I'm proof that even an idiot can run Linux

[Random Variable]

Installing OpenGL drivers seemed unnecessarily complicated. You had to do everything through the command-line terminal.

 

[dighn]

Originally posted by: Random Variable
Installing OpenGL drivers seemed unnecessarily complicated. You had to do everything through the command-line terminal.

if you are serious about using linux, being comfortable with the command line is a must. the whole thing is built on commadn line after all, and it is very powerful as well.

 

[jamescardenas07]

i still cant figure out how to install programs in ubuntu 6.06

 

[stars]

Originally posted by: jamescardenas07
i still cant figure out how to install programs in ubuntu 6.06

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edgy#Installing_Addtional_Software

 

[pcgeek11]

The bottom line:
If you want to learn something new and like a massive amount of control over what your system does use linux

If all you want to do is accept the amount of control MS gives you and would rather not learn anything new stick with Windows.

If you want the best of both... Then dual boot.

pcgeek11

 

[Random Variable]

Originally posted by: pcgeek11
The bottom line:
If you want to learn something new and like a massive amount of control over what your system does use linux

If all you want to do is accept the amount of control MS gives you and would rather not learn anything new stick with Windows.

If you want the best of both... Then dual boot.

pcgeek11

or have two computers

 

[Random Variable]

Originally posted by: dighn

Originally posted by: Random Variable
Installing OpenGL drivers seemed unnecessarily complicated. You had to do everything through the command-line terminal.

if you are serious about using linux, being comfortable with the command line is a must. the whole thing is built on commadn line after all, and it is very powerful as well.

How does one can comfortable with it? Are there any good online tutorials?

 

[Quinton McLeod]

I haven't seen so many Linux haters in one spot before.

Some of you people are really really sad.

You people work on Windows: when Windows has a problem, you guys don't think twice about spending hours or maybe even days to repair it. Windows requires drivers and configuring before anything can work right.

Linux usually works right out of the box WITHOUT the need for additional drivers. When something doesn't work right, you people give up almost immediately. Then you preach on these forums and complain how Linux was so hard to deal with and etc.

The learning curve for Linux is the same as Windows. Its just you people are so used to Windows that you expect everything to be built like it. When something differs, you hate it. How ironic.

Linux isn't hard at all. Nowadays, everything you can do in a terminal can be done in the GUI. You don't need to know how to program to run Linux. Heck, even my mother can run Linux. My gf has Linux on her PC and she never ever had to go into terminal to do anything she needed to do.

I work at a computer repair shop. Most people who own computers never venture pass their own desktops!

"Click on your C drive" I'd say.

"Huh? What's that? Where do you find it?" They'd respond.

Honestly. Most people simply read email and surf the net. Linux can do this so much better and without the threat of viruses and spyware. No need for grandma and grandpa to worry about opening that email and getting infected by an attachment that downloads evil men to their computers.



As for gamers, they're a bit different of course. However, it's not Linux's fault. Game developers like programming in Direct X instead of Open GL. Even though OpenGL has more support than Direct X. Games such as Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament (support for DX9 and OGL), Prey and many others work on Linux with no problems. This is not a Linux problem here. Yet, people want to blame Linux.

Windows has millions of viruses. Microsoft takes forever to patch up serious security holes. Reboots have became so common, that when Linux users tell people, "Hey. I haven't rebooted in a month." People look at them as if they were drunk. Why is that?! A computer doesn't need to reboot for a month!? Unheard of!

Best of all, Linux is free of charge. Ignore all that crap about people spending books to "learn" it. I'm not talking about that. The actual product is free. So much hate, yet so much ignorance.

 

[Nothinman]

let me know when you actually wanna use it and realize you can't change the resolution, get firewire hdd to work or enable multimonitor setup.

There's a resolution changing tool in every distro that I've seen, firewire drives should 'just work' as soon as you plug them in just like USB. Multimoniter is a bit of work but it's pretty uncommon and it's a lot more flexible than the multimoniter support MS gives you.

