cd, it'll work off your hardrive even better!

Now that sounds pretty good KZ, I will check that out.

Ehh... You can really get almost any hardware to work if you know where to look. Alsa for sound cards, linux-printing for printers, et cetera. I guess PCLinuxOS has better hardware detection than Ubuntu? What does it use to install? Anaconda? It's pretty nice of them to provide codecs, but how do they get around the legal issues?

Ooh, valve is being ported to Linux? BTW, for gaming on Linux, check out linuX-gamers.net - ENJOY Linux Games. Wine is free...

Originally Posted by kaptain_zero

Old School, try downloading a copy of PCLinuxOS, it's about 700megs so it fits on a CD. I've found that out of all the more popular *nix's, PClos is the most complete and friendly to set up. The downloadable cd is a live cd so you can boot to it, bring up the desktop and check things out before you actually install anything. Most of the codecs are included so if you surf to a website, no need to go looking for this and that, just to play a little video etc.

I downloaded it and burnt it to disk, it worked first time, so thats a good start. I thought I could test drive it like Ubuntu where you run the OS from disk though it doesn't get installed, I got a little worried after making sure the image burnt correctly as it lloked like it was installing, but that was not the case thank heavens. I ran into the tiniest of problems...... It requires a username and password, now I thought it might know my windoze login info but it seems not. Any ideas on that? I would like to test drive the OS before installing.

two possibilities:

username: guest
password: guest

username: root
password: root

root is like administrator on Windows. I suggest you login with the guest login. I'm not sure if you need to login to root to install... Wouldn't hurt to just try, and if that fails, logout of guest, login as root, and try to install. Of course that's when you're ready to install PCLinuxOS.

Yupp, username guest, password guest and username root, password root. It should be spelled out on the log in page in the top left corner if I recall correctly though I don't think it *tells you* to use them.

Use the live cd system as guest, if you want to install it to your hard drive, there is an icon for that on the desktop. If you click on that as guest, it will ask you for the root password which at this point is of course root. When you install it on your hard drive, it will ask you to supply a root (root = Administrator) password and of course you should choose something more secure than the default root. You should also create an account for yourself and anyone else who will be using the computer but you can add and delete accounts after it's installed so just the root password and one account for yourself is all you need to get going.

PCLinuxOS has an excellent user forum like here and the guys are pretty good to newcomers unlike some distros where it seems like they would rather discourage new users who aren't familiar with Linux.

Christian

Originally Posted by kaptain_zero

PCLinuxOS has an excellent user forum like here and the guys are pretty good to newcomers unlike some distros where it seems like they would rather discourage new users who aren't familiar with Linux.

What forums might you be talking about? I've tried many distributions (Redhat 8-9, Fedora 3-5, Debian 1.3, Slackware, Gentoo 2004.1-2007.0, Zenwalk 1.7-2.4, Xandros, SymphonyOS, Ubuntu 5.10-7.10, OpenSUSE, SimplyMEPIS, VLOS, paldo and a few others I don't remmeber), most had their own forums. All forums I went to were friendly to newbs... Same with general linux forums such as Linuxquestions and Linuxforums.

Just in case some people may get the wrong idea, the reason I went through so many distributions was because I got a little over-excited about Linux and what was available. I wanted to see what was out there and which one best suited me. All the distributions I tried were great, but just wasn't to my satisfaction, except Gentoo. It would be great if everyone could explore different distributions/flavors, but unfortunately most people don't have the time or hardware too. I was lucky enough to find out about linux while in high school and we had a spare hard drive.

Well, of course, I can only speak from personal experience.... I found PClinuxOS after a love/hate affair with Mandrake/Mandriva... For the record, Tex, the mastermind behind PClos also came from Mandriva and based PClos on said operating system when he first started PClos. I based my claim of noob friendly forum on the significant numbers of new users recently alienated by other distributions and who showed up on the PClos forums, and I won't name where they came from as it would be second hand information and besides, I don't want anyone to avoid any particular flavor of Linux, FreeBSD etc. just because of something I heard. I started out hacking around some 15 years ago with slakware, redhat etc. but I never found peace with the X windows desktop until Mandrake showed up, mostly due to lack of hp in the hardware I had.

For anyone interested in alternate linux flavors, you can always check out Distrowatch.com where pretty much everything is listed and the latest news is frequently posted there with links and whatnot.

For me, PClinuxOS has proven to be simple to install, simple to learn (I got fed up fixing an XP box for a co-worker due to viruses and spyware so I installed PClinuxOS on it and showed them how to get started and they've not called me back since... it's still working, the kids get their university work done on the box, load their mp3 players, dad gets his stuff for work done and the Mrs gets to surf and check her email and nobody seems to have any issues with something not working) and the fine gents who put it all together keep a tight grip on what's included for software and what's available from the repositories. When you find something you want to install, it pretty much goes without hickups (as in all packages are actually tested) and tend to be good working programs. I know other distributions include 87 bazillion packages and half of them don't actually install properly or they need massaging by the administrator to work. PClinuxOS is as the slogan says, is Radically Simple. Install it, upgrade to the latest updates with their excellent package manager and live happy ever after.

I like several other distributions as well, some are very promising but I've found that PClinuxOS seems to just get MY hardware right and they don't make you go to the PLF to get codecs, proprietary drivers and all that stuff and make you do the extra work that most folks aren't interested in learning how to do.

Regards

Christian