Six months with Linux

[ochadd]

About four months ago I decided to give Linux another shot at replacing Windows on my home machine. Thought I would write a few words on it. I have much experience as a Windows sys admin, gamer, and IT guy. I took a semester long class on Linux nearly 10 years ago and have used it in server roles as firewalls and proxy servers.

What I do in order of importance or time spent:

Browser/Internet access using PPPOE and wireless
Software Firewall
Gaming
Instant Messaging
Video editing using Windows Movie Maker
BitTorrent Client
OpenOffice
DVDFlick for conversions of other peoples backup copies of legally purchased movies.

Order of distros I've tried and how long I gave them.

PCLinuxOS 2008- (2 hours )
Could not get video drivers installed. The window they provided was not sizable and would not fit in the monitor I was using. Spent two hours trying with no success. I've learned to install from the command line since I originally tried it.

Linux Mint 6- (5 months and still going. Installed on PCs for mother and brother.)
Far and away the easiest alternative OS I've used. It was the second distro I tried. All but video conversion and gaming worked for me. Getting the PPPoe connection setup initially took some research and it now connects at boot with no issues. Firefox search function is mutated and it pisses me off every day. I use this daily at home only booting to XP for gaming and DVDflick. Tried using Wine but no go. Can not seem to get my joysticks or control pads to work. They behave as a mouse so SNES and Sega emulators aren't working well.

DSL (2 days on and off installed as a virtual machine on VMware)
I really wanted to make this one work but there were issues with everything outside of the wired network connection. Decent mouse support and getting the resolution set seemed impossible. Vmware tools install was a nightmare and it didn't seem to solve a single problem. I had used three distros as virtual machines at this point and thought I had it mastered. Guess not.

OpenSuse (1 day)
Got everything to work but Linux Mint seemed to flow better. My assistant thinks this is the ticket.

Zenwalk ( 2 hours)
Could not figure out how to get a PPPoe connection to work or even get the tools installed.

ArchLinux (3 days)
This one taught me more about the functionality of a Linux X setup than all others combined. Everything needed to be done by hand and it took a very large part of 3 days to get what I would call a functional desktop setup going. When I was done I had XFCE, Gnome, and KDE as options but had to start them manually. Icons, themes, and other pretty stuff evaded me and didn't feel like dropping another three days moving on. Some day I'm going to come back to Arch and get it tweaked perfectly.

PCLinuxOS 2009 (2 days and going)
Started using this a couple days ago. Works for me the same way as Linux Mint and it's prettier with Compiz installed already. There were no updates to do and everything I got to work on other distros works here and the default ATI drivers worked great on the laptop. Easily the quickest setup but I'm also not as useless as I was 6 months ago.


For gaming I could not get it to work even to play little emulators and such. New video cards, joysticks, and controller pads seem to hate all versions of Linux I've tried. Video conversion can be done once it's an MPEG easily enough but getting them from AVI to MPEG to DVD was daunting and after many hours of reading it seems I need to know more about the source video or just use Windows.

It has a purpose. It's lightening fast and never crashes. It's the default boot option on my machine and I've been supporting two other installs for my mother and brother and they prefer it over Windows hands down. When I'm surfing, messaging, or listening to music and video I'm using Linux Mint or PC Linux OS 09. Gaming and video conversion still works better in Windows XP.

Hardware used is in my sig and the laptop is a Dell Latitute D531 with a Broadcom BCM4311. Used an Xbox360 controller and Logitech joystick.

 

[lakedude]

About a year ago I did a similar thing and tried a bunch of distros to determine for myself which was best. I liked that Mint included lots of multi media apps but Mint ran really slow on my machine.

Puppy and Sabayon ended up being my favorites. I didn't see either in your list so if you are looking to try a couple more distros give Sabayon and Puppy a try.

Puppy is similar to DSL but is much more up to date and complete. It is bigger than DSL but at 100MB it is hardly bloat-ware. Puppy will load completely to RAM on any modern machine which makes it super fast. If something is missing it can generally be added easily with the package manager. There is even an option to load non-Puppy packages.

Sabayon is a full sized distro based on Gentoo.

Check em out at distrowatch.

 

[ochadd]

Originally posted by: lakedude
About a year ago I did a similar thing and tried a bunch of distros to determine for myself which was best. I liked that Mint included lots of multi media apps but Mint ran really slow on my machine.

Puppy and Sabayon ended up being my favorites. I didn't see either in your list so if you are looking to try a couple more distros give Sabayon and Puppy a try.

Puppy is similar to DSL but is much more up to date and complete. It is bigger than DSL but at 100MB it is hardly bloat-ware. Puppy will load completely to RAM on any modern machine which makes it super fast. If something is missing it can generally be added easily with the package manager. There is even an option to load non-Puppy packages.

Sabayon is a full sized distro based on Gentoo.

Check em out at distrowatch.