Not to mention you have to look up the console command just to mount your CDROM to get linux to recognize it.
ohhhh but it makes you look so l337 typing in those commands!!

Right, so when was the last time you actually used Linux? Every desktop distro automounts CDs on insertion and puts an icon on the desktop for it.

Installing OpenGL drivers seemed unnecessarily complicated. You had to do everything through the command-line terminal.

You can thank nVidia and ATI for that, they can't release their drivers under the GPL so they'll always be more work than normal to install.

If you want the best of both... Then dual boot.

Dual booting sucks, use VMWare instead.

How does one can comfortable with it? Are there any good online tutorials?

Just keep using it, find something you want to accomplish and figure out how to do it.

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: Quinton McLeod
I haven't seen so many Linux haters in one spot before.

Some of you people are really really sad.

You people work on Windows: when Windows has a problem, you guys don't think twice about spending hours or maybe even days to repair it. Windows requires drivers and configuring before anything can work right.

Linux usually works right out of the box WITHOUT the need for additional drivers. When something doesn't work right, you people give up almost immediately. Then you preach on these forums and complain how Linux was so hard to deal with and etc.

The learning curve for Linux is the same as Windows. Its just you people are so used to Windows that you expect everything to be built like it. When something differs, you hate it. How ironic.

Linux isn't hard at all. Nowadays, everything you can do in a terminal can be done in the GUI. You don't need to know how to program to run Linux. Heck, even my mother can run Linux. My gf has Linux on her PC and she never ever had to go into terminal to do anything she needed to do.

I work at a computer repair shop. Most people who own computers never venture pass their own desktops!

"Click on your C drive" I'd say.

"Huh? What's that? Where do you find it?" They'd respond.

Honestly. Most people simply read email and surf the net. Linux can do this so much better and without the threat of viruses and spyware. No need for grandma and grandpa to worry about opening that email and getting infected by an attachment that downloads evil men to their computers.



As for gamers, they're a bit different of course. However, it's not Linux's fault. Game developers like programming in Direct X instead of Open GL. Even though OpenGL has more support than Direct X. Games such as Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament (support for DX9 and OGL), Prey and many others work on Linux with no problems. This is not a Linux problem here. Yet, people want to blame Linux.

Windows has millions of viruses. Microsoft takes forever to patch up serious security holes. Reboots have became so common, that when Linux users tell people, "Hey. I haven't rebooted in a month." People look at them as if they were drunk. Why is that?! A computer doesn't need to reboot for a month!? Unheard of!

Best of all, Linux is free of charge. Ignore all that crap about people spending books to "learn" it. I'm not talking about that. The actual product is free. So much hate, yet so much ignorance.

Great post. I think people are just lazy. They were forced to learn WIndows and so they did. They aren't forced to learn Linux however. Most folks just want to do the minimum amount necassary with the least effort possible. It's unfortunate that more people didn't grow up in the DOS era. I honestly wonder how I'd be if I first touched a computer with Windows instead of DOS. Would I be the same? Would I love to use the console?

 

[QueBert]

I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10, didn't think about the 8 gig limit and ended up having to repartition my HD so it could be installed in the first 8gb of the drive. Last *nix I had messed with was YEARS ago, I knew they had made the install process much more simple. It was quick, and I was really surprised at how all my stuff worked without any extra drivers. First boot and having my Audigy 2 & on board network card work was pretty damn cool

I ended up removing it as I was having a royal bitch of a time getting XP to work with Grub (could't actually...) I wil be reinstalling Ubuntu as soon as I get another HD

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: QueBert
I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10, didn't think about the 8 gig limit and ended up having to repartition my HD so it could be installed in the first 8gb of the drive. Last *nix I had messed with was YEARS ago, I knew they had made the install process much more simple. It was quick, and I was really surprised at how all my stuff worked without any extra drivers. First boot and having my Audigy 2 & on board network card work was pretty damn cool

I ended up removing it as I was having a royal bitch of a time getting XP to work with Grub (could't actually...) I wil be reinstalling Ubuntu as soon as I get another HD

What kind of machine did you install this one?

