Loving Linux
 

Hi All,

Just wanted to post this as I am new here. I recently trashed windows XP and converted fully to Mandrake 9.0

I can say it was the best move of my life. I love Linux. Sure it is tough to get some things to work when you are unfamiliar with it, but just look on sites like these, I find that 99% of my questions can be answered by searching the forum.

Once you get the hang of it, it rocks. I used to try and install it and use it when I had a modem, but the modem would never work due to most are winmodems. Now I have cable and the install and connection this time went flawlessly, completely automated with Mandrake 9.0

I will never switch back to windows. I have not had one .dll error file missing or any of that windows crap, it is great.

Thanks for the great forum.

And for the windows users browsing the forum thinking of switching? DO IT. Just give yourself a couple of days to get the hang of it, you will not be disappointed.

Cool, if more linux games would come out a lot more might switch completely over. I still use me, but just for games.

me to

Glad you like your switch! :) Welcome to LQ

Cool

hey i have to agree! the first few days were confusing and took quite a bit of effort to set everything up, but with great resources/communities like this site problems soon get fixed.

lol its the little things that get me, like i can print stuff straight to my printer, i.e.

ls -a | lpr

thats just so cool. and i made (with the help of these forums) a bash script that gets my weather info from the web when i type weather at the terminal! useless but so cool!! already i am aware that there are no limits to what linux can do and i have only been using it for a week.

i also recommend to any windows users reading this to convert NOW, i promise you will not regret it. i originally planned to test linux but use XP as my main OS. i havent even considered booting back into XP since last sunday, and it cost me £100 !!

thanks to all for the great help/advice/support :):)

I just want to say "LINUX RULEZ" :)

I have been using linux for a few months now dualbooted with windows. Yesterday I finally had it with windows when I booted into my new installation of 2000 and it took 15 minutes to boot and then everything worked like molasses in January and then it crashed. I replaced it with another linux distro. I am still dual booting, but the choices are now SuSE 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0. Windows has literally driven me to linux. I will never, ever, put another M$ product on my personal computer. I only hung on to windows as long as I did after starting with linux because my scanner don't work with linux and because I came into a supply of DVD movies that I watched on my computer. I don't use the scanner all that often and will eventually get one that works with linux. I will find another solution for the DVD movies.

Really for what I do with a computer linux works fine, and it isn't near as much trouble as Winblows. People who avoid linux because windows is "easier" don't know what the hell they are talking about. I tried a half dozen times to install ME on my computer and never could get it right. I even bought a new video card to try to placate ME but still had problems. I have been running ME since it came out and have installed it several times over the last few years so I am not totally unfamilliar with it. But for some reason it just wouldn't work this time. I then installed windows 2000 and it worked fine for a week or so and then the problems started all over again. One doesn't realize how bad windows really is until using linux for awhile. Sure one has problems with linux also but windows is really just one overpriced, bloated, inefficient, rip off piece of junk and I for one have chosen to live without it.

Its True!!! Several years ago I saw an article on how to make coffee using linux and your parrallel port. Gave proper pinout and everything! (hehe)

I am ready to make the full cutover on my laptop, but unfortunately my job as a consultant requires me to keep abreast of all technologies. I would be limiting myself by forgetting Windows exists. :(

So for now I will continue to use windows as my wintendo. (p.s. anyone have some good solid war simulation games for linux?)

I plan to fully dump windows from my PC at home in the next few weeks. No one said I have to enjoy using windows. :)

-------------
Jeremiah

bash scripting is so cool! if anyone cares (and i know you dont), here is my first ever script for getting tv now listings from teletext (UK residents)

**********************
#!/bin/bash

# get tv now listings from teletext website and format them nicely

lynx -dump 'http://www.teletext.com/tvplus/nownext.asp?High=3' | grep -A 4 ' BBC
1' > tvnow.tmp
BBC1prog=$(cat tvnow.tmp | grep ' BBC 1 ' | sed 's/ BBC 1 //g' | sed 's/[0-9|:]
//g')
BBC2prog=$(cat tvnow.tmp | grep ' BBC 2 ' | sed 's/ BBC 2 //g' | sed 's/[0-9|:]
//g')
ITV1prog=$(cat tvnow.tmp | grep ' ITV 1 ' | sed 's/ ITV 1 //g' | sed 's/[0-9|:]
//g')
CHN4prog=$(cat tvnow.tmp | grep ' Channel 4 ' | sed 's/ Channel 4 //g' | sed 's
/[0-9|:]//g')
FIVEprog=$(cat tvnow.tmp | grep ' five ' | sed 's/ five //g' | sed 's/[0-9|:]//
g')

