Stop Microsoft
Operating Systems => Linux and UNIX => Topic started by: Canadian Lover on 10 May 2003, 08:55
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I live with a cuple of roommates, and they refuse to replace Windows with Linux! here are the reasons
A:
quote:
Windows can't read Linux
Her wife said this and she works at home; her co-workwers are also Windows lusers and use MICROSOFT OFFICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
B:
quote:
Linux is hard to use, and only computer pros unerstand linux
He knows NO PROGRAMNG KNOLAGE! and thinks only experts can understand it.
So I'll need:
-an alternative office suite, that runs on both windows and Linux, and can read the same files;
-proff that that linux is user friendly and everyone can use it.
Thx
[ May 10, 2003: Message edited by: The all Microsoft hater ]
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All I would do is show him this screenshot of Linux, showing off Openoffice.org, Gnome, and Nautilus browsing SMB shares. That oughta convince him.
Check out this screenshot! (http://www.bayou.com/~troll/desktop2.png)
[EDIT]
Linux User, sorry for linking to the picture but the image is kinda big, and can scroll off the screen. I hope you don't mind. ;)
Panos;
[/EDIT];
[ May 13, 2003: Message edited by: Panos ]
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still, if he's going to be his own administrator, it can be tough at times and require much researching and troubleshooting. But please, don't let an OS come between friends.
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What about dual booting?
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most distros take care of that automatically when installing. A note to some, when I installed REDHAT 7.3 some months ago it made my (now nonexistent) MS Me partition "HIDDEN" acording to Partition majic.
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Linux user's screenshot says it all I believe. Tell your friends also that most recent distros like Mandrake 9.1 or SuSE 8.2 can resize NTFS partitions during installation. As for the Office suite they're talking about, I can't think of anything better than OpenOffice.org, which can read and write *.doc files.
One last thing. You don't need to have any programming skills to run Linux! For heaven's sake, all you might have to do from time to time is to compile some apps. It's not like everyone has to compile their own kernel. :eek: Oh and with Synaptic now, you can also forget all of the above. I can't think of anything easier. ;)
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Wheres a good place to find out about Synaptic
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quote:
Linux user's screenshot says it all I believe. Tell your friends also that most recent distros like Mandrake 9.1 or SuSE 8.2 can resize NTFS partitions during installation. As for the Office suite they're talking about, I can't think of anything better than OpenOffice.org, which can read and write *.doc files.
Ah so those CAN be resized! Good to know for my bro, who will eventually be trying out Redhat 9. Ummm can Redhat 9 resize NTFS partitions?
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Thanks, Linux User, That outa show him Linux is better. I think I'll take Lazygrammer and get an external hard drive.
EDIT: whopps I said Windows is better :eek: :eek:
[ May 10, 2003: Message edited by: The all Microsoft hater ]
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Damnit Linux User. Why did you have to cover up your erotic anime. Now I gotta find my own.
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quote:
Originally posted by fett101:
Damnit Linux User. Why did you have to cover up your erotic anime. Now I gotta find my own.
You need to see my background. O_o
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quote:
Originally posted by fett101:
Damnit Linux User. Why did you have to cover up your erotic anime. Now I gotta find my own.
Oh I see, you just assume that because you can't see my background that it's automatically something perverse. I'm outraged!
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I feel for ya! Its difficult to offer advice, if anything goes wrong people hate you; if things go right you never hear from them again.
Well, here goes. What you need is a dual boot strategy. What you need to know is:
Processor: a pentium 233 /w 32 MB of RAM is not going to run RH 8.0 (this is the turning point* release, in my opinion) where it might run Win98.
How much hard drive space do you have? You need 2 GB free to be on the safe side.
You'll need a spare drive (of equal capacity to your windows files), copy of Ghost, a 12 pack of beer, and a bottle of asprin(for the headache your going to have.)
*turning point: don't try to catch sheep on early releases of RedHat, it was for tech geeks only, and you will only scatter them in the field.
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I'm now acepting donactions from people that see my pane. If you can be so kind to donate? any amount is apreacted (I'm talking like the webmaster now!) I just hope Norton has a therty day tral of ghost.
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quote:
Originally posted by suselinux:
Wheres a good place to find out about Synaptic
Void main has written an excellent tutorial on Synaptic which you can find here (http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/redhat/redhat_8_apt-get_must_have.html).
These instructions are RH specific though and from your handle, I would assume that you run SuSE Linux. I really don't know if there's an apt package for SuSE Linux as well.
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quote:
Originally posted by lazygamer:
Ah so those CAN be resized! Good to know for my bro, who will eventually be trying out Redhat 9. Ummm can Redhat 9 resize NTFS partitions?
Hmm, I don't know about RH9 and I can't seem to find anything on their page. I do know however that SuSE 8.2 and Mandrake 9.1 do support NTFS partitioning out of the box.
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For new users, I love SuSe. Besides the time it took to actually read the files from the Cds, I installed 8.0 on a previously all Win98 machine in less than 15 minutes. Easy and painless.
Openoffice is wonderful.
If they run XP under NTFS, you probably want Mandrake, as SUSE 8.2 does not support resizeing NTFS partitions.
Or you could buy a cheap HD. . . .
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quote:
Originally posted by NM:
If they run XP under NTFS, you probably want Mandrake, as SUSE 8.2 does not support resizeing NTFS partitions.
Wrong. 8.2 Professional supports NTFS partitions resizing. ;)
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There might be freeware Wind0ze programs that can handle NTFS partition resizing.
