linux?

[RJ_Paton]

Good old Windows - you shove a CD in and manage to get something working straight away.

Having spent the last day and a bit trying to get a windows installation (XP Pro 64) to work I am less inclined to agree. As you say

Without an Internet connection it is worthless so I guess I'll have to waste a bit more time trying to sort it out but I am not optimistic.

having to download drivers for basic equipment, burn them to CD and then transfer over ... (once I'd got it to recognise the DVD Drive) is a real pain. last time I agree to do a favour without asking what it is first 

[downside]

I almost got it to work!

Although my USB modem was recognised I later discovered I had to its microcode.

I then got an error message FIRMWARE_FILE undefined.

I then followed endless solutions posted on the Internet and downloaded certain files.  Having discovered that I didn't have a basic C compiler installed, I  managed to get that sorted out and have had to use make and other long forgotten commands.  Then I sorted out chap-secrets and pap-secrets and I seemed to be getting some response back from my ISP whilst in a shell with lots of techie information whizzing past.

The bottom line is that it is not really working.  I read a comment that many people give up on Linux because they cannot use it to connect to the Internet becuase of modem problems.  I can understand why.

downside

[downside]

Hold the front page!

Just as I about to give up I found another Linux forum and found the solution.

I can now use Linux to surf the Internet - although it looks slightly weird compared to I.E.

I'll have to look at the other problems about the USB keyboard and mouse in the future.  As both of these actually work the situation is not terminal.

Cheers

downside

[arnietheother]

Hi daveanpat,
I'm a Linux user & find that it works fine for me.  The great Windows v. Linux question has been done to death elsewhere many times before; there are members of both camps that feel passionate about their OS.
Like xrchris, I'm using Ubuntu, which has good community support & is easy to set up & get working.  If you'd rather have some support backup, you might consider paying for a supported distribution.  Take a look at Distrowatch http://distrowatch.com/ for descriptions of the various distributions available.  SUSE is probably not a bad choice for someone who's never used Linux before. 
The bootable CD distributions won't write to your hard disk unless you specifically request to mount your hard disk or a USB drive in order to read / write to it. 
Linux doesn't work with all hardware.  There are Linux compatibility guides available so that you can check that your new hardware will work before you buy it.   Having said this, the only compatibility problem I've had is with modems. 
If you want to try Linux because you're looking for a good, stable OS that's easy to maintain & learn about, you could do worse than to give it a try.  If you're looking for a free copy of Windows, Linux is going to disappoint you as there are many differences between the two systems. 
Linux and it's associated software is updated regularly.  The distribution that I use http://www.ubuntu.com/ has a new release every 6 months with regular updates in the interim period as software is improved. 
I think downside's experience shows us:
1. It's worth getting a recent distribution.  Your transition into Linux is not going to be eased by attempting an installation from a distribution release of 3+ years longevity. 
2. Linux is not Windows.  Anything that is not I.E. will look slightly weird compared to I.E. 
(although it is actually possible to run I.E. under Linux. )
Arnie.

[daveanpat]

Hi Arnie
 Many thanks and to all the others for their input,  it has been very informative.

   The main reason for the question in the first place was just that I like to try almost things  and I thought I might have a crack at it.

 Thanks again to all
                                    David

[downside]

Hi arnietheother

An update on my previous posting.  I did download the latest version from Mandriva and burnt the image to CD.  I then clean installed it and as per usual I couldn't get the modem to work.  When I tried to to follow the steps I had taken to get the previous installation working I ran into all sorts of problems like no gcc compiler.  As this was a simple one disc edition it did not contain many of the features you normally get with Linux.  So I reinstalled the old edition again.

I guess if you are going to install Linux the lesson I learnt is that you need to get a full edition rather than mess about with the one CD desktop versions.  That means getting a 3 CD version or a DVD.  Linux has become quite bloated in the last few years.  I remember a time when it only occupied a few MB of disk space.

downside

PS I downloaded Firefox for Linux and it looks quite good compared to Konqueror.

[arnietheother]

Downside,
Sorry to hear that you had modem problems with the latest free Mandriva distro.  I gave up on Mandriva myself after v.9.1 in favour of Fedora Core 2 / 3 / 4 / 5, then after a brief association with SUSE, moved to Ubuntu via debian.  I got a broadband connection while using Fed core 5 & have never had a connection problem since then. 
Just to clear up a common misconception - that of confusing Linux with a Linux distribution:
"Linux has become quite bloated in the last few years."
Perhaps the Mandriva distribution has become bloated, Linux hasn't.  Linux is still used to run custom applications on embedded systems having computing power comparable to 1980s machines. 
Here's the listing for the current Ubuntu linux kernel for my sytem - a whopping 1.4MB.
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1414477 2006-05-23 17:56 vmlinuz-2.6.15-23-386
I suspect that the kernel size is dominated by the driver code. 
A distribution takes the linux kernel & attaches services & applications to it.  Each distribution has it's own aims.  Some aim for minimalism & speed such as puppy linux http://www.puppylinux.org/ and DSL http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ Others such as Ubuntu, aim to supply a high quality desktop system entirely from free software and so have a bigger footprint.  Ubuntu and its derivatives (kubuntu, edubuntu) run and install from a single disk, with updates and thousands of other applications available online through software repositories. 
Here's one nocternal person's experience installing both Windows and Ubuntu on a PC:
http://rhosgobel.blogspot.com/2006/06/installing-ubuntu-comparison-of-ubuntu.html

Arnie.

[leytone10]

Hi I have two hard drives in my computer one runs XP the other run Ubuntu 6.06.  I installed Ubuntu about 3 weeks ago and it really is great I now only use XP for Voip calls.  I had tried linux in various forms over the years and could never get the hang of it . Ubuntu really is user friendly and the forums are very helpful.  If you are looking for a user friendly OS try it.  It has a feature called Automatix which will install most of the software you need to get it running e.g flash-player adobe etc. My kids use my computer as well and it runs nearly of their websites so no complaints from them a big +   My other 3 computers run XP but I will not upgrading to Vista they will gradually be switched over to Ubuntu. I tried Ubuntu live on them and they will all run on it when it's time.

[downside]

Hi leytone10

I tried Ubuntu  (the dark one) and immediately I got error messages about my modem but I persevered and did an install.  Very nice GUI and nice sounds.  Strange idea of having the task bar at the top of the screen?

Bad news, no danger of getting my Speedtouch modem to work.  Even worse I couldn't log on as root in order to change certain files.  Apprently I only had sudo root permissions.  I didn't realise that root's password was root

So I quickly installed something called PCLinuxOS.  I took one look at the wallpaper and went wow - get that on to my system right now!

I got error messages about my speedtouch usb modem straight away.  This distro is actually a souped-up version Mandrake or Mandriva as it is now called.

I have to face the fact that all these distro's recognise my speedtouch usb modem and offer a certain amount of support.  They all require that I obtain a FIRMWARE file from Thomson.  There is a Linux firmware file at their website but no instructions about how to install it.  You then have to wade through various Linux forums to see how people cope with trying to get this device to work with different distros.

The bottom line is that I have only managed to get it to work on the old Mandrake 9.1 (2.4 kernal) version.  It won't work on any of the new releases.  Speedtouch is quite a common modem, the only problem is that Thomson expect it to be used on a Windows system and only offer minimal Linux support.

Yours enviously

downside