Linux QuestionsDVD

[Akira 0]

I've been thinking of switching to Linux for some time now. I don't do any code development or anything like that. Moderate graphic work (only FS related). There is so much information out there that it is an overload, so I know a few users here use Linux so I ask for your input.

This is my system in question:

HP Pavillion zv5120us

2.8 Celeron

1.2GB DDR 333

40GB HDD (with 250GB USB 2.0 Slave)

15.4 Widescreen

ATI 9000IGP (128MB shared)

Usual 802.11g wireless, and LAN capabilities.

DVD/CDRW (no floppy)

Three USB ports

Soundblaster compatible.

My main concerns about Linux are:

1) Configuration and Update difficulty. I have messed around with Linux before, and have even had to try to recompile the kernel (for nVidia drivers awhile back...unsuccessfully I might add). I've screwed around with Red Hat 6 and 7, Suse 8 pro and Mandrake 8 or 9 (forgot which).

2) Is installation of programs and configuration of settings very difficult (ie RPMs and things like that)?

3) Is it worth it to buy one of the "pro" OS bundles with all the programs, or is the free versions just as good?

4)DVD playback. This is a major turn off for me right now. I have read it is possible but how difficult is it? Have they come out with a player yet?

5)Windows games. My second big problem. My Neverwinter Nights, America's Army, and a few other games I can have in native Linux. My Microsoft FS 2004 and others I would need Wine. How difficult is Wine to use? Admitedly though this might be less of a problem if I build myself another desktop for Windows games, and keep the laptop for productivity and school.

6)What version of Linux do you recommend?

So I'm hoping ya'll can help me try and centralize my information instead of having to go through 20+ websites.

EDIT: I'm not sure how the "DVD" got into my title. If a mod would be so kind as to remove the DVD at the end of the title I would appreciate it...don't wanna give the impression its about DVDs under Linux.

EDIT2: Added question 6.

[der bastler 0]

first thought: Try Gentoo. Good manual, good community/forums. Never had problems with Nvidia.

I've been thinking of switching to Linux for some time now. I don't do any code development or anything like that. Moderate graphic work (only FS related). There is so much information out there that it is an overload, so I know a few users here use Linux so I ask for your input.

This is my system in question:

HP Pavillion zv5120us

2.8 Celeron

1.2GB DDR 333

40GB HDD (with 250GB USB 2.0 Slave)

15.4 Widescreen

Good until now, but...

Quote[/b] ]ATI 9000IGP (128MB shared)

ATI cards work, but don't expect good perfomance. ATI can't develop correct working drivers (well, this is not new on Win either). Nvidia's cards are working fine though (UT2k4, ET)

Quote[/b] ]Usual 802.11g wireless, and LAN capabilities.

Might work natively, but there's also a NDIS wrapper program making the use of Win drivers possible. My WLAN PCMCIA adapter is working with the wrapper because Netgear changed something in their firmware between v2 and v3...

Quote[/b] ]DVD/CDRW (no floppy)

Three USB ports

Soundblaster compatible.

Support for burners is good. With a Soundblaster compatible card there should be no problems with ALSA or OSS.

Quote[/b] ]My main concerns about Linux are:

1) Configuration and Update difficulty. I have messed around with Linux before, and have even had to try to recompile the kernel (for nVidia drivers awhile back...unsuccessfully I might add). I've screwed around with Red Hat 6 and 7, Suse 8 pro and Mandrake 8 or 9 (forgot which).

Well, Gentoo does this well. You begin with a very basic system and with a good manual. So when you finished your installation compiling a kernel should not be a problem anymore. I started with Gentoo only with few Linux knowledge (one army course) and it helped me a lot to understand an OS in general, even regarding Windows.

Quote[/b] ]2) Is installation of programs and configuration of settings very difficult (ie RPMs and things like that)?

Example Gentoo:

You have a huge database with lots of programs... Office, Multimedia, Games. And you have a management program that does all steps of installing them for you. Drawback: Gentoo is a source based distribution. You can get the newest versions of programs but your system needs to compile them by itself. Most packages will build in a few minutes, bigger programs like Openoffice are also available as binary package to avoid long compile time. Let's say you want to get the newest Firefox:

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">emerge sync

This let's you sync with the latest Gentoo package database version.

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">emerge mozilla-firefox

This starts the process of downloading, configuring, compiling and installing Firefox to your system. Afterwards the program is ready to run.

