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Why GNU/Linux Rocks

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lxskllr said:
That's got my interest. I don't know what I'd do with it, but it would be a fun toy. It's hard to beat the price :^)
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Same. It'd be an ideal server watchdog, especially with a 3G chip or something for reporting, but mostly I just want to say that I own a $25 micro computer :biggrin:
 
I like that you can boot Linux from a USB key and actually run the OS directly without installing it to the computer. That is friggin awesome, Windows should be updated to support this.
 
zCypher said:
I like that you can boot Linux from a USB key and actually run the OS directly without installing it to the computer. That is friggin awesome, Windows should be updated to support this.
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I have a 256mb(!) thumb drive with a bootable SliTaz install, as well as a handful of Windows portable apps to use on a Windows box. Btw, Opera really shines as a portable app. It has a lot of functionality in a single executable.
 
lxskllr said:
My old P4 bedroom computer went tits up today. I shut it down, took it outside to clean it, and it never ran again :^/

After dicking around with it for a couple hours, I pulled the HD, and put it in my C2D box. I'm running without optical drives due to the HD being IDE, and having limited room. Anyway, I booted it up, and it went into Ubuntu fine, albeit in low gfx mode. I updated the drivers trough the handy utility that deals with proprietary drivers, rebooted, and here I am, about 10* faster than before :^D

Try doing that with Windows!
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A friend of mine moved a hard drive with XP on it from an AMD Opteron system to a new Core 2 Duo one and it booted up without a problem.
 
lxskllr said:
My old P4 bedroom computer went tits up today. I shut it down, took it outside to clean it, and it never ran again :^/

After dicking around with it for a couple hours, I pulled the HD, and put it in my C2D box. I'm running without optical drives due to the HD being IDE, and having limited room. Anyway, I booted it up, and it went into Ubuntu fine, albeit in low gfx mode. I updated the drivers trough the handy utility that deals with proprietary drivers, rebooted, and here I am, about 10* faster than before :^D

Try doing that with Windows!
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Try installing new video drivers without having to screw around with repositories and the terminal.

That's one of the things that's always bugged me about Linux. It works fine for everyday stuff, and it's free. But routine maintenance and installing new programs off the web is a pain in the arse.
 
corwin said:
Intel to Intel is not a "completely different architecture", Intel to AMD would be..I did the same thing with XP from a PIII to a P4 and it booted "flawlessly" as well
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Uh no it wouldn't. They're all x86. Try Itanium to Sun Sparc or something like that.
 
mmntech said:
Try installing new video drivers without having to screw around with repositories and the terminal.

That's one of the things that's always bugged me about Linux. It works fine for everyday stuff, and it's free. But routine maintenance and installing new programs off the web is a pain in the arse.
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Uhhh... where exactly do you think you're installing programs from when you download them on windows and run setup.exe?
 
mmntech said:
Try installing new video drivers without having to screw around with repositories and the terminal.

That's one of the things that's always bugged me about Linux. It works fine for everyday stuff, and it's free. But routine maintenance and installing new programs off the web is a pain in the arse.
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Drivers are in the repositories, and you shouldn't have to scour the web for programs. Any mainstream distro has tons of stuff in the repos. If by some chance you have to compile something from source, it isn't the hardest thing in the world as long as you can read. Ubuntu makes things easier, if less secure by using a PPA system. You can enter the private repos, and get access to updates at the desktop.

Everything updates through the desktop. You don't have to worry about some obscure piece of crapware you seldom use compromising your system due to being out of date. If something needs updating, your told about it, and you can update it without going to some website, and downloading an executable.
 
This scenario made possible by using class drivers and newer driver models, especially for the storage architecture, rather than the old days where proprietary drivers were more common.
 
I just put Debian on my Pentium 3 laptop and GNOME is agonizing compared to Windows XP. But yes, Linux is pretty awesome.
 
Chaotic42 said:
I just put Debian on my Pentium 3 laptop and GNOME is agonizing compared to Windows XP. But yes, Linux is pretty awesome.
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Try installing the Xfce desktop. That might run a little better, and be more familiar to you. For lightweight glitz, try Enlightenment.
 
lxskllr said:
Try installing the Xfce desktop. That might run a little better, and be more familiar to you. For lightweight glitz, try Enlightenment.
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Well, I kind of like Gnome, but it's just so slow on lesser systems. I'm going to muck around with it today and see if I can't get something sleeker going, or at the very least get the damned thing to work at 1024x768.
 
yeah, windows vista and 7 are pretty forgiving in my experience when you transfer them. Recently i have gone win7 home premium x64 from my amd e-350 netbook to my core 2 duo e6750 p35 chipset, booted, updated drivers, done.
 
You can do that in Windows, but you'll probably end up having the reactivate the license key and reinstall some drivers. Last time I tried it, it took about a hour to fix.

But, yeah, hardware auto detection is awesome when it works. When it doesn't... not so much.
 
ultimatebob said:
You can do that in Windows, but you'll probably end up having the reactivate the license key and reinstall some drivers. Last time I tried it, it took about a hour to fix.

But, yeah, hardware auto detection is awesome when it works. When it doesn't... not so much.
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Vista and up do handle it a lot better than earlier versions. But like you say, there's a lot more variables involved to cause issues. Activation and shitty, closed drivers are a huge problem that will never go away with Windows. With Linux, if it can find the hard disk it'll boot and should run fine. The NICs might change names (e.g. eth0->eth1) but that shouldn't break anything. The only "difficult" thing you might have to do is swap non-free video drivers if you go from nVidia->AMD or vice versa.
 
Vic Vega said:
MS makes a tool called SysPrep (or did... been a while since I did this kind of thing) to prep an OS install to be moved to a different platform...

I didn't use it myself, not sure if it's out there for Windows 7. Been a while since I was a HD lackey.
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My understanding is that SysPrep still doesn't deal with differing HALs properly, so that can be a stumbling block with Windows.
 
zCypher said:
I like that you can boot Linux from a USB key and actually run the OS directly without installing it to the computer. That is friggin awesome, Windows should be updated to support this.
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This! I have a 32GB USB2.0 flash drive with a bootable Linux install, and I can take it to any machine that supports booting off of USB (nearly all modern PCs support this now), and have my OS.
 
VirtualLarry said:
This! I have a 32GB USB2.0 flash drive with a bootable Linux install, and I can take it to any machine that supports booting off of USB (nearly all modern PCs support this now), and have my OS.
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And it'll never happen with MS' blessing because of licensing.
 
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