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I am doing a research in my tech. writing course about installing linux in one of the computer labs.
Basically, I want to find out about new Linux users' experiences with their system.
So, if you just made the switch from Windows to Linux, and find that the Linux system you installed is very easy to use, please share your opinion and experience with me.
Certainly . I moved to Linux (FC2-Fc3-FC4) from Windows XP.Though I configured my Dell600m Laptop into Dual Boot , I restrict my wife a lot when she tend to use Windows XP.
My Experience :
Initial Stages : Dec 2003-June-2004 : Quiet a hectic one -unable to move to Linux or not .Lot of time went on in decision making whether to move to Linux or not.
From July-2004 to Dec-2004 : Good learning period I would say.In this period , I would graduate from a totally novice Linux seeker to a medium linux users with somebit of developing stuff.
From Dec-2004 to Till Date : It's a remarkable one.Had a chance to se linux t flourish from nothing (In enduse-layman point of view) to a "BIG" yes from my parents/wife to move over to Linux (FC4 to be precise).
But , I do have issue like cinfguring the system to My wife's/Parents taste's as they are well worsed rather spoiled by MScharacter.Finally , I am in a position to teach other what's the benefit of using linux vis-a-vis problems with MS.
Most important of using Linux which users want to adhere to is ,
1.Please be very acrefull about what you are doing.Because , in MS , you have rollback in XP(systemrestore point) where in ther is no such thing in Linux as of now.
2.Be very choosy , as you have hell lot of rpm which does the same and its your responsibility to see what you want.
3.Please bear in mind that , free os means , its very powerfull and for that u need to be responsible enough and gather all the info how much possible before you do it..else...problem in linux with scare you to death and lead you to hell(MS) again.
4.Remmeber , that with power you shld be responsible enough to select the right source of information.I would say , best source is this forum ..
That's it as of now..anything else .. will share it...
thank you so much KCPavan. Any other linux distributions I should be looking at?
The computers in that lab have NVIDIA, and I have heard many distros have a problem with that. However, I don't know about now. Maybe that's old news.
I'd also like to know about any other distros. Any new users switch? How do you like it? Was install easy? How is the package management? is the package management free? Is it as easy to use as Windows? Can Windows users easily make the switch?
How about Debian, Knoppix, Mandriva?
Also I'd like to know about Ubuntu. I hear they mail you a free cd w/ free shipping.
Please, all the new users, share your experiences. It will help my research tremendously.
thanks again pavan.
Last edited by machinated; 06-19-2005 at 10:51 AM.
I may not be the typical linux newbie. I'm a Windoze system admin by trade and have gotten sick of having to upgrade my hardware constantly. Add to that the activation codes, and that made me want a switch. I have several spare computers on my home network, so started messing around with RedHat 8 that I got in a book. I decided that I wanted to learn how linux worked. I started doing a little research and found several distros I wanted to try. Went to an on-line CD warehouse store and ordered a bunch of distros.
Loaded up Mandrake 10 and it worked fine. Easy to install and recognized all my hardware. Played with that a little and loaded up Mepis. Now this is a distro that I could even get my mother to use. Flawless installation. Recognized all my hardware. This installed so smoothly that it could easily be a commercial distro. Next it was on to Vector. Pretty decent installation, and it was really fast. I did a little playing around and decided that since it's Slackware based, I should try Slackware. Wipe the drive and install Slackware.
Slackware is my distro. My biggest reason to move was to learn linux. Slackware lets me do this. It's definately not a distro that I'd have my mother try, but it's really good for the computer saavy user. You do a lot of configuring of this distro, and there's a lot of work done on the command line. That's what has me hooked on this. I started working with computers regularly around the time of MS-DOS 4. At that time, the command line was everything. So Slackware sort of takes me to that time when to work on a computer you had to know what was going on. You were expected to put a little time and effort into making things work.
