[dobbin]

Over on the FlickR UKB thread the topic of *nix came up. Far be it from me to drag that topic off topic I thought I would start another thread, as I have some questions for slack--line. I would use the PM system, but you never know, someone out there may find this useful.

So, having worked in an IT job for years I've always flirted with *nix but never quite got there. I think I have always felt its a bit of a challenge to accomplish quite a lot of stuff under *nix, especially when I know how to do it with my eyes shut under windows, and there has seemed to be a significant prerequisite knowledge required for working with *nix that I just didnt have time to learn. So, this time when windows needed rebuilding I first went to Vista which made my machine run like a dog, so I rebuilt it to Suse - and apart from some teething problems its chuffing brilliant. And free! I love it. I think the last time I looked it was red hat 7.2 and I didnt get on great with it. Seems that the community have done a lot to improve the usability of the OS and although still a learning curve I have managed to get everything I want to do done with a bit of tinkering.

So, questions. Slack--line - which is better gnome or kde? I am running kde at the moment as I think that must have been the default. How do i install gnome? YaST I suppose... assuming I manage to get it installed can I choose which to boot to or how do I switch between them?

[slackline]

Over on the FlickR UKB thread the topic of *nix came up. Far be it from me to drag that topic off topic I thought I would start another thread, as I have some questions for slack--line. I would use the PM system, but you never know, someone out there may find this useful.

So, having worked in an IT job for years I've always flirted with *nix but never quite got there. I think I have always felt its a bit of a challenge to accomplish quite a lot of stuff under *nix, especially when I know how to do it with my eyes shut under windows, and there has seemed to be a significant prerequisite knowledge required for working with *nix that I just didnt have time to learn. So, this time when windows needed rebuilding I first went to Vista which made my machine run like a dog, so I rebuilt it to Suse - and apart from some teething problems its chuffing brilliant. And free! I love it. I think the last time I looked it was red hat 7.2 and I didnt get on great with it. Seems that the community have done a lot to improve the usability of the OS and although still a learning curve I have managed to get everything I want to do done with a bit of tinkering.

Glad your enjoying your GNU/Linux experience so far, there is a learning curve with most distro's (the Ubuntu family perhaps being the exception), but its worth it in my opinion as you end up with a system that you understand far better than the often occluded setup/configuration hassles with M$-windoze.

So, questions. Slack--line - which is better gnome or kde? I am running kde at the moment as I think that must have been the default. How do i install gnome? YaST I suppose... assuming I manage to get it installed can I choose which to boot to or how do I switch between them?

Its really horse's for courses in the KDE v's GNOME business.  They are both somewhat bloated for window managers in comparison to some of the others (XFCE4/FVWM/Openbox/fluxbox, the later being my prefered choice), but I KDE is slightly more bloated, and therefore fractionally slower, and in my opinion has lots of bells and whistles for getting things done.  Ultimately its a matter of choice, try them both and see which you prefer.  You'll probably find that KDE ease's you in a lot easier with things like associating files with particular GUI apps, but you might find you like the look and feel of GNOME better (a search on google won't really help, but will give some other perspectives).

I've not used SuSe myself (started with RedHat 7.3, switched to Slackware for a year or so and have now settled on Gentoo), but a quick google around of some docs indicates that YaST is indeed the package management system for SuSe.  Beyond that I can't really help much with getting GNOME installed, but it should be fairly straightforward, along the lines of selecting the packages that you want to install, then sitting back whilst they download and install.

Once its all installed its really simple to switch between different desktop/window managers because the sofware that actually does the rendering of windows and GUI's (which is called Xorg) is completely seperate fromt he windowing system that is used.  In all likelihood you have a graphical login when you've finished booting.  This will be something like xdm/gdm/kdm (X-display manager/GNOME display manager/KDE display manager).  Somewhere around here you'll see a button that allows you to select which session you want to start, and you should now have the choice of KDE or GNOME (and any others that happen to have been installed by default).  Select the one you want, enter your username and password and your away.

