[blip]

Thanks for the heads up... Downloading the ISO now.

I've been thinking about Linux for a while... I've gotten tired of XP's bloat and instability. I'm planning on doing a dual-boot of XP (games, photoshop) and Linux (office, internet, e-mail). Probably won't get around to actually setting it for a few weeks though.

While I'm thinking about it, is there still a problem in writing to NTFS? I was planning on just using a spare parition to boot linux and using all of the other partitions with each OS. Do I have to do anything special in terms of configuration for this sort of a setup?

I suppose if the NTFS problem is still around I could use a pen drive formatted in FAT32 to transfer files between the two... Could get a bit irritating though. Gahh... I knew that I should have kept one of my drives in FAT.

 

[rsabo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by blip While I'm thinking about it, is there still a problem in writing to NTFS? I was planning on just using a spare parition to boot linux and using all of the other partitions with each OS. Do I have to do anything special in terms of configuration for this sort of a setup?

I've used Captive NTFS several times and it's worked very well.

 

[Welly Wu]

Red Hat Fedora CORE, in my opinion, has come a very long way to get to where it stands today. The first four Fedora COREs were highly experimental and it seemed as if both Red Hat and the Fedora CORE community were deciding upon which direction to take the OS. Now, it seems as if they do know where they want to go and RHFC5 SELinux shows. It lacks none of the features that other Linux distributions have and it has all of the features and software packages that they do not currently have too. If I was not so committed to CentOS, then I would definitely install RHFC5 SELinux as my second out of three OSes on my laptop now. The inclusion of Pup and Pirut alone are major advances that ease the installation and removal of software applications in RH SELinux. The additional refined SELinux makes the OS more impervious against hackers and I for one hope that these major upgrades will get into the next major upgrade of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. It would make my job easier as a sysadmin. The one thing that I love about Linux and FreeBSD is that I can have the same functionality with the same degree of powerful options at no cost to me. I am free to do with the software what I please. The stability, security, and reliability of both these OSes are far superior to Windows and understanding how they work is more logical and efficient. Also, both OSes work well with both older and newer hardware at no cost to performance and speed. I am not saying that they are perfect, far from it given that they are complex to learn and manage, but they do it for me. I am taking great pains to learn FreeBSD and I want to make it my default OS. Someday that will happen soon. In the meantime, try RHFC5 SELinux. It is a great way to (re)introduce yourself to a major Linux distribution and it is free and easy to use.

 

[dreamnid]

Just wanted to mention that you can try many Linux distro from the comfort of your own Windows desktop via VMware's Virtual Player (completely free).

The Virtual Player will load up a "virtual appliance" which is basically a virtual OS living on your current OS. It is similar to a Live CD where you don't have to install the OS except that its virtual hard drive lives on a file on your Windows system so you can install program/updates and save files with no problem. There are many virtual appliances out (including Ubuntu Breezy and FC5). Browse the list here: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/community.html

The cool part is that it can interface with all your hardware (including sound, networking, etc). Plus, it is very easy to try out new OSes since you don't have to bother with installing or setting it up (or worry about messing up partitions/dual booting with Windows.).

Download and read more information here: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/.

If you have any problems, post away :cP

 

[gsteinb88]

I might add that if you want to beat the learning curve, install gentoo. I reccomend using a computer you dont really care about, because you are going to mess it up the first couple times. You have to compile your own kernel, choose all of your packages etc. etc. etc.
Basically, if you have a handle on the basic *nix command line, i would install gentoo, and start hating yourself. Knowing what i am doing, it takes me 2-3 days to get a working installation. But its damned well worth it, if only for the package manager portage. I type emerge kde, it will download, and compile kde customized and optimized for my system. No binaries here, only pure compilations. Installation times do go up, but so does performance. Well worth it
Anyway, if you take my advice, enjoy banging your head against the wall for the next week

-g

 

[Welly Wu]

The only constant in this world is change. I am installing Red Hat Fedora CORE 5 Security Enhanced Linux. I enjoyed using CentOS 4.3 Stable, but at my very heart, I am a power desktop user...who likes change...a lot.

I just do not need to install an enterprise grade OS; I need cutting edge software to be of maximum compatibility with the other software programs on my two other OSes on my laptop.

Reading all of the new RHFC5 SELinux reviews also swayed me. Red Hat did a bang up job with 5. This represents, in my opinion, a much more complete Red Hat Fedora CORE that does not miss anything that the other major Linux distributions have in terms of feature count and yet it maintains cutting edge packages. Besides, what fun is computing without any change whatsoever?

