(I Hate Microsoft), Linux Help!

[Microsoftsuc]

Hey everyone,
    I hate microsoft just as much as everyone else.  I need to keep it on my machine unfortunately for business purposes.  But I have and would like to run linux as much as I can.  I have run Redhat 7.1 and Mandrake 8.2 with NE6 and StarOffice.  I have liked it all.  I need help finding a distribution that is friendly like Mandrake and has the ability to: Have Serious Multimedia Applications (sound and video) Already Built In,  Games (You Need Fun) and that is about it.  You can email me at [email protected].  Thank You.

[iancom]

Welcome!

I know what you mean... my PC's at home are almost completely Microsoft-free except that I do have to keep a couple of them with partitions for Windows for my work (and that's pretty much all I use them for   )

In terms of games, I'm probably not the best person to comment on that, although it seems that Mandrake would be your best bet there - it has better support for native hardware OpenGL acceleration (RedHat probably can do this but I couldn't find it in the install process whereas it's definitely there in Mandrake 8.2).

For my purposes, though, I find RedHat does everything I need, and as long as you steer clear of the x.0 releases is very stable indeed. I've been using 7.3 for a few weeks now (from the 'Skipjack' beta) and it's been great - KDE 3 is a huge improvement.

I don't think you'll find any distributions (please, anyone correct me if I'm wrong!) that have the sort of out-of-the box multimedia support that you get from Windows. However, with just a little effort you can get a system that does everything you need.

I use "aviplay" for Windows-compatibility for video files. It does pretty much everything including all the DivX formats. You can also get completely multi-region DVD players. All these are fairly easy to install.

In terms of music, XMMS is just superb for MP3 playback and playlisting. I don't want to get into the whole Winamp/XMMS thing - they both have their own strengths and both do their jobs extremely well.

With a little coaxing, you can even get Musicmatch Jukebox to run on Linux, though in my experience it's a little flaky (the Linux version MusicMatch provide is not a native Linux app, but runs under WINE I think).

In terms of Office Applications, Sun have started charging for StarOffice (I don't begrudge them this of course, it's still better and cheaper than MS Office), so I now use OpenOffice - they've just released their 1.0.0 version and it's great in my opinion. Reads and writes MS-compatible files very well and includes more features (a proper vector drawing program for a start) than Office. If you need an integrated database suite you'll probably want to buy StarOffice 6 which includes the Adabas database (far better than MS Access, but not quite FoxPro as far as I can tell).

As a bonus you also get to use The Gimp - a full-featured photo editor almost (but not quite - yet) rivalling PhotoShop.

Scanners can be tricky to set up in Linux - particularly USB ones (mostly because the manufacturers blatantly ignore the fact that people want support for Linux/BSD) but "Sane" is coming along nicely and you might find your scanner (if you have one) is supported just fine.

Anyway, good luck...!

[Master of Reality]

i would suggest Red Hat 7.3.
But i am having installation problems with 7.3

[creedon]

Give LibraNet 2.0 a shot; it's based on Debian "Woody" (testing release).  It's MUCH easier to install than plain-vanilla Debian, but it has apt-get for packages, and it comes with a shitload of apps and window managers.  This is the second release of LibraNet I've used, and they just get better and better.

[iancom]

...I have to admit that I haven't heard of that, and I haven't ever seriously tried a recent Debian release.

How does it do with multimedia out-of-the-box? One of my main gripes with most Linux distributions is their lack of a comprehensive media player. You have to dig around to find software to install before you can just double-click on a DivX movie, or insert a DVD to play it.

Is there a distro where immeditatley after installation you could double-click on a DivX avi file and have it play sucessfully?

[creedon]

quote:Originally posted by IanC:
...I have to admit that I haven't heard of that, and I haven't ever seriously tried a recent Debian release.

How does it do with multimedia out-of-the-box? One of my main gripes with most Linux distributions is their lack of a comprehensive media player. You have to dig around to find software to install before you can just double-click on a DivX movie, or insert a DVD to play it.

Is there a distro where immeditatley after installation you could double-click on a DivX avi file and have it play sucessfully?

I think you're gonna have a hard time doing that with any distro; Linux is hardware-specific, not really plug-n-play if you get my drift.  Once you setup your hardware, it won't give you a blue screen when it's got the rag on, though.

[iancom]

quote: I think you're gonna have a hard time doing that with any distro; Linux is hardware-specific, not really plug-n-play if you get my drift. Once you setup your hardware, it won't give you a blue screen when it's got the rag on, though.

...but this really is nothing to do with hardware though, is it?

After my RedHat installation, *all* of my hardware, including soundcard, DVD, network, video etc works fine.