The "beauty" I find in using GNU/Linux is the command line for getting things done.  There are various different terminals (GNOME and KDE both have their own defaults, personally I prefer aterm as it gives you full transparency which looks very cool) I do all my file management from here and for me its far quicker than using Nautilius or the KDE equivalent (or the windows equivalent of Explorer).  Useful commands for that are things like cd, ls, rm, mv.  At the command prompt preceed each of these with 'man' to look at the manual pages (i.e. man ls).  The other nice thing is that I don't have to use GUI's for configuring my system, virtually everything involved in configuration is kept as text files in the /etc/ directory structure, and over time I've learnt how these files are structured and configured and simply edit them in a text editor (e.g. nano/emacs/vim).   For example your configuration for Xorg, which is doing all the desktop stuff is most probably in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.  To look at it simply type 'less /etc/X11/xorg.conf' in a terminal and you'll have the contents parsed to the screen.

There are apps for virtually anything you ever need to do with a computer available for GNU/Linux, and even if its not in YaST you'll be able to install the program from source.

You'll find that  and in particular http://www.google.co.uk/linux are particularly useful, and  will often pay dividends (even if it can be tedious), but there are a lot of forums out there that are very helpful and friendly, linuxquestions.org was very handy when I was getting started.  I also found the fourth edition of Running Linux to be a very useful desktop reference.

Have fun and feel free to ask questions, no guarantee I'll be able to a) answer helpfully; b) respond in a timely fashion, but you never know.

Oh and one very important tip, never, ever login as root, it leaves your system wide open to attack.  Log in as your user then su (or sudo) into root.

[unclesomebody]

linux is all well and good if you don't really have to do that much. But when you come to needing to do something you can't find  program to do it. This is not said out of malice, just experience. I ran SUSE way back in they day, I tried Red Hat, last year I tried Ubuntu, and most recently I experienced Sabayon (which is so wonderfully gimicky but built on gentoo)... check out compiz fusion.

Anyway, when it came time to hook up my video camera and capture some footage there wasn't a way to do it. What about editing HDV footage? Not possible. How about listening to some music? oh, my soundcard isn't supported under any flavour of linux under the sun. Little things like no sound and not being able to edit video are a pain in the ass. It's all these things that are so readily available in windows that make life easy. I don't have to spend hours reading about how to get my ethernet driver to load at boot when I'm using vista (this was years ago under SUSE). I agree, most new linux distro's have nearly everything working (no proper graphics card drivers though).

I hope that all these things do get worked out because I do think linux runs way more efficiently and I want to join you guys and be part of the *nix club. (actually, I do have sabayon installed but don't use it all that much)

[slackline]

Hardware Compatablity Lists would have sorted out the soundcard problem, and probably suggested that bleeding edge hardware often isn't supported as the details of chipset etc. are kept secret and need to be reverse engineered, this won't change unless there is a shift in perceptions.  Windows "just works" because they've paid to have access to that information etc., a cost which is passed on to the end user.  Can't comment on video editing as I don't own any sort of video camera, but there is the Video for Linux 2 project and various other resources listed here, but if you want to plug and go then I agree GNU/Linux is unlikely to be for you, particularly if your using High-Definition (HDV?), thats not to say it won't come along though in due course.  Personally I never see the point in staying bleeding edge on anything in computing given Moore's law, and always go for marginally older and therefore cheaper hardware thats more likely to be supported (and save me beer tokens at the same time).

The two major graphics card manufacturers (nVidia and ATI) do however provide proprietry drivers for GNU/Linux for virtually all of their cards (although personally at present I'm waiting for the nVidia driver to be updated as it doesn't support the latest Xorg release), and these work well (at least with the minor tests I've run, I don't play 3d FPS games).

Anyway, I guess it comes down to what one wants to get done, for me its a natural choice, as all of the software that I use for work has a history (and still is) written and tested on *NIX systems (its all statistical genetics software).  I found scp (no simple rsync in windows) & ssh to the local grid from a windoze box tiresome, and got fed up with having to go to the local sysadmin to get new software installed on my work comp.  I was free to do what I wanted when I installed GNU/Linux (Redhat 7.3), and the comp still sits at Manchester University where I can access it from anywhere and is still useable (despite having left their over two years ago :D).  Same situation with the job I had in Australia, and now in Sheffield (long since switched at home).

Computing for me is a hobby and I enjoy solving the problem of getting hardware and software to work, I learn a bit about something I didn't know about, and gain a sense of satisfaction from having done so myself.  This isn't the case with everyone though.  With regards to "don't really have to do that much" it is again a case of what you want to get done.  A large portion of the web is based on LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/(Perl/Python/PHP)).  Major sites like Amazon, Yahoo, Flickr etc. all run this setup, so there is a lot that does get done.  Linux clusters were used in Lord of the Rings, Shrek and various other CGI intensive films, so a _lot_ does actually get done on GNU/Linux systems (this very board even).