I was wondering though, why the heck does RH9 need 400 mhz to run properly? This is Linux, not Windows. The only possiblity is that Windows cuts corners on hardware requirements by being extra unstable, Linux might do the opposite.
Rising system requirements on Linux wouldn't be out of hand like Windows system requirements. Maybe later versions of distros might get bloated(useless things loaded by default, things you don't need in the kernel, more eyecandyish GUIs), but not in a Windows way(so it would be bloated, but an optimized high quality bloated). So in theory, Redhat 11(around 2004?) would probably need 600mhz at the most to run good, whereas longhorn would need well over 1GHZ to run good. (http://smile.gif)
[ May 11, 2003: Message edited by: lazygamer ]
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Just download partition magic 8.0 off kazaa. It should be a 30mb download. Get version 8.0 and not 7.0.
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Firstly, I deleted X11's, erm I meant Win's, post and will continue to do so, at least in the Unix/Linux sections, as long as he keeps posting such rubbish. ;)
Secondly, I'll also be editing posts that encourage the use of pirated software, and yes that goes for TheKnifeThrower and his last post about kazaa and Partition Magic. We've been through this before. The newest Linux distros can resize NTFS partitions. ;)
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There are partititioning tools other than fdisk/diskdrake/disk druid? :eek: :D
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quote:
Originally posted by Faust:
There are partititioning tools other than fdisk/diskdrake/disk druid?
Yeah, there's parted :D
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??? Havent seen that one must have a look/STFW
Obviously this "partition magic" thing is a lie though - why make something that nobody needs? :D
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yes, parted is very good. it is intuitive and interactive. it reminds me of a similar tool which is on my CD for partition magic 4 but which does not appear to come with later versions of partition magic (although a similar tool for DOS does) called PQMAGICT.EXE - pqmagict is not as good as parted and i have had ocassions when it hasn't read the partition table properly and has wiped out the whole drive. parted is more recommended. of course distros that already use diskdrake and so on in the installer will not insert parted in there as it is a scary non-GUI text based interface (oh no! don't i need to have 5 years of programming skills to use it et c).
quote:
lazygamer:
I was wondering though, why the heck does RH9 need 400 mhz to run properly? This is Linux, not Windows. The only possiblity is that Windows cuts corners on hardware requirements by being extra unstable, Linux might do the opposite.
i don't understand what you mean here, but you'll notice that mandrake requires a pentium to run properly even though linux is an OS for the 386. The reason is, some of the programs are optimised for later processors now that most people have them, and with that CPU speed thing, red hat obviously included software that requires a certain amount of processing power to function without it appearing to have crashed (my guess is it's all the GUI tools they include). A similar analogy is that manydistros (including red hat) will not install on a partition smaller than 2.5 GB. Peanut linux installs on 600MB and slack does take up 2MB but can install on a lot less if required. A year or two ago i remember reading that 2GB would be more than enough for linux and all the programs i would ever need. And i suspect these requirements have been creeping up for a while. I think the 386 linux was originally developed on had a 30MB hard drive for instance.
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Rising system requirements on Linux wouldn't be out of hand like Windows system requirements. Maybe later versions of distros might get bloated(useless things loaded by default, things you don't need in the kernel, more eyecandyish GUIs),
this is an accurate analysis, in fact this is the case today. Install red hat and reconfigure your kernel and see how many things are included that you don't need. True many of them are included as modules, but things like infrared and PCMCIA support are only needed if you have those hardware interfaces attached to your computer. quote:
but not in a Windows way(so it would be bloated, but an optimized high quality bloated).
so it wouldn't be bloated, it would just be... bigger. in theory this means that you could still get by with the original requirements if you simply didn't install whatever the newer additions were. Luckily there will always be many projects on the go which aim to cram linux into a tiny space. i heard only yesterday about a distro called linux in a pillbox. it comes as seven floppies. each one is a linux bootable floppy, tailored for different tasks, like there's a hard drive recovery one, a networking one et c. I even saw a 2 floppy distro of linux that claimed to include XWindows! quote:
So in theory, Redhat 11(around 2004?) would probably need 600mhz at the most to run good, whereas longhorn would need well over 1GHZ to run good.
will longhorn run "good"? i doubt it, although those who pay money for it will say it does in order to justify their "investment". And those estimates are probably about right in my opinion.
[ May 14, 2003: Message edited by: Calum: hopelessly outnumbered ]
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quote:
will longhorn run "good"?
I'm sure we're all aware of Windows' poor multithreading performance. (http://smile.gif) Why would they want to make it better when they get their money anyway? ;)
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OpenOffice all the way. (http://www.openoffice.org). They may need to learn the interface for formatting text, but it's not that difficult to understand.
Sit them down at a GUI and show them all the games other than the classic four that linux has, and how easy it is to access all the programs from the K or GNOME menus.
I'd start them off w/ RH 8 or 9 b/c it double clicks and everything just like windows, if they're that hard core about using windows.
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They could have Solitare as a default install option. That would boost it's popularity with windows users easily.
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lycoris desktop should be a whiz then. it looks just like XP, and not only is solitaire included, but it is actually a part of the install process! i had time to play 3 and a half games of solitaire when i installed lycoris desktop! i won the third oen too!
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whats wrong with anarchy?
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Only the fact that people are far too vicious, petty, and greedy to govern themselves.
Same reason Communism doesn't work.
Then again, Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Let's just blow up the earth. Then people would finally be content. (http://smile.gif)