Thanks, Chrism01! I must admit I'm not quite sure what 'sharing' is - on a single computer with only one user. I never had a work station or shared access of any sort, and so never looked into it. So please forgive the stupid questions...

Is it just like plugging in an external hdd or dvd and then make use of its contents? In Windows, the whole things just pops up as a new drive.

Or to put it different: If I sit in my Linux in its virtual box on the h: drive; and I want to look up the files in my music dir on the f: drive under Windows (which obviously is not a part of the Linux root dir), how would I go about that?

Thanks a bunch,

Traviata

Never had a network share at work eg Network Neighbourhood? Or a eg Z:\public drive or been told to always store work docs on eg H:\? These are all remote mounts made to 'look' local.

A network share is (effectively) a remote mount, which is (as it implies) remotely mounting a disk instead of locally....
Don't be confused about the fact its really all on on physical box if you use a VM; from the overall view, its 2 systems connecting/sharing over the network, even if the the entire n/w is on one box.
That's what makes it transparent to location.

Sometimes its not a good idea to pay to much attention to random web pages...

LOL, I spend ages on XP. Aside from one huge technical issue that nobody ever figured out, it ran pretty well, and the worst I got was a few very minor infections, easily removed.I always got ms updates, never used IE, always used a 3rd party firewall, and rarely even had antivirus installed.

Debian has a pretty interesting and simple system.

Packages start off in 'experimental'.
Then they move down to 'unstable' (or 'sid').
Then they move down to 'testing'.

Every couple of yuears, 'testing' is 'frozen', meaning no new packages come down from unstable/sid. They do a few months of testing, bug fixing, etc., then release the 'frozen' testing as 'stable'. BTW, in many ways 'stable' doesnt refer to its ability to avoid crashes, etc. (though its very good at that) its more about its packages...debian almost never upgrades packages in 'stable'.

You wil get secrity/bugfix updates for packages, but no newer versions. For example, debian uses 'iceweasel', a firefox version with the branding stripped out. Current stable, 'wheezy', has iceweasel version 10 (based on firefox 10). It will only get point security/bugfix updates, and currently its on version 10.0.12. There will not be iceweasel 17.O as used by 'testing/jessie' or 24.0 like is currently used in 'unstable/sid' in debian wheezy.

That is why 'stable' is widely regared as being one of the most stable and bug free linux distros. Its also why some people say that the software is out of date.

Nah, not monthly as far as I know, the updates happen whenever they happen.

I wouldnt overthink it....

Preplanning like 'I'm going to use program A to replace Y, B to repalce X, and C to replace Z' might seem to be sound planning. Its also an easy way to fustrate yourself.

I wouldnt even plan on using KDE 4. Sure, its nice in many ways, but there are tons of desktops, and you can try them for free! Why limit yourself to KDE when you might love Xfce, or E17, or one of the *box versions, or MATE, or Trinity, or even gnome 3....

BTW, as a KDE 4.X user, I find Konqueror fairly awful.

Nah. People are wayyy to 'omg debian is they hards!' when is not. Lots of times that because they are either thinking of old versions (debian circa 2005/2006 was a huge amount more work than newer versions) or because they dont realise how much stuff does work 'out of the box' now with debian. You used to have to add all sorts of pakeages to get some multimedia playback, now a lot of that just works 'out of the box'. There is a great wiki with directions on how to do most everything.

https://wiki.debian.org/MultimediaCodecs

https://wiki.debian.org/FlashPlayer

You can do a lot of stuff from 'synaptic', a software installation/package managment software.

But quite often, that is slower than doing things from the termainal. Opening the terminal, switching to root and entering the password, then typing 'apt-get install foo' is faster than opening synaptic.

GAh, I know I was going to reply to soemthing else I saw, but I've run out of time. Maybe later....

Well, I'm fairly tolerant when it comes to 'outdated' software... ;)

As for browsers, my current Firefox version is 5.0; and my current SWare Iron is 7.0 - they're both hopelessly outdated. But they're still good enough for me, as I rarely use them anyway. My favorite browser is K-Meleon Twin+.


As for Debian, I had another look at SimplyMepis again. It's based on Debian stable and still regarded as very newbie-friendly. But still, you've put a bug into my ear with Debian 7 KDE.



You've got a point there - I do tend to over-think things. I just like to be prepared and to have at least a vague idea of what I'm doing. Right now, I'm crawling through Linux guides and watch one tutorial after the other in YouTube. I'll most likely forget half of the stuff I learn within 5 minutes or so, but there's hope some of it might stick - or pop up again when I need it.