I agree that the majority of people don't want to know this level of detail, and therefore would be better off with something where the t's are crossed and i's dotted for them like windows (the Ubuntu family of distro's are going this way, and _anyone_ should be able to use KNOPPIX).  However, look at how frustrated a large proportion of people get when their windows system does freeze, or something doesn't work and they've no idea how to get it working.  Computers are great tools, but they are exactly that, and one needs to learn how to use a tool, irrespective of the OS thats installed, this is more explicit when using GNU/Linux as opposed to a windows variant.

I'm not trying to be evangelical about this, it was just nice that someone else had recently discovered and enjoyed installing and starting to use GNU/Linux.

P.S. - Compiz-fusion is pretty sweet eye-candy, have it installed for the wife as she likes her bells and whistles.

[dobbin]

I mentioned this in person to Keith in the pub on friday and he mentioned those drawbacks then. Obviously, being a linux noob I dont know shit, and certainly cant offer a solution to a HDV starved supercomputer owning shirehorse (actually, I suggested a VM, but with such intensive stuff as video rendering, its probably not a great solution - even on Keith's hardware platform), and I probably do fit into his dont do much category - our home computer is used for surfing, emithering, musak and ipod management.

I have to say though, I rate this linux stuff. Its chuffin brilliant. I never paid for Windows so I cant claim to be saving money, but its the stability of it and the security piece of mind that I really like. Also, I run some servery bits and bobs and its mega. I will probably have to end up building an XP Vm for those odd bits and pieces that I cant do in 'nix, but I reckon they will be in the minority. And, its all a learning experience. I've got an MCSE and a CCNA but this is something I never understood. I like to learn new things and this is something I have always wondered about.

After years of installing dodgy versions of windows and being careful about which updates I install, I have gone legit and I like it! (excepting the VM!)

[Bubba]

I'm loving Ubuntu as the new server OS for this place - everything is so easy and just works.

Not sure i'm really ready to use Linux on the desktop yet - can photoshop/lightroom/other major win apps be easily and properly replaced yet? For free?

[slackline]

I'm loving Ubuntu as the new server OS for this place - everything is so easy and just works.

Not sure i'm really ready to use Linux on the desktop yet - can photoshop/lightroom/other major win apps be easily and properly replaced yet? For free?

In all likelihood yes.

Word Processing = OpenOffice/AbiWord/LyX/LaTeX
Spreadsheet = OpenOffice/GNUmeric
Database = MySQL/postgresql/sqlite/etc.
Email = Claws Mail/Evolution/SeaMonkey
Web Browser = FireFox/Opera
iPod = gtkpod/amarok/banshee (although the really new iPods don't work so easily and need a special hack to get round the database encryption, lots of noise on various tech blogs about this in the past week).
Music = banshee/amarok/audacious/XMMS2/BMPx/MPD
CDripping = grip
Movies = Mplayer/Xine
Movie Editing = Mplayer/Cinepaint
Pictures = GIMP (can even use Photoshop plugins, and get it to look like photoshop/ImageMagick
Scanning = XSane
CD/DVD burning = XCD-Roast/Gnomebaker/

There's probably more out there, but the best thing to do is to browse/search through package repositories.  If your taken by Ubuntu then the Ubuntu Packages would be a good place to start, another (for Gentoo) is Portage.

If you've got really new (bleeding edge) hardware then it would be worth consulting Linux Hardware Compatability Lists first (alternative).

On top of that you have things like Apache, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Icecast (stream music to your laptop downstairs thats plugged into the stereo ), Mail Servers, MythTV (home-brew PVR), SAMBA (for sharing your Linux files & printers with Windows comps), Network File System (easily share partitions on one comp with another linux comp) etc. etc. all dead easy to install (configuration may take some time though  ).

Printer wise Epson and HP printers are very well supported (see Linux Printing) to see if your printer is supported, my printer/scanner/copier/fax works fine, HP even have an opensource management tool (hplip).

As mentioned nvidia and ATi have drivers out for virtually all of their cards (although support for older ones is starting to lag a bit).