Quote[/b] ]3) Is it worth it to buy one of the "pro" OS bundles with all the programs, or is the free versions just as good?

For you have already some experience I'd say give one of the free ones a try. Knoppix is also a good start.

Quote[/b] ]4)DVD playback. This is a major turn off for me right now. I have read it is possible but how difficult is it? Have they come out with a player yet?

There are many players...

MPlayer, Ogle, Xine, Videolan Client, ...

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html

http://xinehq.de/

http://www.videolan.org/

Actually I'm even authoring some DVDs these days (TV recording of German free-tv premiere of Band of Brothers, conversion of shorts from http://www.bmwfilms.com ...).

Quote[/b] ]5)Windows games. My second big problem. My Neverwinter Nights, America's Army, and a few other games I can have in native Linux. My Microsoft FS 2004 and others I would need Wine. How difficult is Wine to use? Admitedly though this might be less of a problem if I build myself another desktop for Windows games, and keep the laptop for productivity and school.

You'll need WineX... eh... Cedega to play DirectX games (it's not open source because of some copy protection algorithms). But if you still have a Windows OS somewhere, do a dual boot installation for non-native Linux games.

Edit: Hmm, there's no "version" of a Linux system. If you regard the kernel version I'd say a recommendable "version" of Linux would be something of the 2.6.x kernel series...

Look at the screenshot in my signature: Gentoo Linux, kernel 2.6, XFce4

[Akira 0]

Quote[/b] ]ATI cards work, but don't expect good perfomance. ATI can't develop correct working drivers (well, this is not new on Win either). Nvidia's cards are working fine though (UT2k4, ET)

What kind of performance? Stuttering in OFP or games like that? Video playback problems?

Quote[/b] ]Code Sample

emerge sync

This let's you sync with the latest Gentoo package database version.

Code Sample

emerge mozilla-firefox

This starts the process of downloading, configuring, compiling and installing Firefox to your system. Afterwards the program is ready to run.

Actually you touched on another concern I have...the console commands...or even just using the console. Admitedly, I'm far from knowledgable in this area. I assume the manual has a good index of commands I will need with explanations and usage? Being a Windows dork, the usage of a console is somewhat daunting.

EDIT: By "version" I actually meant what distro do you recommend.

[der bastler 0]

What kind of performance? Stuttering in OFP or games like that? Video playback problems?

Yes, ATI used to have bad or no 3D acceleration. There are ATI drivers to use a desktop system but they are unstable. For the users it's a pita, ATI screwed it up. On the other hand, Nvidia's drivers work flawlessly.

Quote[/b] ]Actually you touched on another concern I have...the console commands...or even just using the console. Admitedly, I'm far from knowledgable in this area. I assume the manual has a good index of commands I will need with explanations and usage? Being a Windows dork, the usage of a console is somewhat daunting.

The manuals explain most steps very well.

You can just type in "help" on the command line to get a list. Or do a "help command". Other ways of help: "man command" (access manual pages) or "command --help" (quick help).

Perhaps it's because I'm an old MS-DOS veteran, but I like the command line. You just type in the first letters of a command and hit TAB and zap... the shell does the rest and completes the name. Same for file names or directories. If you are used to it you are incredible fast in moving/copying/renaming files, playing medias, etc...

Recently I had to replace spaces many file names with an underscore.

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">renamexm -s/" "/"_"/g -R *

That did it, for all files in current directory and below...

What distribution? Knoppix to try out, <s>Gentoo</s> or Ubuntu for a serious installation.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

<s>http://www.gentoo.org/</s>

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

edit: After thinking about it and considering your CLI comment I removed Gentoo from the list

[der bastler 0]

Another example of command line usage:

I need HDD space for Band of Brothers, Part 3, tonight. I remember there were some wav recordings of old tapes wasting space in my /home/audio directory. Hmm, I don't want to delete them, so they have to be reduced. MP3, OGG? Lossy. Hey, I also have FLAC support on my system. But how to use it? No idea. So I went to that directory and guess-called <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">flac -h Flac spit out 4 pages of information, and at the beginning there were interesting lines

Quote[/b] ]Usage:

Encoding: flac [<general-options>] [<encoding/format-options>] [iNPUTFILE [...]]

Decoding: flac -d [<general-options>] [<format-options>] [FLACFILE [...]]

Testing: flac -t [<general-options>] [FLACFILE [...]]

Analyzing: flac -a [<general-options>] [<analysis-options>] [FLACFILE [...]]

