bored of windows suggest me an alternative

[tornadog]

I used to use my pc exclusively for gaming. But now that PC gaming is "dead" with my 360 and ps3 hogging all my free time, my pc has become a web interactive service. Browsing, opening some pdfs and office docs, torrent downlads, vlc player, tversity and newsgroup downloads are the only stuff I do on the pc. So I am wondering if there is any alternatives that will let me do all this and make the experience a little more interesting???

Also I have 3 drives with data on it that I dont want to remove. Can I use them if I go with any flavor of linux?

 

[Megatomic]

You could try Ubuntu or Kubuntu. And you can access your NTFS drives via Samba, I do it all the time.

 

[vailr]

Leopard OSX 10.5 might be an interesting challenge.
Not that Apple, Inc. would officially "approve", of course.
There exist 3rd-party programs to enable accessing NTFS drives under OSX.

 

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: Megatomic
You could try Ubuntu or Kubuntu. And you can access your NTFS drives via Samba, I do it all the time.

Samba is for network sharing, not reading NTFS drives. There has been a driver for NTFS in the linux kernel for quite some time. Some distributions don't enable it by default but Ubuntu does.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Ubuntu 8.04 if a fine operating system, I keep trying other distributions and I keep coming back

I still dual boot to XP Pro for gaming, but everything else is on Ubuntu.

 

[Crusty]

I used to dual boot, but now I just have more then one computer. Good thing my Ubuntu box is a beast though, I'm usually running anywhere from 2-8 VM's at once depending on what I'm doing.

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: Crusty

Originally posted by: Megatomic
You could try Ubuntu or Kubuntu. And you can access your NTFS drives via Samba, I do it all the time.

Samba is for network sharing, not reading NTFS drives. There has been a driver for NTFS in the linux kernel for quite some time. Some distributions don't enable it by default but Ubuntu does.

Doh. I thought the NTFS partition was showing up as an SMB share... If it is, isn't an SMB share done via Samba?

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Megatomic

Originally posted by: Crusty

Originally posted by: Megatomic
You could try Ubuntu or Kubuntu. And you can access your NTFS drives via Samba, I do it all the time.

Samba is for network sharing, not reading NTFS drives. There has been a driver for NTFS in the linux kernel for quite some time. Some distributions don't enable it by default but Ubuntu does.

Doh. I thought the NTFS partition was showing up as an SMB share... If it is, isn't an SMB share done via Samba?

yes, you can "serve" SMB shares via Samba, which can be connected to by the Samba client or Windows, and you can access SMB shares that are served by either Samba or Windows. It is a network protocol; for accessing local partitions you need a file system driver for that partition (ie, the ntfs driver on linux for accessing local ntfs partitions).

 

[Rottie]

Best alternative is Warp OS or MS-DOS

 

[sourceninja]

I'd go ubuntu 8.04

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: Brazen

Originally posted by: Megatomic

Originally posted by: Crusty

Originally posted by: Megatomic
You could try Ubuntu or Kubuntu. And you can access your NTFS drives via Samba, I do it all the time.

Samba is for network sharing, not reading NTFS drives. There has been a driver for NTFS in the linux kernel for quite some time. Some distributions don't enable it by default but Ubuntu does.

Doh. I thought the NTFS partition was showing up as an SMB share... If it is, isn't an SMB share done via Samba?

yes, you can "serve" SMB shares via Samba, which can be connected to by the Samba client or Windows, and you can access SMB shares that are served by either Samba or Windows. It is a network protocol; for accessing local partitions you need a file system driver for that partition (ie, the ntfs driver on linux for accessing local ntfs partitions).

Thanks Brazen. This is actually a big testament as to how far linux has come. When reading info off of NTFS partitions on a networked drive is so transparent that you forget how it works, it's THAT easy. I still have vague memories of struggling to get info off on NTFS drives from linux.

 

[drag]

Doh. I thought the NTFS partition was showing up as an SMB share... If it is, isn't an SMB share done via Samba?

Nope.

Samba is for SMB/CIFS network file sharing. CIFS (also called SMB) is the protocol that Microsoft uses for it's network file sharing.

If you want access to a NTFS file system then the best way to do it in Linux is to use the ntfs-3g user space ntfs driver. This is a FUSE-based file system that provides the most reliable way to read and write to NTFS in Linux. This is only useful for dual booting, however. If you want to use Linux full time then you need to use a native Linux FS.

FUSE is 'file systems in userspace". The Linux kernel exposes some file system features and then you can use regular programs to make something that mounts to your directory tree. It does not provide the same level of performance that a kernel-level file system can, but its much easier to make odd and special file systems using. (other FUSE file systems I like a lot are sshfs and smbnetfs)

 

[Megatomic]

Thanks for the lesson drag. You are a fountain of information as always. :thumbsup:

 

[BW86]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
Ubuntu 8.04 if a fine operating system, I keep trying other distributions and I keep coming back

I still dual boot to XP Pro for gaming, but everything else is on Ubuntu.

QFT