Linux is a vast field and its diversity can be quite overwhelming. It's easy to completely lose oversight.


I cannot comment on Konqueror as I never tried it - I just hoped from what I read that it would resemble K-Meleon (yeah, I keep coming back to it...). K-Meleon Twin+ is a reworked and updated version by a member of the (very) small K-Meleon community (the actual K-Meleon developer quit in 2010). It's fast, reliable, portable and highly configurable - simply put perfect for me. K-Meleon will be the one reason for me to try out Wine.

But then, I might end up with Swiftfox, who knows?




That's good to read - as Debian 7 is quite intimidating with everyone telling you how hard it can get.

On one of your links, it says: In summary, when you install a media player available from Debian, many different codecs the media player supports will be automatically installed. Chances are, the codecs you will ever wish to use will be the ones automatically installed with the media player.

So instead of running after all the codecs, I could simply install VLC player, as it practically plays everything you throw at it - and that would take care of things? Wow!

Debian 7 looks more and more alluring to me... ;)



Not much of a miracle with my mile-long posts... :D


Thanks so very much,

Traviata

For a lot of people (I'm probably #3 on the list), it's really difficult to get an idea of something, and remember specifically how it works, when your exposure is theoretical. You can always install as dual-boot, say, Mint 15 just to get a feel of it - or wait till November and get Mint 16. You may realize that you just sort of 'settle' into the distro without planning; sometimes planning is the enemy of progress. Otherwise, play around for these months, and if you're happy, switch in April to Mint 17 LTS.

While certain aspects of Linux seem daunting, you might find that they're in part what makes Linux incredible - the strength of these systems. Certainly it'll take time to learn, but you learn along the way. Don't worry, Linux has come far enough - it's not the like you need to boot into shell and manually configure your system every time you start your computer! Regarding challenges you may have, as you can see from the responses to your post, there is an incredible, amazing, and vibrant Linux community; gobs of knowledge, and willingness to help in such specific difficulties you may be encountering.

If you over-research and over-expect what the distro will be like, you might end up anywhere with a system that you're disappointed with, or second-guess yourself with your choice to the point of leaving the distro without investing sufficient time to learn it.

I know this isn't the most on-topic in regards to your specific questions, but hopefully it speaks a little bit to what appears to be some of your underlying concern.

Every time I say to myself 'I should really leave the whole XP security thing alone' you manage to post something I have to reply to. ;)

Firefox 5? Thats so old that I wouldnt be surpised if you're getting infections 'on the fly' with your setup.

But the good news is that if you can come close to living with firefox 5, you can certainly live with iceweasel 10 (rebranded firefox 10) in debian 7. Or older browsers found in other stable/server OSes (eg CentOS).

I've used Mepis a few times, aside from a few niggles here and there (non-software related) I dont mind it.....but I've also never quite seen the point.

I wouldnt use swiftfox myself. Its a proprietary license, and based on a really old version of firefox.

There are a lot of open browsers for linux. I'd have a look at them before installing swiftfox, e.g. Midori-

http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php/midori/

WINE can sometimes work well, but I'd rather not have it on a system myself. It adds a fair few packages, and if you run 64bit it will add a lot of 32bit comptibility packages.

Thats been standard for years now, and it got a lot worse when ubuntu came out, since for a while at least ubuntu was seen as a 'fixed, better, eaiser version of debian'.

Debian, like most linux based OSes has got a lot easier over the years.

Its still harder to find the debian directions on stuff, e.g. 'how to install video card closed source drivers' than it is to open 'jockey' (ubuntu hardware driver installation tool), but its not that hard.

Depending on how you install, you may have a media player installed 'out of the box'. If you have one at all will depend on what you install with debian.

When you install debian you will see 'tasksel'-

https://wiki.debian.org/tasksel

Screenshot-

http://screenshots.debian.net/screenshot/tasksel

If you install a desktop enviroment, or manually select the 'right' packages, you will (as far as I've experienced) get a media player of some kind installed. You wont need to install VLC. If you like VLC, its installable, and I normally have it as a backup on my systems. But I tend to use mplayer (Gnome mplayer on GTK+ enviroments like Xfce, Kplyer on KDE/razor TQ) as my default video player.

BTW, even though I'm using different media players to the original defults in most of the distros I use, I've never 'lost' those file associations after updating. Unlike windows, where a WMP update would normally reset all file associations to WMP.

My advice- break it a few times. Or try. :D

Install lots of stuff, different desktop enviroments, media players, etc.. Plan on something breaking, and that you'll need to reinstall.

I'd start off with instaling any drivers you might want or need, them play with different desktop enviroments and programs.