I will give them a shot. I had the same feeling about Mint in that it seems bloated. One of the reasons I have kept trying others. It runs slightly quicker than XP on the same machine. ArchLinux is the only distro I've found to be noticeably quicker and it wasn't as functional. I think it came down to boot time as I shut the machine off daily.

 

[Brainonska511]

I ran Ubuntu for about 4-5 months on my laptop starting in September '08. I also tried Kubuntu (KDE 4.1 was very unpolished though, looked cool) and OpenSuse 11.1 (but probably didn't give it long enough and getting hotkeys to work on a laptop can be tricky).

I liked using Ubuntu, though video playback (particularly DVD) sucks with an ATI card and compiz effects enabled. Something about the way the ATI driver works with OpenGL overlay mode. I had to always disable desktop effects before playing DVDs to get things to play without flickering. It was a lean OS though and ran just as fast, if not faster in some instances over XP. I eventually left it though because I don't have room on my laptop hard drive to have 2 OS partitions + a data partition for pictures and music (40GB+ of music since a lot of it is in flac) + I also wanted to play FEAR.

Fun while it lasted and I'll definitely look into installing Ubuntu again on a future machine (either my next laptop whenever that happens or if I build some sort of desktop). It's crossed my mind to build some kind of cheap HTPC using an atom-based computer and a hardware-encoding USB TV tuner, but it probably wouldn't do so well for video playback and most, if not all of those cheapy systems lack any kind of composite video output.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: ochadd

ArchLinux is the only distro I've found to be noticeably quicker and it wasn't as functional. I think it came down to boot time as I shut the machine off daily.

Suspend in Ubuntu has been pretty reliable in my experience. You might want to try that for quick startup times.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: lxskllr

Originally posted by: ochadd

ArchLinux is the only distro I've found to be noticeably quicker and it wasn't as functional. I think it came down to boot time as I shut the machine off daily.

Suspend in Ubuntu has been pretty reliable in my experience. You might want to try that for quick startup times.

this, i only power off or reboot if i must.

 

[ochadd]

Originally posted by: xSauronx

Originally posted by: lxskllr

Originally posted by: ochadd

ArchLinux is the only distro I've found to be noticeably quicker and it wasn't as functional. I think it came down to boot time as I shut the machine off daily.

Suspend in Ubuntu has been pretty reliable in my experience. You might want to try that for quick startup times.

this, i only power off or reboot if i must.

I've tried suspend and hibernate in Mint and they both keep my GPU fan going, maybe others but that's the one I hear. I've let it sit for several minutes and it doesn't want to spool them down.

 

[Brainonska511]

Originally posted by: ochadd

Originally posted by: xSauronx

Originally posted by: lxskllr

Originally posted by: ochadd

ArchLinux is the only distro I've found to be noticeably quicker and it wasn't as functional. I think it came down to boot time as I shut the machine off daily.

Suspend in Ubuntu has been pretty reliable in my experience. You might want to try that for quick startup times.

this, i only power off or reboot if i must.

I've tried suspend and hibernate in Mint and they both keep my GPU fan going, maybe others but that's the one I hear. I've let it sit for several minutes and it doesn't want to spool them down.

Hibernate is a "save session to hard drive and shut down" feature. Hibernate should shut your computer down completely.

 

[SickBeast]

I don't know why so many people like Mint instead of Ubuntu. If you hate the default theme, it's easy enough to change.

I've personally had installation issues plus some other problems with Mint that I did not have with Ubuntu.

I highly recommend release 9.04; it makes the others seem slow and bloated in comparison (aside from Puppy, DSL, and those other 'lite' versions).

 

[ochadd]

Originally posted by: SickBeast
I don't know why so many people like Mint instead of Ubuntu. If you hate the default theme, it's easy enough to change.

I've personally had installation issues plus some other problems with Mint that I did not have with Ubuntu.

I highly recommend release 9.04; it makes the others seem slow and bloated in comparison (aside from Puppy, DSL, and those other 'lite' versions).

Mint had most of the features I like installed out of the box. Updated VGA drivers, installed Kino, VLC, updated packages, and I was set. Not to say Ubuntu can't work just as well but Mint has the reputation of having one of the best out of the box desktop setups.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: ochadd

Mint had most of the features I like installed out of the box. Updated VGA drivers, installed Kino, VLC, updated packages, and I was set. Not to say Ubuntu can't work just as well but Mint has the reputation of having one of the best out of the box desktop setups.

They're almost exactly the same in my experience. I prefer the default Ubuntu setup, so that's what I use. I'd be happy enough using Mint though.

 

[Alaa]

4 days Ubuntu user and I am enjoying it. I just want to try it in a dual boot with vista. I have three problems though. I can't change my network IP even when I used the same IP address as in vista; I can't forward ports like ports for utorrent running in wine; and finally I couldn't install Nvclock v0.84 for some weird errors!

