My experience with Linux Mandrake and Red Hat

[Saint]

I installed Lindows 3.0 on my old Quantum 2GB HDD,
it just looks like Linux,
nothing special.

To install software, you must register with Lindows.com, to use the Click-N-run.

 

[Galatea]

Originally posted by Saint
I installed Lindows 3.0 on my old Quantum 2GB HDD,
it just looks like Linux,
nothing special.

To install software, you must register with Lindows.com, to use the Click-N-run.

<rant>I don't personally care for Lindows.. Everything has to be run as root it seems, and as far as the "click-n-run", I don't even know what that's about. I think Lindows might be good for people who are scared of Linux by itself, since they've tried to dumb down the process a lot, but it isn't necessarily good for Linux (as in, the promotion of Linux as a viable competitor for Windows) because it tries too much to be like Windows without actually addressing what's great about Linux. The *great* things about Linux come from the freedom it provides which I don't think Lindows actually allows.</rant>

Anyhow - damgo, yes apparently NTFS write support is still experimental. I don't really know why though. Perhaps some googling will come up with some information.

 

[J-Man]

Galatea said:
Which distros? I (and others) could probably assist you with distro-specific quirks/capabilities.

Hmmm... I could only find one CD in the 2 minutes I looked. It's TurboLinux 4.0 (probably 3 or 4 years old). I know I have another version or two, but I can't find them at the moment, and I don't recall what kind/version they were. I think I had an old copy of Suse somewhere...

...but vi(m) is the best simply because it's on pretty much every *nix system...

that's pretty much why I still use it too.

Well, as of right now, the read/write capabilities are only safe on FAT32. You can read NTFS partition but writing is extremely dangerous and you run the risk of ruining that partition should you attempt to write to it. I would recommend making a fairly sizeable FAT32 partition on your drive if you're planning to dual boot and your primary Windows partition is NTFS. You could also use symbolic links to have certain directories in the FAT32 partition 'virtually' in your /home partition (or directory if you choose to not put it on a separate directory which is highly recommended) should you want to have easier access to them. Keep us updated on what you plan to do!

I don't use NTFS at home, no reason to IMHO. But the capability to do so, if I wished, would be nice.
I'm just as surprised as Damgo that NTFS for linux is unreliable. It should be fairly easy to make a protocol interpreter. I guess the addage "if you want something done right, do it yourself" might apply.
It might be awhile before I actually try out linux on my machine... It's getting warmer outside.

One more thing about filesystems... Is there >good< UDF capabilities? I use CD-R and CD-RW more and more it seems.

 

[Frac]

Originally posted by Greg Bernhardt
I use Mandrake sometimes. If your not a programmer there isn't any reason to use Linux. Stick with Mac or Windows if your an app user.

I'm an occasional Linux user. However, I wonder if Linux really is for everyone. I've seen in other forums that Greg is a solemn gamer, is it possible to have a thriving gaming life outside of windows or a mac?

 

[Saint]

So far I run linux, i never get hanged like what happened in windows,

even windows 2000 can hang sometimes--- system busy etc...

in linux, something goes wrong, a KILL operation will be done ! And the OS is stable, no need to reboot.

 

[Galatea]

Originally posted by Frac
I'm an occasional Linux user. However, I wonder if Linux really is for everyone. I've seen in other forums that Greg is a solemn gamer, is it possible to have a thriving gaming life outside of windows or a mac?

Isn't "gaming life" kind of an oxymoron?

I'm not a gamer, but some members of my LUG are and they're always playing Unreal Tournament - I don't know about other games on linux (besides things like tetris..) I suppose someone who cared about stuff like that could research it.

Originally posted by J-Man
I'm just as surprised as Damgo that NTFS for linux is unreliable. It should be fairly easy to make a protocol interpreter. I guess the addage "if you want something done right, do it yourself" might apply.
It might be awhile before I actually try out linux on my machine... It's getting warmer outside.

It also may be the Microsoft is making some kind of funky changes. I know that there are problems with Samba because Microsoft keeps screwing around with protocols. The Samba people do a good job of keeping up but some of it isn't the linux community's fault. Apparently there are several changes between the versions of NTFS used on NT, 2000 and XP. With Microsoft keeping stuff closed source I can only imagine they have to reverse engineer everything. For more information: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html

Regarding your question about UDF capabilities, you'll have to be more specific. From what I've read UDF is basically some kind of replacement for ISO9660 but I don't know much else about it so I couldn't elaborate on the capabilities in linux.

 

[Raavin]

The only real reason I have any interest at all in linux is the Open Source/Freeware aspect of it. If I was going to use it seriously I would be trying to steer away from things like KDE. I'm sure that at some stage in the future, when the time is right, you will have to buy it. I don't think Gnome will ever go that way.

Raavin