As it stands now, I just wiped my home server and loaded up Slackware. In the course of the past week, I have gotten the server set up with SSH, DHCP, FTP, Sendmail and Apache. Next is Samba so I can use it for a file server. My thinking is that what you get out of linux is proportional to what you put into it. If you do your homework and put in some sweat equity, you can make that PC do just about anything.
My first experience with Linux was about two weeks ago - I downloaded Knoppix live CD... I messed around with taht for a bit, and at the same time I had a PC my friend gave me to fix. First I put XP Pro on it, but he wasn't ina rush to have it returned, so I took at whack at a distro - I chose Debian. It took a while to get it to wotk because I had to guess at the video drivers, then I ran into mouse problems and ended up formatting and installing the whle thing 5 times... But once I got it working it ran great. Because my friend has a dial up connection I figured I'd have to reformat and put XP back on. So I did but I split his HDD partition and now he has a dual boot system. The dual boot setup went without a hitch.
I decided several months ago on a whim that I would dump windows and switch to an open source OS. My motivation: ideological. It took me several weeks to actually get linux to work on my computer, I ran into a slew of hardware problems, burning problems, internet problems, and dozens of failed distros before I finally suceeded with RH9. When it finally worked, I was just shooting in the dark trying to solve the slew of problems I had. To top that, my internet wasn't working so I couldn't get direct help from anyone on the site. After I invested in an ethernet cable and switched the buggy RH for SuSe9.3 with working internet, through hard work and online support my confidence grew rapidly. I'm now happily commited to never using another windows product again.
I decided several months ago on a whim that I would dump windows and switch to an open source OS. My motivation: ideological. It took me several weeks to actually get linux to work on my computer, I ran into a slew of hardware problems, burning problems, internet problems, and dozens of failed distros before I finally suceeded with RH9. When it finally worked, I was just shooting in the dark trying to solve the slew of problems I had. To top that, my internet wasn't working so I couldn't get direct help from anyone on the site. After I invested in an ethernet cable and switched the buggy RH for SuSe9.3 with working internet, through hard work and online support my confidence grew rapidly. I'm now happily commited to never using another windows product again.
Distribution: Slackware 13; Ubuntu Raspberry Pi OS
Posts: 255
Rep:
Well I've used Linux for more than 10 years now, so I'm no noob by any stretch of the imagination , but I did want to share a few thoughts with you...
First, I can still remember my first few installs. It amounted to what is now a Slackware install, but using floppies. Like 30 of them, give or take. The install process was very time consuming! Not only did one have to locate the individual disk images (remember - 30!), but they had to be the same version. 1.0 didn't play well with 2.0. Oh, and if you didn't have that Internet thing, you were dialing in BBS systems, and the chances they had the complete set? Pretty slim usually. Then each disk file that was downloaded had to be copied to its own floppy. Now you've already heard in nearly every post that for a new user a typical Linux install turns into... well... several Linux installs. Even in the early days this was the case. With floppies. 30 of them, ugh! (With a dialup Internet connection, one could install three disksets, configure dialup internet and let the remainder of the distribution download overnight. Then install from the downloaded directories.)
The absolute best innovation for the PC was the CD-R, I just want to put that on the record.
There is a lot of trial and error with installing, especially when dealing with the partitions, packages and dependencies. Luckily the newer releases ease this a lot. Linux has moved from the "School of Hard Knocks" learning curve syllabus, to something a little friendlier. At least the instllation process holds your hand now while you're being knocked around...
The other thing that has not been brought up yet (at least not in this thread) is software installation outside of the OS. I think a lot of people try out Linux because it is free and one is not locked into Bill's vision of a properly configured system. (Wow, just read over that and had to laugh! What an oxymoron that is!) There are a lot of folks that had no idea that when software is installed, it has to be compiled. Now it does not take long to remember: "./configure;make;make install" which will accomplish this in the vast majority of cases. But this is such a foreign concept! And difficult to get a grasp on for some. Not their fault by any means, but this has been brought about by Microsoft and software developers that have created a planet of appliance operators. There is a lot of resistance to having to go throuth this compilation process, but if one looks at the big picture, the software they end up using is basically custom made to fit the system it was compiled on.