So I called <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">flac *.wav and some minutes later all wavs were encoded in FLAC format. Another command <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">rm *.wav and I got rid of the redundant wavs.

P.S.: I can't live without four virtual desktops anymore. Right now I've one LaTeX editor opened to get my project doc done (slow but steady), another desktop is showing Firefox with this page and in a third I've running an encoding process for the BMW films ("Powder Keg" atm).

At work I'm needing three virtual desktops (one showing telnet/ssh for access to our robot, one for the source code and one for MATLAB).

Man, I need an additional monitor. The other thread was very helpful, encouraging me to try the Samsung. I'm wondering which 6600GT I've to pick. The ASUS looks promising, too.

[Akira 0]

I'm thinking of doing dual boot, but I've had problems with that before, and Windows has to be on the first disk...something I dislike, which means Linux would have to be run on my slave drive through a USB connection.

I'm thinking of dual boot because the ATI problem is troubling if my games that will run under Linux are going to look and run like crap.

[Tovarish 0]

I'm thinking of doing dual boot, but I've had problems with that before, and Windows has to be on the first disk...something I dislike, which means Linux would have to be run on my slave drive through a USB connection.

Another option could be to partition your first HD.

[Akira 0]

I'm thinking of doing dual boot, but I've had problems with that before, and Windows has to be on the first disk...something I dislike, which means Linux would have to be run on my slave drive through a USB connection.

Another option could be to partition your first HD.

I thought about that too, but with only 40GB available on that HDD it could get messy, with programs for both OS's on the main drive and the slave drive.

I could try putting a small install of the Windows system on to the main HDD I suppose, with just what I need to run the games that won't run in Linux. But my folder for MS Flight Simulator 2004 stands at 12+GB.

[BlackScorpion 0]

Sorry, going a bit offtopic now...

Actually I'm even authoring some DVDs these days (TV recording of German free-tv premiere of Band of Brothers

So, if I understood right, so BoB is showing on German TV...

Is it dubbed?

[shinRaiden 0]

For duel-booting, put windows on first, then linux. That way linux's mre capable boot loader can switch between the windows loader and the linux one.

Regardless of which distro you go with, unless someone is handing you a preinstalled sanitized box, you're going to need to have a pretty good idea of the specs and layout and balancing of your system. Knoppix livecd's let you get away from some of that temporarily, but hey, even in windows setting one big massive glut partition is bad karma.

Gentoo does offer imho the most efficent and controlable tweaking interfacing, but you realisticly need at least a 2nd pc to double-check the docs and package db if you're doing offline work. Secondly, its normal method of downloading and compiling the source code can be a significant impact on low-bandwidth/processing machines, like my poor little Athlon 900.

Mandrake's been the easiest imo to install, RedHat/PinkTie/Fedora/IcantMakeUpMyMindWhichHatImGoingToWearToday is kinda clunky. Haven't tried SUSE, I'm very curious to play with it some time due to the Novell enterprise connectivity.

As mentioned previous, ATI's really slacked off in rolling out decent drivers for Linux. That said, I doubt it's going to have much effect either way for a 9000 IGP. I swear the idiot who came up with memory-sharing IGP stupidity would have us all back at 40x25 ASCII consoles if he had his way.

One little niggly worth mentioning here. Aside from Mandrake, most distro's do not have NTFS support turned on out of the box. If you're duel-booting, you'll definately want to enable that so you can at least read files off your Windows drives into Linux. Iirc, it's still officially read-only to avoid any risk of writing garbley-gook to the file ACL's, but if you use standard home-user level lack of file security you might be okay for limited file writes. Otherwise you'd have to burn files to CD or copy back and forth via USB stick or something.

[der bastler 0]

There's a distribution portal:

http://distrowatch.com/

with a page about the most-used distros:

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

[Akira 0]

The most I have experience with (and the best luck) is Mandrake and to some extent Suse due to their very Windows-like install procedures that were intuitive from my Windows stand point.

I have screwed around with RPM install and had some success via the console commands, though really I prefer (and am used to) GUI interfaces.

The learning curve is a bit daunting and challenging at the same time. For school, Open Office offers MS Office compatibility which is my biggest concern. Having learned and used Windows the past 14 years, its hard to let go of it though. My productivity for school won't be effected I know, so really the only thing that is stopping me is A)the hassle of reinstalling if I truely hate it (though i don't see why), and B) missing out on some games (which I shouldn't play anyway since I'm doin' my Masters). I'm not going to lose ALL games so that doesn't seem like a big deal though its the main reason I am holding back. That and being behind the learning curve again.