The last time I had grub issues like this was because grub detected my windows partition as the "recovery" partition on the gateway machine I installed it on.

And by gateway, I mean the brand gateway. Some machines have a partition for recovery operations.

So just ended up switching the windows partition to /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/hda2

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: Hyperblaze

Originally posted by: QueBert
I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10, didn't think about the 8 gig limit and ended up having to repartition my HD so it could be installed in the first 8gb of the drive. Last *nix I had messed with was YEARS ago, I knew they had made the install process much more simple. It was quick, and I was really surprised at how all my stuff worked without any extra drivers. First boot and having my Audigy 2 & on board network card work was pretty damn cool

I ended up removing it as I was having a royal bitch of a time getting XP to work with Grub (could't actually...) I wil be reinstalling Ubuntu as soon as I get another HD

What kind of machine did you install this one?

The last time I had grub issues like this was because grub detected my windows partition as the "recovery" partition on the gateway machine I installed it on.

And by gateway, I mean the brand gateway. Some machines have a partition for recovery operations.

So just ended up switching the windows partition to /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/hda2

I installed it on my main box, which has pretty normal hardware, my XP was installed on partition 1 of my 74gb raptor. Ubuntu was on a partition I made about 30gb into the drivem it wouldn't boot at all, and I couldn't even get the Grub loader to come up, so no Ubuntu or XP. I repartitioned and made a 4 gig partition before the XP one. then Ubuntu would come up but still no XP. I discovered Super Grub but I couldn't get both to work, maybe with Super Grub I could get Ubuntu to load even being past 8gb on the drive

when it did work I really liked Ubuntu though. Almost killed my monitor trying to get Beryl to install, but I think with a few solid weeks Ubuntu would make perfect sense to me.

 

[Nothinman]

I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10, didn't think about the 8 gig limit and ended up having to repartition my HD so it could be installed in the first 8gb of the drive.

Which still baffles me, any semi-recent BIOS that supports LBA48 shouldn't have that problem. And you say it's a raptor so it's SATA, right? That makes even less sense because the 8G limit is a PATA thing and shouldn't affect SATA drives. Maybe it's some compatibility setting in your BIOS that's enabled?

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: QueBert

Originally posted by: Hyperblaze

Originally posted by: QueBert
I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10, didn't think about the 8 gig limit and ended up having to repartition my HD so it could be installed in the first 8gb of the drive. Last *nix I had messed with was YEARS ago, I knew they had made the install process much more simple. It was quick, and I was really surprised at how all my stuff worked without any extra drivers. First boot and having my Audigy 2 & on board network card work was pretty damn cool

I ended up removing it as I was having a royal bitch of a time getting XP to work with Grub (could't actually...) I wil be reinstalling Ubuntu as soon as I get another HD

What kind of machine did you install this one?

The last time I had grub issues like this was because grub detected my windows partition as the "recovery" partition on the gateway machine I installed it on.

And by gateway, I mean the brand gateway. Some machines have a partition for recovery operations.

So just ended up switching the windows partition to /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/hda2

I installed it on my main box, which has pretty normal hardware, my XP was installed on partition 1 of my 74gb raptor. Ubuntu was on a partition I made about 30gb into the drivem it wouldn't boot at all, and I couldn't even get the Grub loader to come up, so no Ubuntu or XP. I repartitioned and made a 4 gig partition before the XP one. then Ubuntu would come up but still no XP. I discovered Super Grub but I couldn't get both to work, maybe with Super Grub I could get Ubuntu to load even being past 8gb on the drive

when it did work I really liked Ubuntu though. Almost killed my monitor trying to get Beryl to install, but I think with a few solid weeks Ubuntu would make perfect sense to me.