It only takes a few minutes (once you know what you need to download and how to install it) to get the open-source software to play all the various video/audio/DVD formats that are natively supported by, say, Windows XP. I don't understand why something like NOATUN (KDE's media player) can't be distributed with support for these out-of-the-box... There may be issues with AVI and DivX being proprietary formats, I don't know; the fact remains it's easy to get Windows to play these formats and not easy to get Linux to do it... and it's things like that which will stop your average computer user from warming to operating systems other than Windows.

[ May 10, 2002: Message edited by: IanC ]

[Microsoftsuc]

Looking for a good multimedia package is my main goal.  I would also like to find a Linux distribution that runs very specific Windowsuck apps....

So far I haven't tried anything for this.  The only problem is to do this we are looking at the factor of emulation and that causes everything to run much slower(emulating windowsuck inside linux with like virtual pc).

Anyone had any luck with Wine or WinLinux?

Also, Who here hates AOL, I know I sure do.  I personally like trillian messenger instead.

[iancom]

I've been quite successful in getting "solitaire" to work under WINE.

However I've yet to find any other Windows-only applications worth the bother to get working in WINE, so no, unfortunately I can't help you there.

It would be most useful if I could just install Windows apps in Linux, but in most cases there's a free alternative that does the job just as well if you're willing to look for it...

I would rather there were native Linux apps available for these sort of things, since it's only a matter of time before M$ change their API's specifically to be incompatible with WINE to defend their monopoly... (remember what they did with Win 3.1 and DR-DOS?).

[hoojchoons]

For a comparison among the different Linux distros you could go here. I can't seem to recall another distro which combines ease of use, a good multimedia package, games etc, except for Mandrake, which is a real easy distro for newbies.

[iancom]

I would definitely agree with Mandrake for the inexperienced... especially those concerned with games (though you have to know to select XFree86 3 instead of 4 to support your OpenGL graphics card...).

I don't know why I don't really get on with Mandrake myself, but it's probably something to do with several months of continually reinstalling and playing with RedHat 7.2 to get my RHCE... Heaven only knows what would have happened if I'd decided a MCSE was a good idea (uuurgh).

I don't think I'm a RedHat bigot as such - I've had a good go at the recent Manrake releases (although before that was probably a very early Slackware [kernel 1.?] install) but I find RedHat does everything I need quite nicely... not sure about RPM's though - all my important services are compiled from source, as I think they should be for any distribution.

[fruitbat]

I run Mandrake 8.2 on my box and it found all the hardware and set it up.
You can get NVidia drivers for XFree 4 at www.nvidia.com. There are README files covering the installation and X configuration.

Mandrake Gamers edition is also out which is more play oriented.

[voidmain]

If you have to run Windows apps, VMware is by far the best way to do it. It is however, the most expensive way to do it. I've been running it for a couple of years now. You can download it and run it for 30 days on a free trial (of course there are ways around this but I bought version 2 and now version 3 because it's a great product). It also requires a real version of Windows (which you likely already "own").  VMware is not a software emulator, but a hardware emulator so you actually install Windows in a virtual machine under Linux. Windows thinks it is running on the computer all by itself. It's extremely easy to install and use, and it works extremely well.  You'll need a lot of RAM and a fast machine though. I'm running an Athalon 1600 w/512MB on my desktop and it works flawlessly.  I'm running an Intel 800 w/512MB on my Laptop where it also works very well. I would say minimum of 256MB of RAM to make it run nicely.

http://www.vmware.com/

[ May 11, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[Calum]

re: multimedia, and games. My madrake 8.2 has much more support for audio visual stuff and has ten times as many games as my WinME does when installed for the first time.

Re: hardware support, when i installed windowsME, i got 16 colours, no sound except for beeps, a 480 pixel screen and so on, none of that happened with mandrake linux, full 1024 screen, 24 bit colour (could have been 32bit but why would i want it?) and sound card fully installed automatically (except i didn't turn the volume up!  :rolleyes:  ). These all required me to go and look out drivers when installing windows.

If that's "superior plug and play" then you can keep it, it's mediaeval compared with linux, sorry, but that's the way it is.

[Microsoftsuc]

I feel bad that you have WindowsuckMe.  The reason M$ released that OSuck was because they didn't remember how to write the OSuck Windowsuck 2k Home And Business which was never released.

I have VMware and Virtual PC.  I haven't really tried them yet because I don't really know how to use them.  Do you suggest that I install linux then install windows from linux?  Or install windows and linux, load my windows apps and then from linux configure the virtual pc or vmware to run windows?

It looks like I will be installing Mandrake 8.2 or Redhat 6.0.  In Redhat 6.0 I absolutely loved the Desktop Afterstep which you can obviously download for the newer version, but I could never get it to install....Can anyone help me with that So I can install Redhat 7.x and still have Afterstep?

Thanks Everybody, (this is a greeat forum, lets make sure it stays up for a while)