i was just about to buy winxp pro for a lot of $$

[robphelan]

i don't know much at all about *nix and need advice whether I can get away with using a *nix distro.

there are a several things I frequently to do from this PC.

normal net surfing/email
play BF2142/Oblivion
watch Xvid/Divx vids
utorrent
stream vids to my modded xbox
zip/rar & other compression formats
word processing - Open Office
Print to my HP laserjet printer
watch TV using Beyond TV & Hauppage PVR 350 tv tuner

If I went Ubuntu, would I be able to do all this? how difficult would it be to get this up and runnig?
thanks alot.
rp.

 

[aCynic2]

The only ones I'd question are BF2142/Oblivion (wine or some other emulator may correct this) and watching TV.

All other things I know Linux can handle.

 

[nweaver]

Linux can probably do all that, but it's not going to be as "out of box" as windows is (and the games is the big issue, not to mention h/w). Utorrent (iirc) does not have a linux port, so you would have to change to another torrent app. Streaming videos to your modded xbox is just samba server stuff (I think, could be wrong) and the TV thing would best be served by MythTV probably.

 

[imported_nightfox]

utorrent runs perfectly under wine

 

[ravana]

Whatever distro you choose, it should have it's own BT client, so that takes care of utorrent.

For the games, according to the Wine App DB, BF2142 is rated bronze. So it should work.

Battlefield 2 (which 2142 is based on I think) is rated 11 out of the top 25 windows games running under just plain ol' wine. By Oblivion I hope you mean this. It is rated silver, so should be better!

For the TV stuff check out MythTV. Streaming is possible with VLC & MythTV.

Hope this helps you!

For Ubuntu:
- BF2142 thread
- Oblivion Setup page from Wiki

Hope those help as far as your games go :thumbsup:

 

[Atheus]

Only thing that will not work is the games. Wine will hit performance too much unless you have a god-like rig.

You play those games now? So you already have Windows? Why not use that copy?

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: nweaver
Linux can probably do all that, but it's not going to be as "out of box" as windows is (and the games is the big issue, not to mention h/w).

Linux has brought many a Windows user to their knees. :laugh:

 

[drag]

For your TV card there are a few different options.

One is to use just your normal programs to watch it. Stuff like VLC can use your PVR directly, setting channels and watch live TV and such. It doesn't support it in Windows, but it does in Linux.

If you want time shifting features, TiVO-like, then you'll have to run Mythtv. It can be somewhat difficult to setup and run correctly, but out of all the different options for Windows or Linux it has the most capabiltiies, by far. I've just used it for it's 'PVR' features, but it has lots of different add-ons for a complete home entertainment center. Stuff like music jutebox, ripping dvds, MAME, clever web interface, and other such things.

One of things that a friend at work likes doing is with his PVR-350 card you can set the device to record at the proper resolution and datarates for a DVD movie. This way he can burn the recorded TV shows directly to DVD using Mythtv without the need to re-encode them.

I beleive the PVR-350 and other hauppauge stuff requires a seperate firmware image you have to obtain and put in the correct directory, but other then that it should just work.

There are a lot of guides for setting up Mythtv on Ubuntu.

Keep in mind that Mythtv is designed to be used in a distributed fasion. You can have multiple 'backends' and multiple 'front ends'. The Master backend will have the MySQL database for keeping track of TV listings, recording sessions, and other settings. The backends also are the items that have the actual TV cards and do the work of recording, storing, and encoding any thing.

Frontends provide the user interface and use their cpus for playback and decoding of the media streams from the backends.

Typically you use the same machine for both the front and the backends, but it's nice to have a seperate backend so you don't have your desktop performance being interupted by some show being recorded. Also people like to use the old Xbox as a Mythtv front-end which are now aviable for dirt cheap.

There are two ways of doing a frontend on Mythtv. One way is to use a Xbox Linux distribution like Xebian or whatnot to run Mythtvfrontend on it. The other way is to use XBMC and some python scripting to support Mythtv. I don't know which is better.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Xbox_Frontend

The one thing to realy watch out for is that your frontend and backend need to be able to speak the same protocol for it to work. Mythtv frequently changes it's network protocol and it will cause breakage even with minor changes in revision numbering.

