Doesn't take much learning. I recommend using a Knoppix or Ubuntu live disc, and eventually I repartitioned my hard drive and installed Ubuntu permanently.
Compared with XP it is a bit of a memory hog, 1 Gb of RAM is good.
Cheers
Greg Locock
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.
I'm using Fedora Core 4 on a very old laptop right now. I had to max out the memory to 256Mb to get it to run FC4 at all, and I had to use an external hard drive to get it to do a full live update. Newer distributions won't fit in the 4.7Gb hard drive.
Knoppix and Damn Small Linux will boot on smaller machines, and can be useful for stuff like getting data off a hard drive that Windows won't boot. It ain't easy, but it can be done.
I like Linux, and hate it.
I have Open Office installed, and it reads and writes Word and Excel files without difficulty. I haven't tried installing AutoCAD yet, and I haven't found a Linux CAD program that's worth a crap, either.
It is a memory hog, and getting more so with each new release. Figure on a minimum of 1Gb ram, a 40Mb hard drive, and a DVD drive to load and run the latest distributions.
It's getting steadily better wrt to ease of installation and automatic detection of hardware. You will probably have to install half a dozen distributions to find one that works with all your hardware, unless you buy it preinstalled.
I have installed or attempted to install more than two dozen distributions on this machine. Linux is Linux, but there are hundreds of distributions, and they are all different from each other. It used to be said of my favorite computer language, "If you've seen one FORTH ... you've seen one FORTH", because there were so many variants and they were so different from each other. Linux has the same problem, on a larger scale.
The core, that you see at the command line, is pretty much the same in all distributions, and well documented. All the 'modern' stuff that makes it easier to use is done differently in every version, and documented badly or not at all.
It's wonderfully stable, in the sense that once you get it running, it doesn't kill itself.
But ... little changes made in pursuit of improvements can have side effects that cause odd behaviors in nominally unrelated areas, and can take a very long time to fix. This is partly because of the mountains of advice available on the Net, much of which is either flat wrong, or applies only to some other distribution or some other version of what is nominally the same distribution.
Like Greg said, get a Knoppix disk and screw around with it a bit, and work from there.
Watch out for later version of Fedora. Fedora Core_6 installs something call Xen. This allows something called paravirtualization, and it disables your serial port and floppy drive.
You can install the non-xen kernal and boot that, and the problem goes away.
I strongly agree with the notes above about memory. X11R6's virtual windows is one of the best tools ever invented for choking up a computer that has inadequate memory.
Linux runs fine on older computers if you stay away from the serious eye-candy window managers like KDE. Gnome is not bad. You will have to hack around to get FVWM2 to work the way you want, but you will be amazed at how fast it starts up when you log in. It is the only window manager I have found so far that will allow you to keep the active window below the others. This is powerful if you are doing a lot of copying and pasting.
I have Qcad on my Linux boxes. It is not adequate for serious design engineering, but it is okay for an occasional home reno.
The other capability that is gently becoming useful is WINE. which allows you to run Windows programs under Linux. It definitely works for Mathcad 4, and a special version of it called crossover office works for Office (I think)
Cheers
Greg Locock
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.
I have had a LinkSys wireless card for this computer for a long time. It ran perfectly with W98. It has a Broadcom chipset, which is a known problem with Linux. I have spent a solid month of time screwing around with all the workarounds for it, and for me they don't work.
So I bought a new Belkin MyEssentials wireless card and a router too, because they were too cheap to pass up at OfficeMax.
I got the router running (as an access point only; I don't have broadband) from WinXP in about an hour. So far I've put in 12 hours beating on the wireless card, and can't get it to work with Linux. I've downloaded the precompiled package and installed and removed it, and downloaded the source and compiled it three times. The various revisions of software available and produced use three different aliases for the driver, but so far the driver has not shown any sign of having established a connection with the hardware.
Some of the software I'm using is 'deprecated', which is computer- speak for "It won't be supported in the future; live with the bugs, or upgrade your hardware." That's partly due to the combinatorial problem presented by the proliferation of distributions; no one can support them all.