I only installed ubuntu once so I can't remember if it gives you the option to install grub on the master boot record or linux root partition or just installs it on the master boot record.

Do you recall?

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10, didn't think about the 8 gig limit and ended up having to repartition my HD so it could be installed in the first 8gb of the drive.

Which still baffles me, any semi-recent BIOS that supports LBA48 shouldn't have that problem. And you say it's a raptor so it's SATA, right? That makes even less sense because the 8G limit is a PATA thing and shouldn't affect SATA drives. Maybe it's some compatibility setting in your BIOS that's enabled?

Heh, wasn't it like...6-7 years ago that this problem more or less disappeared?
Last distro I remember having this with was something like Redhat 6.x or something...

QueBert, I'm currently logged onto a box at home, a P2-450 in an Asus P2B motherboard(good ole 440BX chipset), as you can imagine it's quite old, but nevertheless it has a >8 GB root partition, if you can't make that work on your box, I'd look at BIOS settings like Nothinman said, or if you can't find anything, turn to Google.

As foru CLI for mounting CD's and changing windows resolution, I have NO idea what distros you are using?
Slackware 1.x?
Even Solaris will be happy to auto mount CD's for you, and Solaris is about as user unfriendly as the UNIX world gets.
Heck, run Ubuntu and you won't have to touch the CLI to install the binary nVidia or ATi drivers either, they're in the repos.
I believe the repo they're in is disabled by default though due to it's un-free nature, but don't worry, there's a nifty checkbox in the software install/update GUI for that.

 

[Nothinman]

Heck, run Ubuntu and you won't have to touch the CLI to install the binary nVidia or ATi drivers either, they're in the repos.
I believe the repo they're in is disabled by default though due to it's un-free nature, but don't worry, there's a nifty checkbox in the software install/update GUI for that.

Nope, they're installed by default and with the release of Fiesty they'll be enabled by default.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Heck, run Ubuntu and you won't have to touch the CLI to install the binary nVidia or ATi drivers either, they're in the repos.
I believe the repo they're in is disabled by default though due to it's un-free nature, but don't worry, there's a nifty checkbox in the software install/update GUI for that.

Nope, they're installed by default and with the release of Fiesty they'll be enabled by default.

Sounds pretty much like what I said, save for the part about Feisty

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10, didn't think about the 8 gig limit and ended up having to repartition my HD so it could be installed in the first 8gb of the drive.

Which still baffles me, any semi-recent BIOS that supports LBA48 shouldn't have that problem. And you say it's a raptor so it's SATA, right? That makes even less sense because the 8G limit is a PATA thing and shouldn't affect SATA drives. Maybe it's some compatibility setting in your BIOS that's enabled?

Heh, wasn't it like...6-7 years ago that this problem more or less disappeared?
Last distro I remember having this with was something like Redhat 6.x or something...

QueBert, I'm currently logged onto a box at home, a P2-450 in an Asus P2B motherboard(good ole 440BX chipset), as you can imagine it's quite old, but nevertheless it has a >8 GB root partition, if you can't make that work on your box, I'd look at BIOS settings like Nothinman said, or if you can't find anything, turn to Google.

That's not proof, unfortunately. Even if your partition is larger then 8 gigs as long as the kernel and initrd are located within that limit in the harddrive, then it's fine. I beleive.

But it's not likely that is the problem irregardless.

As foru CLI for mounting CD's and changing windows resolution, I have NO idea what distros you are using?
Slackware 1.x?
Even Solaris will be happy to auto mount CD's for you, and Solaris is about as user unfriendly as the UNIX world gets.
Heck, run Ubuntu and you won't have to touch the CLI to install the binary nVidia or ATi drivers either, they're in the repos.
I believe the repo they're in is disabled by default though due to it's un-free nature, but don't worry, there's a nifty checkbox in the software install/update GUI for that.

