Still not sure after all this time...
Posted 04-10-2009 at 11:02 AM by and3583
I'm perhaps less of a linux newbie now, I've tried a whole lot of different distros and I'm feeling rather stupid as I found out the p.c. I'm using has hardware issues owing to the thunderstorm and concomitant lightning strike which stopped it running on Windows in the first place. Still, so far its survived 18 months since that time and I'm not complaining.
My beloved Fedora core 8 was the last but one distro I loaded (if the red hat fits...) and it worked fine until I upgraded it to core 10. At this point the red hat ceased to fit and my wonderful Packard Bell heap of .... began crashing more often than those test dummy things. I tried all the old and new favourites again, I should have realised when ubuntu wouldn't work that the p.c. was as good as dead but hey, not me!! I kept trying them all, right into Space o/s, eventually a guy from the Ebay message boards suggested I try Linux Mint, and by crikey what an o/s that is. I installed Felicia 6 and that was it; it had shipped with everything needed, you tube etc. worked right out of the box. I was pretty surprised it didn't crash, nothing else would even install, not even my desperate attempt finally to kill it off by installing WinXP Professional from a dodgy looking cd off ebay could penetrate the mysteries of this ok-but-nothing-to-write-home-about model until along came Mint (who's not the type at all, you'd meet it on the net and never notice it). Brilliant.
That's about all I can tell you about Mint. Brilliant, virtually no hassle, run the live cd, hit install and its all there. It wouldn't work my card reader and it doesn't like my (very elderly) Olympus c370 3mpx camera but I'm pretty certain those problems are because of my p.c.s dilapidated state.
I'm still in love with opensolaris laaarge style but it seems to have been designed around powerful cutting edge hardware; my old bone-shaker won't touch it, and as yet I don't fancy buying a brand new machine and replacing Vista (spitting noise) with it. It'd be a shame to lay out all that money then have to buy yet another copy of XP. Old Gatesy has had his last dip into my bank account, I'm tellin ya, from now on its Linux or the Highnux if you will. I've started looking on freecycle, or maybe one day Sun systems will send me a cutting edge SPARC number free of charge for services to the internet or something, but until then I'm still gonna use Mint, it still works pretty well even as I speak. I hear there's a version of Fedora that has a Mint side to it, I'll probably try that at some point.
My beloved Fedora core 8 was the last but one distro I loaded (if the red hat fits...) and it worked fine until I upgraded it to core 10. At this point the red hat ceased to fit and my wonderful Packard Bell heap of .... began crashing more often than those test dummy things. I tried all the old and new favourites again, I should have realised when ubuntu wouldn't work that the p.c. was as good as dead but hey, not me!! I kept trying them all, right into Space o/s, eventually a guy from the Ebay message boards suggested I try Linux Mint, and by crikey what an o/s that is. I installed Felicia 6 and that was it; it had shipped with everything needed, you tube etc. worked right out of the box. I was pretty surprised it didn't crash, nothing else would even install, not even my desperate attempt finally to kill it off by installing WinXP Professional from a dodgy looking cd off ebay could penetrate the mysteries of this ok-but-nothing-to-write-home-about model until along came Mint (who's not the type at all, you'd meet it on the net and never notice it). Brilliant.
That's about all I can tell you about Mint. Brilliant, virtually no hassle, run the live cd, hit install and its all there. It wouldn't work my card reader and it doesn't like my (very elderly) Olympus c370 3mpx camera but I'm pretty certain those problems are because of my p.c.s dilapidated state.
I'm still in love with opensolaris laaarge style but it seems to have been designed around powerful cutting edge hardware; my old bone-shaker won't touch it, and as yet I don't fancy buying a brand new machine and replacing Vista (spitting noise) with it. It'd be a shame to lay out all that money then have to buy yet another copy of XP. Old Gatesy has had his last dip into my bank account, I'm tellin ya, from now on its Linux or the Highnux if you will. I've started looking on freecycle, or maybe one day Sun systems will send me a cutting edge SPARC number free of charge for services to the internet or something, but until then I'm still gonna use Mint, it still works pretty well even as I speak. I hear there's a version of Fedora that has a Mint side to it, I'll probably try that at some point.
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Just to clarify...
I've learned more about Mint, Linux generally, and I've managed to fix all the image issues I mentioned in the last entry. The issues are to do with my faulty pc, not Linux.
I want to make it absolutely clear, you don't need windows any more. I'm serious. There are Linux distributions (distros), available free of charge which do everything you want straight "out ofthe box". Windows is everywhere, its true. I'm told that even my arch-enemy Vista is just about up-to-scratch after a couple of years, but unless you're happy to pay upwards of 100 GBP for an operating system and tear your hair out for a month, I'd recommend Linux. Its easy and free to download, and for a very small fee you can have it mailed to you on a CD rom. There are pay versions but I've never used one, they offer enhanced functionality in specific areas, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (rhel).
When you've downloaded the distro of your choice (you'll find them all through this website) and burned your cd, or you've received it through the mail, you just whack it in your cd or dvd drive, don't matter which, and follow the instructions. Most distros come on a "live cd" which lets you try it out without installing it. They run slow this way until you install. If you want to install, there's a button right there on the desktop, you click and you're in. They run nice and quickly from your hard drive that way. Its that simple, they really have got these distros set up in such a way that anyone can use them, you don't need any special knowledge or tools. If you do run into a problem there's help everywhere you look from a community of enthusiastic users but you're not all that likely to run into a problem. Like I said, who among us hasn't ripped half the hair out of their scalp trying to get windows to perform? I know I have and believe me Linux is one hell of a lot simpler.
I can't list all the advantages of Linux in a blog post, we'd be here for a week if I did. Some of the better advantages;
i) you could have antivirus software with Linux if you wanted to, but there are hardly any bugs that target Linux or Unix,
ii) you won't have to spend hours defragmenting your hard drive with Linux. When you install a new programme on Windows, Windows drops little bits of the files into any available spaces so your hard drive has to look all over itself several times to make sense of what its being asked to do. Linux keeps files and file types together so its a lot quicker to work, and it works smoothly and efficiently even on older machines.
Those are just the first 2 advantages that spring to my mind and there are many others, not least the ever-growing Linux community of users who'll help you every step of the way if there are problems (unlikely)
Go on, give it a try, you won't regret it.Posted 04-12-2009 at 02:55 PM by and3583 