It's also partly due to an odd philosophy that originates with Linus. He insists that hardware that works differently should all appear to work the same. E.g. you should be able to install a wireless card in the same way that you install a 10Base2 card, whether their interface to the computer is via ISA, PCI, USB, PCMCIA, or Cardbus. Down on the silicon, they are _way_ different.
The side effect is that complexity is increased, but hidden under layers of indirection, such that if you have the latest and greatest hardware and the latest and greatest (i.e. today's) revision of your distribution, everything will appear clean and neat. Try to use last week's hardware with this week's software, and something is going to be screwed up ... and only God can figure out what that is.
Most of what you actually see on a graphical Linux desktop is written in shell scripts and/or Python. It's structured differently for different distributions, and for different revisions of a distribution, as fashion changes. It's object- oriented too, so you may be making changes to what is really only one of several copies of a particular file, and they're distributed pseudo- randomly over a huge directory tree with many similar but different branches.
Maybe my wireless card was paravirtualized, too. So far I've found four copies of what should be _the_ configuration file for it. The GUI interface changes them all when it closes ... and the card still acts dead. Maybe there are four more copies that actually affect how it works, and they aren't being changed.
So, yeah, buy a Linux computer, but buy a modern one with a lot of memory, from a system integrator who will put it together, install your applications, use your data and exercise it for a while ... and then, don't mess with it.
I'm doing this for a hobby, and to keep my mind functioning 'between jobs'. If I needed it running for work, I'd be tearing my hair out. Okay, if I had work, I'd have money, and I'd just toss it and replace it with something much newer.
An update:
I got the Belkin wireless card up in FC4 using Madwifi, the day before yesterday. It was kind of flaky at first, but got better as I twiddled stuff ... and rebooted, ad infinitum. Now it's fairly solid, and I can swap the wired and wireless pcmcia cards for each other with just a few commands. I.e., the hotplug stuff isn't quite working, though there is a lot of disk activity with insertion of either card.
Along the way, just to verify that it wasn't dead, I installed the card and software into my wife's Dell XP laptop, configured the WEP security stuff, linked to the router, pinged a couple of local computers, then removed the software and the card. It took all of ten minutes.
.. vs. 15 days to get it to work in Linux.
Oh. I find references on the Internet to a four-bar icon on the taskbar that indicates presence of available wireless access points, and brings up a dialog that allows you to select one and connect to it, sort of like Windows does. I can't find a trace of any such thing in my Linux computer. I've got a primitive setup gui that doesn't completely work with the madwifi driver, and doesn't do anything about finding access points.
The driver seems to be okay with the card, except that I haven't found a way to make it run the activity and link lights on the card. I found scripts that can turn them on and make them blink on command, but the driver just doesn't run them.
It's funny that how people hated DOS, one reason being the ever-increasing horde of drivers, particularly when one was multitasking and the word processor printer driver would conflict with the spreadsheet printer driver, which would conflict with the CAD program dongle attached to the printer port, etc. We went to Windows and now, a bunch of people are clamoring for the return of an ancestor of DOS.
The other funny thing was back in the 80's when there were a truckload of workstation companies that ran Unix and its variants; the first program that they would get running was a windowed shell, to insulate the operator from the Unix guts.
Seems like there is no software that is better than all the others, that one merely exchanges one set of problems for another--the main difference in preferences is then what kinds of problems do people seem to tolerate. This especially seems to apply software upgrades (which is why we all in this office shut off 'automatic updates,' and allow the masses to figure out the bugs. That may sound selfish, but one needs to lose one's computer for a full week only once after an automatic update before one learns to turn that silly option off).
Sure, all software are written by PEOPLE, hence, are subject to errors.
A previous company was developing a new microprocessor using standard cell design. No design rule checking was required, since everything was "correct by design." Halfway into the first lot of wafers, they were finally badgered into doing a design check, and a mad dash to crank out a new interconnect layer ensued.
Turned out that the design was correct, but one of the standard cells, laid out by PEOPLE, was upside-down, causing the power rails to be shorted together.
Love it and Hate it...
over all I like it better then windows. The installation is 100%^6 better then MSOS, but it takes time to get one or two kinks out... like my mic didnt work in skype... not a NEEDED thing, but nice to have...
It is worth learning/dabbling if you dont have a wife to always ask "are you done yet" every five minutes... or if your company will pay for it