Like I said it's sometimes frustrating to setup, but it's easy to use and it's worth it, IMO.

For Windows games you'd typically use Wine or pay for a subscription for Cedega. Paying for Cedega is worth it if your going to do a lot of games because of it's GUI.. it allows you to easily have multiple different versions of cedega and keep track of game-specific settings for maximum compatability. Although most people are going to prefer to use Wine if it works with the 2-3 favorite games.


For bittorrent I have very little need for anything fancy. I just use gnome-btdownloader, very simple. You just point it at the directory you want to save the download and it just goes.

For fancy stuff I like Azureus. In Linux Java comes in two flavors. You have the official Sun Java then you have the open source GCJ support for compiled and interpreted java. The next generation Java will be all open source and the GCJ/Classpath folks are working with Sun to make this happen. Currently the best performance you will get will be from Sun Java. So you want to make sure that is the java your using with Azureus, otherwise it will suck badly.

Azureus apprently has now got a new 3.0 thing going, which I don't know anything about.

Otherwise there are about a dozen other bittorrent utilities aviable through apt-get. Each with their own special angle. Torrentflux is a LAMP application for very advanced multiuser torrent'ng. Btdownloadcurses is what I've used in the past. Transmission has a GUI and a CLI interface. Rtorrent is ncurses based UI. etc etc.

There is even a plugin for Mythtv that will handle bittorrents....

 

[Nothinman]

Wine will hit performance too much unless you have a god-like rig.

That's not necessarily true, WINE has close to native performance for a lot of apps and games. It just depends on what the process does and how complicated the Win32->Linux translations it requires are.

 

[TheVrolok]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Wine will hit performance too much unless you have a god-like rig.

That's not necessarily true, WINE has close to native performance for a lot of apps and games. It just depends on what the process does and how complicated the Win32->Linux translations it requires are.

I can say that I play a number of games under Cdega just as well as I play them under Windows. In addition, games like Doom3 and Quake4 have native linux support.

 

[drag]

It depends on what video card you have and what games your playing.

For example the Nvidia drivers and OpenGL stack are, at their core, the same between both Linux and Windows. Depending on paticular setups the performance of Linux vs Windows in 3D performance is in single digit percentages.

However if your using ATI's proprietary drivers then your looking at a performance hit of about 20-50% by using Linux. That's just native support. Using ATI in Linux you will never get close to the same Windows performance, even with native games.

With games using Wine or Cedega you can get near Windows native performance on certain games without much trouble. Wine has even released benchmarks were the Wine DirectX implimentation is actually FASTER then Windows with certain functions. With other things it's a little bit slower, with others it's very slow or just unsupported altogether.

A lot of games, especially those using ID engines actually run OpenGL, even though they require DirectX to run. They'll use DirectX for menus and cut scenes and such, while the actual gameplay is OpenGL. These will run fast.


For some Wine vs XP benchmarks you can check out:
http://wiki.winehq.org/BenchMark-0.9.5

On certain things Wine is actually up to 50% faster then XP (certain things in the 3DMark2000v1.1 benchmark suite). Virus scanning is 21% faster under Linux, for example. Most things though your within +5% to -17% or so, with some problematic things going well under -50%

Other games use more common DirectX apis that Wine has very good support for, and these will be within 10% or so the same performance as Windows.

Still others will use APIs that Wine or Cedega have very poor support for, so these games will either not run at all or just be kinda slow and buggy.

So depending on all these factors you can have games running anywere between 20% to 90% of native Windows speed...

 

[Fox5]

As far as the games go, well, if you have an ati card you can almost forget about playing them at decent speeds.
Crossover office (the paid version of wine) and cedega (a splinter from wine that is pay only) can play some games (that's specifically cedega's purpose) so you could check them out. They have compatibility lists online.