I suspect that probably 85%¹ of the population would be able to do everything they wanted without a problem under GNU/Linux, as most people generally email/web/pics/music/write the odd letter, but there is soooo much more you can do (toying with setting up MythTV in the not too distant future as I like a challenge).

slack

¹ As a statistician I am fully qualified to make up statistics off the top of my head 

[Bubba]

I'm almost tempted to give it a whirl

I might try it first on my very very old laptop that struggles with win xp - will linux run better on an old machine?

I also might try it on another old desktop.

Is it possible to keep any of your windows file system intact and just install linux to replace the C:/ drive? I realise that's a very nobby question but i've only used desktop windows for years now.

[slackline]

I'm almost tempted to give it a whirl

I might try it first on my very very old laptop that struggles with win xp - will linux run better on an old machine?

I also might try it on another old desktop.

 

A  to try would be to burn a copy of Knoppix and drop that into the CD-drive of the laptop and old desktop and choose to boot from the CD to see how things run, both should at least run and probably at a decentish speed (check the Knoppix boot cheat sheet for handy command options).

Just (sort of) remembered....I think the Ubuntu disks are bootable as well, so they drop you straight into a running system from where you can if desired start the installation.  That said Knoppix is still the best live CD in my opinion.

Is it possible to keep any of your windows file system intact and just install linux to replace the C:/ drive? I realise that's a very nobby question but i've only used desktop windows for years now.

Definitely, although a very  would be backing things up first  .  I did this when I got a new comp from Time about four years ago (but only had to worry about hosing windows which I wasn't that arsed about so didn't back anything up).

Basically you need to shrink the size of the windows partition down using Partition Magic (there's even a GNU equivalent for when you want to do some resizing under Linux called parted which has two GUI's gparted and qparted, although I'm not sure if these are available for windows).  This then free's up the remainder of your HD for installing Linux.  You'll want to probably have at least two partitions, although I'd recommend three.  One for swap (i.e. use of HD when RAM is full, this should usually be twice the size of the amount of RAM you have), one for the main installation (i.e. / where all the system shit gets put) and personally I prefer to keep my personal data in a separate place (i.e. /home is on its own partition, not essential, but helps keep things a bit tidier and avoids data being spread over all of the disk).  Note that you can only ever have four partitions on a hard-drive, but you can actually have more!  Sounds contradictory?  Well the work around is that the fourth partition can be made into a logical partition which can then be divided into fifth, sixth, seventh etc. partitions (I've eight partitions on the 500Gb drive I have).

You have to choose what filesystems to use, there are plenty to choose from, but something like ext3 with journaling or reiserfs would be good choices.

Make sure you have a spare boot disk as towards the end of the install you need to write to the MBR and if this gets screwed your comp won't boot (the Knoppix disk will come in handy here, but you might want to make a floppy boot-disk just in case so you can get back into windows).

Have fun  and let us know how things go

[dobbin]

I might try it first on my very very old laptop that struggles with win xp - will linux run better on an old machine?

Is it possible to keep any of your windows file system intact and just install linux to replace the C:/ drive? I realise that's a very nobby question but i've only used desktop windows for years now.

This is just what I have done. Copy off anything you have on C and let the linux installer blat the partition, accept its suggestions for repartitioning that bit of your drive (swap partitions and all that stuff) and let it work its magic. On my box it mounted the NTFS drive with all my files on as /windows/C which is great except that it mounted it as a read only filesystem. A quick google told me how to mend and its all ticketty boo.

I really like the concept of symbolic links. Keep your files wherever you want them and create a symbolic link to them in your document root. And its free. And its secure. I do kinda wish I had discovered this ubuntu thing before choosing suse, but it doesnt really matter.

[slackline]

I really like the concept of symbolic links. Keep your files wherever you want them and create a symbolic link to them in your document root.

Symlinks have masqueraded in Windows since about Win95 as "Shortcuts", but I always found them cumbersome to set up in comparison to under *NIX, mainly because of the need to use the mouse (I feel as thought I'm getting repetitive now!!!)

[underground]

I might try it first on my very very old laptop that struggles with win xp - will linux run better on an old machine?

Is it possible to keep any of your windows file system intact and just install linux to replace the C:/ drive? I realise that's a very nobby question but i've only used desktop windows for years now.