Bare in mind that I had no previous knowledge of how to deal with any linux before these 4 days. I would like some help but it is not a big issue since I am not using it as the main OS.

 

[graysky]

Originally posted by: Alaa
4 days Ubuntu user and I am enjoying it. I just want to try it in a dual boot with vista. I have three problems though. I can't change my network IP even when I used the same IP address as in vista; I can't forward ports like ports for utorrent running in wine; and finally I couldn't install Nvclock v0.84 for some weird errors!

Changing IP via a static config is trivial in ubuntu. First don't use the gnome network manager (disable it). edit your /etc/network/interfaces to have the ip you wanna use. Example using mine:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth1
#iface eth1 inet dhcp

iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.1.20
network 192.168.1.0
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.1
mtu 4000

The mtu line is enabling jumbo frames (4k) so you might wanna omit it entirely.

As to your port forwarding issue... 1) that is independent of your O/S and should be setup in your router and 2) why in the world would you run utorrent through Wine when you can use deluge? Try it via 'sudo aptitude install deluge'

As to nvclock are you using the one in the repo or did you download 0.8 beta 4 and try to compile it yourself?

 

[Alaa]

Originally posted by: graysky

Originally posted by: Alaa
4 days Ubuntu user and I am enjoying it. I just want to try it in a dual boot with vista. I have three problems though. I can't change my network IP even when I used the same IP address as in vista; I can't forward ports like ports for utorrent running in wine; and finally I couldn't install Nvclock v0.84 for some weird errors!

Changing IP via a static config is trivial in ubuntu. First don't use the gnome network manager (disable it). edit your /etc/network/interfaces to have the ip you wanna use. Example using mine:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth1
#iface eth1 inet dhcp

iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.1.20
network 192.168.1.0
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.1
mtu 4000

The mtu line is enabling jumbo frames (4k) so you might wanna omit it entirely.

As to your port forwarding issue... 1) that is independent of your O/S and should be setup in your router and 2) why in the world would you run utorrent through Wine when you can use deluge? Try it via 'sudo aptitude install deluge'

As to nvclock are you using the one in the repo or did you download 0.8 beta 4 and try to compile it yourself?

Thanks for helping me. I'll try the stuff you mentioned when I log into my ubuntu. As for the Nvclock, I downloaded the repo version and tried to adjust my fan speed but it said that my gpu is not supported. Then I tried to compile 0.8 beta 4 myself but it kept giving me errors when I used 'make' command.

 

[graysky]

@alaa - there may be some dependencies (deps) that you are lacking.

Here is how I did it:

tar zxvf nvclock0.8b4.tar.gz
cd nvclock0.8b4/
sudo aptitude install automake
sudo sh autogen.sh
./configure --disable-nvcontrol --prefix=/usr
make
./src/nvclock -i
sudo make install

http://ubuntuforums.org/showth...ge=3&highlight=nvclock

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Brainonska511

Originally posted by: ochadd

Originally posted by: xSauronx

Originally posted by: lxskllr

Originally posted by: ochadd

ArchLinux is the only distro I've found to be noticeably quicker and it wasn't as functional. I think it came down to boot time as I shut the machine off daily.

Suspend in Ubuntu has been pretty reliable in my experience. You might want to try that for quick startup times.

this, i only power off or reboot if i must.

I've tried suspend and hibernate in Mint and they both keep my GPU fan going, maybe others but that's the one I hear. I've let it sit for several minutes and it doesn't want to spool them down.

Hibernate is a "save session to hard drive and shut down" feature. Hibernate should shut your computer down completely.

If you're having issues with suspend and hibernate, 99% of the time it's related to your graphics driver (or lack thereof).

 

[Rifter]

I have been running mint 6 for a few months and i love it, still dual boot vista for games. It can be a pain to try and make your own packages but you usually do not need to, comes with almost everything you need out of the box. I love being able to update everything at once the OS and all programs.

 

[Alaa]

Originally posted by: graysky
@alaa - there may be some dependencies (deps) that you are lacking.

Here is how I did it:

tar zxvf nvclock0.8b4.tar.gz
cd nvclock0.8b4/
sudo aptitude install automake
sudo sh autogen.sh
./configure --disable-nvcontrol --prefix=/usr
make
./src/nvclock -i
sudo make install

http://ubuntuforums.org/showth...ge=3&highlight=nvclock

only "./src/nvclock -i" failed for no destination found. I couldn't change the fan speed. I don't need it anyway.

My problem now is that I enabled antialiasing from nvidia settings but it doesn't affect my windows except when I restart compiz with a script I got online. Other startup commands like "nvidia - l" and that delay compiz script don't change anything! Restarting compiz messes up my screenlets so I really need a working solution to get AA settings to work properly. Thanks.

 

[DarkThinker]

I have been using Fedora since 2003.

Hands down the neatest cleanest distro I have used yet.

Fedora 11 is right around the corner too