With Ubuntu Gnome-VFS (vfs = virtual file system) program should be running in the background and take care of automounting stuff.

The issue could be one of permissions. If you install the cdrom or it's been moved around and such then it's possible on a older system that permissions don't get setup correctly.

But nowadays when I plug in a audio cdrom with a data track on it Gnome is smart enough to ask weither or not I want to play the disk or mount it.

Personally I feel that mounting or not mounting stuff is vastly superior in Linux compared to Windows were everything automounts. There are plenty of situations you can run into when playing around with file systems or whatnot and having things just go completely to south in Windows.

 

[Nothinman]

Sounds pretty much like what I said, save for the part about Feisty [/Q}

And the part where you said that they're in a disabled repo by default because they're non-free =)

That's not proof, unfortunately. Even if your partition is larger then 8 gigs as long as the kernel and initrd are located within that limit in the harddrive, then it's fine. I beleive.

As long as the box supports LBA48 for PATA drives or has SATA the limit is irrelevant and he said he's using a raptor which means SATA, right? I didn't think they released any PATA raptors...

With Ubuntu Gnome-VFS (vfs = virtual file system) program should be running in the background and take care of automounting stuff.

The VFS has nothing to do with it at all, but yes there should be a daemon polling the drive to see when a disc is inserted.

The issue could be one of permissions. If you install the cdrom or it's been moved around and such then it's possible on a older system that permissions don't get setup correctly.

Not likely, the system's most likely using udev which recreates the device nodes on every boot and sets the permissions the same so even if he did move the drive to another port it'll still be created properly.

 

[drag]

Not likely, the system's most likely using udev which recreates the device nodes on every boot and sets the permissions the same so even if he did move the drive to another port it'll still be created properly.

Maybe you forget how relatively reacent this stuff is. Udev and having good rules that setup permissions isn't something that has been around for a very long time. The person that brought up the cdrom command line stuff has probably had this experiance from a while ago, maybe a year ago, maybe more. People who don't use Linux generally don't understand the rate of change that is going on.

Also if it's not the default user but one that was added on then it may have not have had give cdrom permissions by default.

As long as the box supports LBA48 for PATA drives or has SATA the limit is irrelevant and he said he's using a raptor which means SATA, right? I didn't think they released any PATA raptors...

Also for the raptor it's likely that even though it's SATA the BIOS is in PATA emulation mode to make it easier to deal with in windows. but yet I agree this 8gig limit is very unlikely. But I wouldn't be suprised either, who knows what sort of cruft gets shoved into the setup in effort to keep backward compatability? (BIOSes suck.)

The VFS has nothing to do with it at all, but yes there should be a daemon polling the drive to see when a disc is inserted.

Right, I got mixed up. It's not gnome-vfs-daemon, which is what I was thinking of, it was gnome-volume-manager.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: drag
That's not proof, unfortunately. Even if your partition is larger then 8 gigs as long as the kernel and initrd are located within that limit in the harddrive, then it's fine. I beleive.

Yeah yeah, the root partition on which the kernel resides then, happy now?

Originally posted by: Nothinman
And the part where you said that they're in a disabled repo by default because they're non-free =)

The repo is installed, but disabled, no?

Hmm, somehow this discussion about semantics doesn't feel very useful

 

[Nothinman]

The repo is installed, but disabled, no?

The repo is disabled, yes, but the drivers (in this case the restricted-modules package) is installed by default.

 

[jmagg]

fwiw
If not for ATI resolution problems, I'd be using Ubuntu now.
I believe its nearly ready for primetime, and I'm rooting for the dog. The Vista version cartel is ridiculous imo.

 

[Random Variable]

The YaST setup tool makes installing software quite simple. All you do is direct it to a URL and it does the rest. I used it to install Firefox 2 (which doesn't come with SUSE Linux 10.1).