OK, I've probably taken up too much bandwidth by now, but I did want to share one more thing. I've been a Slackware user from day one and can do a brand new Slack install (one time!) blindfolded and with both hands tied behind my back (including configuration of network and gui, etc etc ad nauseum). Total time? Couple hours, not any longer than Windows, in fact less time if you take into account all the other stuff that has to go on Windows... MS Office, antivirus, and such. But I've recently downloaded Fedora Core 4 and this new fangled, gui driven, hand-holding install process has me in fits! I think I'm on my 3rd or 4th attempt now....
Cheers!
Oh, one very last (no really!) thing: I have to disagree from the earlier post that Linux has grown from a nothing system to something usable. Even in the mid 90's I was using Linux in a IBM mainframe IT shop as a platform I could communicate with several other systems for data conversions and transfers.
I hate to be particular about some of the comments in this thread, but what I find to be so hilarious about comparisons between different distributions is that aside from patches that might be specific to a distribution, all linux platforms are essentially the same. The same. When you say Linux, you really mean the kernel. Aside from patches, what is different? How recent the software is and, most importantly, the packaging system.
The only way to become a true linux guru would be to use LFS--Linux From Scratch. You have to compile everything from source. I did it a couple of times a few years ago because...I'm crazy. Gentoo might be close, but it has a system built around the process of compiling. LFS is truly just pure compiling.
To address your question: I went from Red Hat to Slackware to Debian to LFS. Now I use Fedora out of convenience. Updating with yum is unbelievably easy.
As for NVIDIA the support is far better than that of any other video card company.
Both of them are opinion pieces .. the second link ... is an older post, where i was a litttle angrier, the first is reasonably informative, but rather general - i hope this helps...
Additional:
Kroeneker (sorry if i misspelt that i don't have the post handy) is quite right - basically all Linux distros are the same, they are linux. However that does not make them same, or similar. Quite the opposite. Some distro's are aimed to make server work easy, some are more suited for desktop deployment, and others are for small system deployment etc etc.
The point is, although Linux powers the distro, ease of use and the range of tools supplied varies - in short you can't do anything with every distro, unless you customize it.
The recency of the software is a big factor also. Take Fedora Core, which is a beta release of the Red Hat, it is cutting edge, often times painfully so. Another issue is that some distros (and again Red Hat / Fedora Core are a common culprit, but most distro;s do it) "enhance" the different packages. For one thing that makes the packages incompatible with other distros, and for another this is a major cause in breakage. I generally oppose the notion of this sort of customization, but in the end it can benefit overall development of titles so it isn't all bad - the period of distro releasers hacking stuff can be ... unpleasant.
Being a Guru at anything does not mean you do the hardway with ease - being a guru is knowing your stuff, being able to resolve problems. Bulding LFS does not make you a guru at linux any more than drinking 5 cups of coffee everyday makes me a Coffee Guru. That said, anyone that can do an LFS is doing Ok and anyone getting into it is going to learn a lot. GNU/Linux inside out ... provided it isn't an issue of information overload.
Nvidia's drivers are better than anyone elses in terms of being up to date, and working well (including ease of installation) - Open source drivers would be nice (but I can't see it happe any time soon) and ATi picking up it's game would go a long way too ...
There are plenty of gfx cards out that are fully supported in GNU/Linux (or X11 anyway) which are not accellerated, and frankly, if you are running a server, why would you run a 3D accellerator in it? (let alone use it)
Distribution: Slackware / Debian / *Ubuntu / Opensuse / Solaris uname: Brian Cooney
Posts: 503
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Quote:
Originally posted by Fritz_Monroe My thinking is that what you get out of linux is proportional to what you put into it. If you do your homework and put in some sweat equity, you can make that PC do just about anything.
F_M
So true, so true.
Im going to be conducting an experiment of my own soon.....
My girlfriend can hardly find the start menu on windows..... so im building her a redhat box. Im gonna prove that most peoples problem with linux is having learned windows first
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