Access to my current windows files isn't necessarily a concern, as most everything (sans games) can be accessed via a native Linux application.

Also my wife doesn't understand my need to screw with things that are working perfectly fine

EDIT: According to the Mandrake page, my Mobility Radeon 9000 is certified to work under 10.1. Hmm...

[nSe7eN 0]

Quote[/b] ]One little niggly worth mentioning here. Aside from Mandrake, most distro's do not have NTFS support turned on out of the box. If you're duel-booting, you'll definately want to enable that so you can at least read files off your Windows drives into Linux. Iirc, it's still officially read-only to avoid any risk of writing garbley-gook to the file ACL's, but if you use standard home-user level lack of file security you might be okay for limited file writes. Otherwise you'd have to burn files to CD or copy back and forth via USB stick or something.

You can fully access NTFS Volumes on Linux using some programs like paragon!

You can also run many games that designed to work with windows using some program called (Cedega v4.3-if you can run games like HalfLife using it I think you can run flashpoint too!) you can access Linux volumes on windows based OS using programs like (Paragon Ext2FS Anywhere v3.0) and edit it too, for dual booting problems you can use programs like (Acronis OS Selector), and for partitioning converting your HD without losing data on multiple files system types you can also use Acronis Partition Expert!

I think that solved many of your problems, though none of those programs free I think, so get a demo version for the applications you really need!

Thanks for the info about the ATI cards der bastler, really didn’t know that, though thought they just having issues over the drivers for windows!

Misspelled NTFS!

You need such programs because Microsoft didn’t give that much of technical information about NTFS as file system, that’s why its not fully supported by many other OSs!

[HellToupee 0]

My 11g wireless card works fine, its a atheros chipset for which drivers exist called madwifi, not the easyest things to get going but work great. Really depends on what chipset the card is weither it will work or not.

[LauryThorn 0]

Quote[/b] ]You can fully access NTFS Volumes on Linux using some programs like paragon!

Yes, but as said before, writing to NTFS on Linux is hazardous. Not recommended. One choice is to make one FAT partition, which can be accessed(read&write) from both Windows and Linux.

[benu 1]

If you jut want to try out linux then pop in a knoppix cd. There are tools to install them to harddisk too. I would recommend too, but if you hate the commandline then you will hate gentoo. Besides that only debian seems to be worth a recommendation. All the rpm based distros are crap, even with apt for rpm or similar tools. I haven't used one in a long time, but mandrake was good for beginning users when i last looked at it.

Sadly, the problem you will have with those is that they have "versions" and upgrading from one version to another might or might now work, so it's usually less hassle to completely purge one version of the distribution and install the new one than trying to upgrade. Especially as a beginner. Debian and especially Gentoo don't have version in the way the other distributions have, i am on the same gentoo installation for a long time. But gentoo requires command line work, not too much and not too difficult if you are willing to learn, but impossible if you are not. And debian... well, stable is so old that it is unusable and backports can create nice dependency loops and do not work for all situations. This leaves you with testing/unstable. Which is not really unstable at all, but i think something is wrong in a distribution where nobody can use the stable tree anymore. Besides that i find debian awkward after gentoo. But afaik you can do most stuff with graphical frontends (synaptic), so i would give it a try. Knoppix is debian too, as is ubuntu. Maybe try one of those...

[void_false 1]

Personally i would recomend Ubuntu (Kubuntu). It got first place on distrowatch.com recently

As almost every begginer I started with Mandrake, then moved to Fedora. Then i won Knoppix CD on one forum. It is the only linux CD I have.

Then occasionaly installed Damn Small on HD. But all distros had problems with internet, that i couldnt solve. Some ppl suggested me to install Gentoo. My greatest success was a kernel panic. Well, till today i´m dreaming about Gentoo, but look like i´m too dumb for it.

I noticed that in Debian-based distros internet is working fine. I was emerging Gentoo files 5-6 hours in Knoppix for instanse.

Then I´ve read overview about Ubuntu on one site. Author was very happy about this distro. Furthermore it was Debian based distro. So i decided to give it a try.

It took some time to install. I was installing it from Knoppix (well, like almost all distros) because i have no CD-Recorder. And i must say it was a pain it the ass - searching google + reading wiki.

And finally... I´m running Ubuntu Hoary with KDE 3.4 (Kubuntu) and live seems beautiful for me.