This is just what I have done. Copy off anything you have on C and let the linux installer blat the partition, accept its suggestions for repartitioning that bit of your drive (swap partitions and all that stuff) and let it work its magic. On my box it mounted the NTFS drive with all my files on as /windows/C which is great except that it mounted it as a read only filesystem. A quick google told me how to mend and its all ticketty boo.

I really like the concept of symbolic links. Keep your files wherever you want them and create a symbolic link to them in your document root. And its free. And its secure. I do kinda wish I had discovered this ubuntu thing before choosing suse, but it doesnt really matter.

I'm just running under ubuntu live and can't see my partitions, apart from the external HD. I take it that if I blat the windows on C:, the other 2 partitions will become part of the linux filesystem?

[slackline]

This is just what I have done. Copy off anything you have on C and let the linux installer blat the partition, accept its suggestions for repartitioning that bit of your drive (swap partitions and all that stuff) and let it work its magic. On my box it mounted the NTFS drive with all my files on as /windows/C which is great except that it mounted it as a read only filesystem. A quick google told me how to mend and its all ticketty boo.

I really like the concept of symbolic links. Keep your files wherever you want them and create a symbolic link to them in your document root. And its free. And its secure. I do kinda wish I had discovered this ubuntu thing before choosing suse, but it doesnt really matter.

I'm just running under ubuntu live and can't see my partitions, apart from the external HD. I take it that if I blat the windows on C:, the other 2 partitions will become part of the linux filesystem?

If your running Ubuntu live then you don't at present have any linux partitions on your computer, its all being done on the fly in memory.  This is why you can reboot and then boot back into Windows from your hard-drive.

Under Ubuntu you can fire-up a terminal and find out what file systems are mounted (along with their size/used/free space) by typing 'df -h' (the -h flag means that size/used/free space are output as 'human readable' as opposed to absolute bytes).  You'll likely get listed things like dev/hd*# f you have IDE drives, where * could be a/b/c/d and refers to the order in which drives are connected and # refers to the partition number within that drive (if you have IDE drives (if you have SCSI then they'll be listed as /dev/sd*).  An example from my system is...

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb3              19G  6.4G   12G  37% /
udev                   10M  264K  9.8M   3% /dev
/dev/hdb1              92M   24M   63M  28% /boot
/dev/hdb5              19G  4.9G   14G  26% /mnt/music/
/dev/hdb6             9.2G  4.2G  4.6G  48% /usr/portage
/dev/hdb7              26G   23G  2.3G  91% /mnt/videos
/dev/hda3             2.8G  2.3G  594M  80% /mnt/articles
/dev/hda6             132G  123G  8.4G  94% /data
shm                   503M     0  503M   0% /dev/shm


Now, how many partitions do you have on your drive under windows?  By the sounds of it you may have three (C:\ and "the other 2 partitions" (possibly called D:\ and E:\ by default), so you may well have three /dev/hda partitions likely all formated for windows (i.e. vfat/NTFS), but only if they are mounted and it sounds as though they're not (the other intepretation is that you haven't got C:\ mounted, but you do have two linux partitions, which will actually be in memory, see above).  If the former is the case you can find out what drives and partitions exist by typing in a terminal (you may have to do this as root or use 'sudo')...

fdisk -l

which should show something similar to....

# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa617a617

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1275    10241406    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2            1276        1518     1951897+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda3            1519        1883     2931862+  83  Linux
/dev/hda4            1884       19250   139500427+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5            1884        2126     1951866   83  Linux
/dev/hda6            2127       19250   137548498+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/hdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x6f1d86c7

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *           1          12       96358+  83  Linux
/dev/hdb2              13         255     1951897+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hdb3             256        2687    19535040   83  Linux
/dev/hdb4            2688        9729    56564865    5  Extended
/dev/hdb5            2688        5119    19535008+  83  Linux
/dev/hdb6            5120        6335     9767488+  83  Linux
/dev/hdb7            6336        9729    27262273+  83  Linux

It may be that your partitions are formatted as NTFS and you're using a version that has an old kernel (see aside below) which doesn't support NTFS.  Although I'd have thought that any of the recent Ubuntu versions would have NTFS support in there.

VERY IMPORTANT : Do NOT blat any of the windows partitions without backing them up (or at least anything that you want to keep).  You WILL lose ALL information on them (well technically you might not, but it would be a real pain in the arse to get it back, and would probably cost a shit load).