So, I am back with Red Hat Fedora CORE. I suggest others try it out too. I will report back with general impressions and more information once I am setup and configured to go.

 

[ssblood]

slackware...

 

[Arainach]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Welly Wu The only constant in this world is change. I am installing Red Hat Fedora CORE 5 Security Enhanced Linux. I enjoyed using CentOS 4.3 Stable, but at my very heart, I am a power desktop user...who likes change...a lot. I just do not need to install an enterprise grade OS; I need cutting edge software to be of maximum compatibility with the other software programs on my two other OSes on my laptop. Reading all of the new RHFC5 SELinux reviews also swayed me. Red Hat did a bang up job with 5. This represents, in my opinion, a much more complete Red Hat Fedora CORE that does not miss anything that the other major Linux distributions have in terms of feature count and yet it maintains cutting edge packages. Besides, what fun is computing without any change whatsoever? So, I am back with Red Hat Fedora CORE. I suggest others try it out too. I will report back with general impressions and more information once I am setup and configured to go.

FC a "Power User" distro? Hardly. It's got enough automated to make it a pleasant desktop distro to compete with Windows. You want a Power User distrol, you go Gentoo or Slackware. Especially Gentoo - Gentoo is the art of customizing and fixing stuff yourself, as all power users love to do.

 

[wallstreet]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arainach FC a "Power User" distro? Hardly. It's got enough automated to make it a pleasant desktop distro to compete with Windows. You want a Power User distrol, you go Gentoo or Slackware. Especially Gentoo - Gentoo is the art of customizing and fixing stuff yourself, as all power users love to do.

Honestly any linux distro is for "power users". You don't have to use any of those automated processes ... you could do everything using the command line. I have used around 7 different distros over several years, and imo Ubuntu/Kbunutu is the easiest to install and maintain since it uses apt.

 

[averydonovan]

I wouldn't mind dual-booting to Linux or BSD on my iBook if my hardware was properly supported. FreeBSD would be my ideal OS, it's fast as hell and very stable, but it's not supported on PowerPC at all currently. NetBSD is supported but it's hardware support is a bit too limited, and stuff like my Airport Express card wouldn't work.

I tried a Ubuntu live CD about 9 months ago and it didn't like my Airport Express card either. Also, I'd have to see about power management. I'm downloading a current Ubuntu ISO right now to see if things have changed much. Not sure if I will really do the dual-boot thing, though, since setting up PowerPC Macs to do so appears to be a royal pain in the ass. Not to mention I don't want to wipe my OS X installation right now, although that is coming due this summer as part of routine OS maintenance. One option for me, albeit not a portable one, is to install and run a Linux or BSD install off of a firewire drive and that is probably the easiest if I can convince my system to boot a non-Apple OS without too much fiddling with Open Firmware.

I really would like to run Linux or BSD since I'd like to run stuff like the GIMP in its native environment and have a snappier environment. For some reason, OS X just tends to feel sluggish all the time which is apparently on purpose. Running a Linux live CD, while making OS X look like it boots swiftly, is incredibly snappy and shows that the hardware is not the limiting factor. That was when I had 512MB of memory that I did that, and within weeks of getting my iBook I bumped it up to 1.25GB which helped Mac OS immensely. I imagine Linux and X.org will appreciate the extra memory, too.

On the subject of Fedora, I had played with it back when they just released Fedora Core 2 and it was pretty impressive then. A huge step from the prior RedHat releases. That was on my desktop PC which by has relatively generic hardware. I have never tried it on a Mac and wish they had a live CD so I could test its hardware support.

 

[Welly Wu]

Yeah, I would love to make FreeBSD 6.0 my default OS, but I don't know enough to make it so. So, I am using RHFC5 SELinux. I installed all of the packages and did an update. So far, it is very smooth. It is faster and there are a lot of new packages or applications to learn. I like Pup and Pirut so far. Now, I can have full file interoperability between my OpenOffice files in all three OSes that I have installed; with CentOS 4.3 Stable, it installed OpenOffice 1.1.2. That's too old. I think I made the right decision to stay with Fedora CORE. I am looking forward to learning FreeBSD next month when I buy that new book on 6.0. I might just get the RHEL4 and Fedora CORE 5 combined book as well.