BBC1time=$(cat tvnow.tmp | grep ' BBC 1 ' | sed 's/ BBC 1 //g' | sed 's/[ |a-z| A-Z|,|?|!]//g')
BBC2time=$(cat tvnow.tmp | grep ' BBC 2 ' | sed 's/ BBC 2 //g' | sed 's/[ |a-z| A-Z|,|?|!]//g')
ITV1time=$(cat tvnow.tmp | grep ' ITV 1 ' | sed 's/ ITV 1 //g' | sed 's/[ |a-z| A-Z|,|?|!]//g')
CHN4time=$(cat tvnow.tmp | grep ' Channel 4 ' | sed 's/ Channel 4 //g' | sed 's /[ |a-z|,|A-Z|?|!]//g')
FIVEtime=$(cat tvnow.tmp | grep ' five ' | sed 's/ five //g' | sed 's/[ |a-z|,| A-Z|?|!]//g')

echo
echo -e "BBC1\t$BBC1time\t$BBC1prog"
echo -e "BBC2\t$BBC2time\t$BBC2prog"
echo -e "ITV\t$ITV1time\t$ITV1prog"
echo -e "Ch4\t$CHN4time\t$CHN4prog"
echo -e "Ch5\t$FIVEtime\t$FIVEprog"
echo

rm tvnow.tmp
************************

actually whilst im on the topic, to save starting another thread, anyone know if it is possible to use the sed command to replace everything BUT the characters listed. i couldnt find anything in the manual. no worries if not, im only curious.

Good to see you're so enthusiastic! So, are you going to help us catch up with Windows?

There's a lot of work to do, as I'm sure you're realising :D

To me what's most encouraging are the dramatic improvements Linux makes year over year. When you're in it every day you may not notice. But I took a year off and WOW, what a difference. Really quite amazing.

What's totally hilarious are the people claiming windoze will continue to be dominant because it's installed on 95% of PC's everywhere. I doubt that figure, at a minimum it doesn't take into account dual boot. Okay, everyone who remembers CP/M, Wordstar and VisiCalc please raise your hand. Alright, old guys, put your hands down. All those products used to enjoy 95%+ distribution and where are they now? Maybe running in a science and industry museum somewhere.

M$ ignored a fundamental rule in software: Don't get greedy. They've been boning the computing public so long and hard everyone hates them. With their sunk costs in relation to units sold, they could probably sell Winsnooze for 20 bucks and still make money. 95% profit margin and they still feel compelled to treat their users like criminals. Where's the love?

I really don't think the product is that bad, it's their business practices. DRM, per user charges, product registration, predatory business practices, back-stabbing EULA's, and version support at their whim. I don't know about anyone else, but a lot of my customer's upgrade cycle ends at Win2K, in some cases NT. The retirement "upgrade" is to Linux. I'm seeing a lot of that (one of the reasons I'm here).

Thanks for putting up with my rant. Just bugs the crap out of me the way they behave. :tisk:

PlanetNEO: So, are you going to stop them behaving like that?

You don't have to be a coder to help by the way. Anybody can get stuck in, and we NEED manpower. If you don't want to code, draw, compose music or write documentation, there's always bug triage.

Good job Charlie.. You might want to check out Freshmeat. There are numerous projects listed for grabbing TV listings. Here's a search of "tv uk":

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=tv+uk&section=projects

Sure, I'll help out. Documentation, end user training (I'm really good at that but need someone with more experience looking over my shoulder). I thought about some kind of new user orientation video. Common problems, setting up users, file structure and permissions, installing printers and software. Need a bit more experience before taking on something like that, but with some tech support...it's doable. The only hard part is the distros are different in how they do things. Telling someone to start MySQL the first time by typing "/etc/init.d/mysql start" at a root prompt might not always work. And the distros turn over pretty fast, so it wouldn't be current very long. Still, some of the basics would be a big help.

Is there something for Linux like Camtasia? That will record screen events as an avi? Could package them as streaming files, put them up online. I think it would be cool. Package them so they were slick and professional besides being helpful. Call it Getting Started with Linux. I thought it would be neat because sometimes just reading a man is kind of dry. I don't know, maybe not.

What do you guys think?

I think that'd be cool, but I don't know of any such screen recording program. You may have to find an X programmer to help with that.

Ideally of course there would be no need for such training videos. Linux would simply be obvious and intuititive to use. Right now the biggest deal is simply building the damn thing, once the Linux desktop has settled down it'll be easier to produce training materials that aren't invalidated within a few months.