lol.. gnu generation... I like that.

i'm just starting getting acquainted with my linux system. it's still difficult, yet i believe i've gone beyond the basics into more turbulent ground.

let me tell you, though: this forum has been my greatest help thus far. you've found the right place - the people here are great

so to begin: you're off to a good start with redhat. read some manuals (http://www.linux.com/howto/HOWTO-INDEX/categories.html shows a list of some; you may be interested in the howtos in section 4.1.2: switching over from other operating systems). ask questions. don't be afraid to take chances with your system (just don't do too many risky things as root ). ask more questions. and just know - worst that can happen is that you'll need to reinstall. (well, maybe that's not exactly *that* preferable, but it's a fun learning experience if that's what you're looking for. )

good luck!

I agree with all that's been said here. I have re-installed RedHat 7.1 five times in the past two weeks, mostly due to my own ignorance, although I think my motherboard may be crapping out on me too. But it has been an excellent learning experience, and this board has been fantastic in helping me out.

However, be that as it may, Linux is a *great* operating system, although it is going to take you some time to get it tweaked to your liking. Are you a do-it-yourselfer? You will LOVE Linux. There's always stuff to learn and in the meantime you can admire just how darned fast and efficient it is.

Also, as a parent myself, I think that Linux is a much more secure OS, and your kids can have their privacy from each other (but never from you, as root muwahahahaha).

Just thought I would add that there is an MSN instant messenger clone for linux out there its called Alvaros Instant Messanger.....or AMSN for short ....... im not exactly sure of where the site is but its hosted by sourceforge. just try googling for it.
It works pretty good......but only supports MSN. I use kopete myself
it supports all the protocols and even includes SMS.

hope this helps

peace

Well, I would not recommend Linux if your kids also use it. Linux is way to hard for kids and from time to time, it appears some random errors, kernel panic, the printer prints oddly, this or that hardware does not work, games natively made for Linux returns error messages and no one knows why, programs as Wine and WineX which are supposed to be a help, are one more problem for you. Get TV-out from a Nvidia Card is not so funny. You will need to read loads of manuals to install a simple program (if it's not rpm, and even if it is, dependencies are a pain... ) and the time you have with your family, that I believe ain't much with job and everything, will be reduced for you to read about Linux and get angry and tired trying to find out why you desktop manager suddenly and for no apparent reason, ate up your desktops icons...

Linux is cool if you are a computer student or enjoy knowing about how computer really works inside out... And above all else, have time to learn it. For a home user with family who surf internet, needs to print documents to school and from time to time enjoy that McDonald's Puzzle Game CD which came with your kids sandwich for 3 bucks, nothing beats MS in media and gaming...
I would recommend you to try Linux, but if things gets to rough, format all pcs and put win2k... no complications, fun and stable...

I am telling you because I have family too, a young son and a wife + study at uni (computer sciences) and a partial crappy job... I'm using Linux less and less due lack of time to fix its silly little things...
I like Linux a lot and it taught me more than I've learned at Uni in a short period of time, don't take me wrong, but in my free time, which ain't much, I wanna play soccer with my son at the sun outside and in the nights install that game which cames in my mailbox from my game club with no complications... Set the CD at the drive and it does everything for you, then play it... think about it...

You're kidding, right? Granted, there is the possibility of software errors with any OS. But Linux is not the quagmire of doom and errors that you make it out to be. Thousands of people, including myself, run very stable desktop installations. Before blaming "Linux" for your spurious errors in printing or anything else, examine your configuration. Chances are there is something you've misconfigured that is causing it. I find that 99% of the time, it is not the software or OS, it is me.

Second, there are things you can do to increase the stability and overall health of your system. Do you have enough RAM for your needs? Do you use low-quality hardware? Do you have cooling problems on the system? All of these can contribute to errors in your operating system or programs. You can do other lower-level optimizations to to improve conditions, such as compiler optimizations. Are you running the latest stable kernel and the latest stable revision of your favorite apps? Have you compiled a custom kernel?

The one place you are correct is in gaming, IMHO. Although gaming support is much better than in the past, and there are several stable games available as native Linux ports, it is not the gamers heaven that Windows is, nor will it ever be, if not simply for the reason that game companies don't have the vision to make it that way. But if you've never played Unreal Tourny 2003 on a GeForce 4 under Linux, you've never gamed. Home is on the horizon if more games like this are produced.

You should use the platform that best supports your focus. Maybe your focus is best suported by Windows, but maybe your focus can be served by Linux. But don't blame Linux for your problems if it involves know-how or inability to configure it properly, especially when there are those out there that don't have your problems and can set it up correctly.

I agree that family time is important. Once everything is set up (which you can do while the kids are at a birthday party or seomtihng), yuo shouldn't have any problems. Don't give the kids root or wheel access and you should be alright with them not messing up config files. Most distros come with all of your needed programs for simple stuff and it will work. In the long run, I think it will save the headaches of "Dad! My computer froze again!"

amsn is a msn messenger clone

I agree also ....... I hear alot of ppl saying that they still use windows for most of their work .......cause linux is iconsistent or something .....
Ive never really had any problems with it ..... the only thing that was a problem was learning to use it properly and how to set up the h/w the right way........once I did that I deleted the windows partitions.......and havent given it a second thought as to re- installing it.....MY LINUX BOX ROCKS!

ps not intended to start a flame war or anything.

Ok The first thing we must to do when we use an OS, is to know it's an OS, not a religion so be easy guys... I also said that I study computer sciences and I'm very careful choosing my hardware, so I know what I'm saying and I've a point, that may or may not differ from yours.