More info would be required for more in depth help (post the output of the above commands, for more info on each of these commands simply type 'man [command]'.  Be VERY careful with the fdisk command though as it is one of the commands that can be used for formatting your harddrive).

You may find the Ubuntu Forums useful (in particular the Absolute Beginners forum, and that isn't meant to be condescending in anyway, you'll find the forums are populated with loads of people who are very helpful, as with here, forums are structured for a purpose (and populated with helpful people)).

This is just what I have done. Copy off anything you have on C and let the linux installer blat the partition, accept its suggestions for repartitioning that bit of your drive (swap partitions and all that stuff) and let it work its magic. On my box it mounted the NTFS drive with all my files on as /windows/C which is great except that it mounted it as a read only filesystem. A quick google told me how to mend and its all ticketty boo.

As a minor aside the reason that dobbin found his NTFS partition was mounted read-only is that support for NTFS was only 'relatively' recently implemented in the kernel as it had to be reverse engineered (probably a good year or so since it entered as experimental, but I think its been fairly stable for some time), although I'm surprised it wasn't included by default.  That said it could have been an issue with how the partition is mounted (which would have involved various flags/options to the 'mount' command on booting, or information in /etc/fstab).

[Jim]

and people say windows is complicated....
I've got better things to do with my time

[slackline]

and people say windows is complicated....
I've got better things to do with my time

Thought it was all rather straightforward really, I do have a tendency to waffle though 

I agree that the majority of people don't want to know this level of detail, and therefore would be better off with something where the t's are crossed and i's dotted for them like windows

[Bubba]

My poor old laptop can't run Ubuntu from memory - is there a way of forcing the install disk to actually install and wipe out the existing windows installation?

[slackline]

My poor old laptop can't run Ubuntu from memory - is there a way of forcing the install disk to actually install and wipe out the existing windows installation?

You might need to get the alternate installation CD (remember to tick the box)

(Gleaned from a thread here).

[Bubba]

Cheers, will give that a go

[slackline]

My poor old laptop can't run Ubuntu from memory - is there a way of forcing the install disk to actually install and wipe out the existing windows installation?

Had a random thought on this.  If your laptop is low on memory you probably want to avoid KDE/GNOME for your desktop/window manager, and instead use something lightweight like Xfce or OpenBox as they won't eat up your RAM (probably the former would be the easiest to get going with).

[Bubba]

It should be able to run it coz it can run XP fine.

Unfortunately the whole thing hasn't gone very well though - Ubuntu just won't install - it can't partition the drive

[slackline]

It should be able to run it coz it can run XP fine.

Unfortunately the whole thing hasn't gone very well though - Ubuntu just won't install - it can't partition the drive

Never actually installed Ubuntu before, but what commands are you using for partitioning the drive?  The two common ones to do this are 'cfdisk' and 'fdisk' (the former being slightly more intuitive).

Strange that you can't partition the drive though, especially if all you want to do is just zap everything thats on there and wipe over it (which is what happens when you write a new partition scheme to the Master Boot Record), its not protected in the BIOS is it?

[Bubba]

Nah, it just sucks balls - fuck the stupid penguin

I've ruined a perfectly good XP install for nothing; it's formatted the drive but just can't install even a command line shell.

[Jim]

get the xp performance disc thats working around the torrent sites. Its pretty good and quite sleek. runs smooth on my old laptop

[dobbin]

Nah, it just sucks balls - fuck the stupid penguin

  Loving your work - this made me laugh.

I'm still cosying up to the little penguin fella. Changed to Ubuntu this weekend. Its better than suse. Because of the way I partitioned my drive originally theres no lost files and changing distro is pretty straightforward.

[xelaxela]

Its good to hear more people are learning that unix based o/s are far superior to windows in my opinion fedora core is the best distro i have used. the simple fact is that windows was developed for home users and so lots of people have experience with it and unless you know a fair bit about computers then you wont know much else apart from windows.

whereas unix and later linux distros have been developed for professional buisness use. basically any computing that matters for companys is done on linux servers. because it has been developed by computing perfessionals for computing perfessionals it is not untill recently that it has become more idiot friendly.

the mac o/s are based on unix so i would imagine you should be able to use some of their programs for video editing if not and you cant find a decent program i suggest using google and serching for one.