 

[wallstreet]

Quote:

Originally Posted by donovansmith I wouldn't mind dual-booting to Linux or BSD on my iBook if my hardware was properly supported. FreeBSD would be my ideal OS, it's fast as hell and very stable, but it's not supported on PowerPC at all currently. NetBSD is supported but it's hardware support is a bit too limited, and stuff like my Airport Express card wouldn't work. I tried a Ubuntu live CD about 9 months ago and it didn't like my Airport Express card either. Also, I'd have to see about power management. I'm downloading a current Ubuntu ISO right now to see if things have changed much. Not sure if I will really do the dual-boot thing, though, since setting up PowerPC Macs to do so appears to be a royal pain in the ass. Not to mention I don't want to wipe my OS X installation right now, although that is coming due this summer as part of routine OS maintenance. One option for me, albeit not a portable one, is to install and run a Linux or BSD install off of a firewire drive and that is probably the easiest if I can convince my system to boot a non-Apple OS without too much fiddling with Open Firmware. I really would like to run Linux or BSD since I'd like to run stuff like the GIMP in its native environment and have a snappier environment. For some reason, OS X just tends to feel sluggish all the time which is apparently on purpose. Running a Linux live CD, while making OS X look like it boots swiftly, is incredibly snappy and shows that the hardware is not the limiting factor. That was when I had 512MB of memory that I did that, and within weeks of getting my iBook I bumped it up to 1.25GB which helped Mac OS immensely. I imagine Linux and X.org will appreciate the extra memory, too. On the subject of Fedora, I had played with it back when they just released Fedora Core 2 and it was pretty impressive then. A huge step from the prior RedHat releases. That was on my desktop PC which by has relatively generic hardware. I have never tried it on a Mac and wish they had a live CD so I could test its hardware support.

Yeah, hardware support is hit-or-miss w/ some things in linux ... especially wifi cards. It's not the distro's or the kernels fault, its hardware companies making closed proprietary drives for their products (god forbid someone uses something besides windows). With exotic hardware you should always make sure that it has been prooven to work in linux ... support the companies that support linux

.

 

[Welly Wu]

Some more notes about RHFC5SELinux:

It is slow. It is fairly bloated. It is also the closest to Microsoft Windows in terms of features count and look 'n feel. I have to say that CentOS 4.3 Stable was at least 33% faster than RHFC5SELinux including full installations for both. However, RFHC5SELinux takes up a significantly smaller footprint on my /ext3 Linux partition. I only had ~775MB of free disk space using a full installation of CentOS 4.3 Stable. I now have ~1.8GB of free disc space using RHFC5SELinux, yet it is about 1/3 slower. Why? And the packages are up to date cutting edge. Why is it so slow?

Speed + Stability + Security + Reliability ratings:
1. FreeBSD 6.0 Stable
2. CentOS 4.3 Stable SELinux
3. Red Hat Fedora CORE 5 SELinux
4. Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP-2

For me, Red Hat is a power user's Linux distribution. I know there is much Red Hat hate like HeadRoom Corporation hate, but being a leader means taking it on the chin for no good reasons too. Thanks.

Go download RHFC5 SELinux if you want to try out Linux. This is the best Red Hat Fedora CORE available and it has evolved to a very polished degree in 5. It's easy to do.

I can not wait until next month when both the FreeBSD 6.0 and RHEL 4 / RHFC5 SELinux books will be available at BN. I love books and learn best from them. I know the grim statistics that the majority of Americans are not reading books anymore, but I go against the grain.

 

[Snake]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Welly Wu Some more notes about RHFC5SELinux: It is slow. It is fairly bloated.

That's no surprise considering my experience with 7 / FC2 / FC4. I was surprised by the claims here that FC5 would be "fast" as was waiting for more feedback.

Linux, regretfully, will always be a second-fiddle player for the desktop as Smeggy notes. Strong workflow commercial-style apps simple don't exist or are very weak. "Power users fixing things" is nice when you want to ****** around with a computer but not when you want/have to get work...DONE. FC2 started to show the bloat and I wasn't that impressed - it really isn't much faster than XP Pro, and XP Pro has 20 times the hardware and probably 50 times the software support, so why bother??

I miss the good old days of 5.x. Now there was a small, scrappy little OS that was a rapid little bugger. RH7.x started the bloatware trend for RH that kinda shows. It's also amazing that Linux is considered "secure" considering the OS has TCP inherent in it's design - if you don't configure properly you've got a hole as big as the Chunnel in your system (OK, admittedly, they are getting better with keeping non-essential components out of the install during the setup, helping to reduce this issue). Ask how many SoHo / private Linux OS users, set up as servers, have had their systems hacked...

I'm afraid we're all doomed. MS is getting to be decidedly decent while the alternatives are getting watered down...we're doomed to middle-road mediocrity!