The things I like most with Linux is the desktop options which are nice and the partition system ext. Nothing else. Say that Windows ONLY crashes is a silly myth. It was like that in the times of Win95 and a bit of Win98, but it's not anymore in NT based systems (read NT4, 2k and XP)... It's just so not true as say that Linux is too hard to learn or use. It's not easy as windows, but not hard... The same goes to security, Norton and mcfee has great firewall systems and they are always updating their software. I've been using Linux since Red-Hat 6.2. (my favorite is 7.3).

Two personal examples from two peoples very close to me, my sister and my parents:

My sister is 10, almost 11 years old who lives in the northern of Sweden... She comes to visit us (me, wife and son) quite often. She loves the game The Sims and when she wants to play, she knows how to do, I don't need to supervise her. She puts the CD and it happens. If "play" is not highlight, then install the game...
How would she make it with Linux? Login as root, run the console, type mount /mnt/cdrom then read the readme file... probably after that, type sh setup.sh. Done with that choose where you want to install the game, local/share/games by default. After that, log in as user and go into the folder where you've installed the game /local/share/games/thesims and type ./thesims.

I bet 10 bucks now that it will not run in my Mandrake 9.1 (one of the easiest distros to use for newbies) with latest drivers to the graphical card and everything... It will be missing some files or other dependencies stuff and I will need to find my 3 CD's of Mandrake and install the packages,which btw, are always one file in the CD2, one in the CD3, and one in the CD1, probably just to make us switch the disks as an idiot....

SHE WILL NEVER MAKE IT RUN.... Not I can sometimes... read my threads from this forum (kernel panic, Quake3 and Few Hardware issues), I've got no answer, because nobody knows .

My parents uses the computer basically for check e-mail or see things on internet (places to spend holidays, prices of old car parts and so on...). They hardly know the difference between file and folder... if something goes wrong with Linux and they come to this forum, everyone asks "Are you using a custom kernel or the latest stable?" or "Which libc are you using?". THEY WILL NEVER KNOW....
I've a partial job as programmer. I know C/C++/C# from inside out... do you know what we use the most at work? Visual Basic and Access... Why? Simplicity and development speed. Maybe Visual Basic is not the same fast as C++ natively, but the computers today as so fast that it's useless even to learn Assembler... And so is useless to compile programs under Linux... My computer is a 2GHZ with 512 RAM, I will not see any difference...

Also, I've read an article in a newspaper that many companies things that the use of Windows 2000 is better that Linux to them. It's easier to configure and less peoples are necessary to maintain the systems (more peoples working = more expensive to the company) at the end, they realized it's way cheaper to have win2k instead.

Let's put in another way, what do you do with Linux that I cannot do with my windows 2000???...I can give really many reasons to use win2k instead of Linux though...

As I said, it's an OS, not religion. We all have to be open minded and try everything around. Linux seemed to get better in what, 10-12 years it has been around, and it's still way too far to be a desktop environment as friendly as Windows, which also gets much better in NT based systems... Maybe Linux had a chance to get into the top when Win95 and 98 were bad, but then, it was used as serves and got no support to entertainment, today is better with mplayer and xmms. As I said, it got better, but in my point of view, won't catch MS anymore once they've found the way to go...
If you would ask me why I use Linux, I'd answer to learn something new cause the market changes all the time and we've to be prepared and I enjoy the desktops, that's all... The rest is pain with everything, configuring, hardware, media etc...

here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hlight=Quake+3

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...t=Kernel+Panic

Some of my threads empties, because no one knows. Don't take me mad, I love this forum and it has been pretty helpful to me and there're many genius peoples around, specially the mods, but I've got no replies cause it's not easy to know those things... I still want to know why use Linux instead of Win2k. Besides the price and the customizable desktops, I see no reason

I have to disagree. A mature distro like RH 8 or 9 should be a breeze to install provided you have fairly common hardware, and it comes preloaded with Mozilla(browser), Gaim (Instant messaging) and Evolution (e-mail), xmms (MP3s and OGG), Open Office (word processing, spreadsheet), GIMP (photo editing) and tons of other stuff. It does take a bit of learning to get used to the file system (I remember installing RedHat 7.1 for the first time and wondering where the frickin C drive was), but it should not be that hard. I installed RedHat 8.0 for my parents, and it has been a godsend for them. No more annoying programs that load in the background or autoinstall when you visit a web page, and becuase they don't have root access, I don't have to worry about them accidentally deleting a file or changing a system setting. If you're on a home network then everything should work right out of the box (DHCP), and setting up your e-mail is a breeze.

Now, that being said, Linux is certainly not as user friendly in some regards as windows, especially when it comes to installing programs. With Windows its a double click here and a double click there and bam, program installed. With Linux, its a little different, although RPMs with RedHat can be installed using the file manager, and it is pretty similar.

Point being, if your happy with the programs that come auto-installed with RedHat and you don't do anything all that involved with your computer anyway, then Linux should be fine. However, expect some time to learn and get used to it. After all, it is a whole different beast then Windows, and that in an of itself is sometimes enough to scare people off. When I first installed RedHat for my parents the first question my dad asked is "Where is the start button"... it took some explaining, but I finally got him to agree to call it the 'hat button'.

My advice would be to take one computer, wipe off Win98, load up RedHat 9, and see how the family feels about it. If they like it and you don't have any problems, then switch the other systems to RedHat 9 as well. If they don't like it, then its time to shell out $300 + for WinXP home.

slight

BTW, I have replied to both of your posts listed above as best as I could.

See, we really do care.

slight

Um, guys...you realise this thread was started in 2001?

ROFL!!!!


*slaps self*

Nope.... I didn't even notice that. :P

Guess that fully qualifies me as a

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