I run Dosbox to play old games.

When I look at something like this that has the option to download it for Debian, will that work on distros that are based on Debian like Mint and Ubuntu??

Sadly, 1TB is as much as I could do right now.
I went with the Green because the only thing the drive will be doing is music which is mainly mp3s and pictures. 80% of the time the drive isn't even spinning.

The 250GB SSD should handle anything I want any kind of speed out of, for now.


I have a 150GB Raptor sitting on the shelf because it's "too slow" for an OS these days. That, and I found them to be unreliable as well. The PC I'm using right now has a 74GB Raptor for the OS still chugging along though.

Well Minecraft is programmed in JAVA so unless Microsoft wants to completely recode the game into something else like C++ then I don't see compatibility ever breaking for this game in Linux. If they did that however they would break every single mod out there for the game and its one of the primary reasons its so popular. I would say that MS has no vested interest in even caring to try and break compatibility.

My Steam folder definitely needs to slim down.
This is after ignoring it for many many years and just leaving things I don't play anymore.

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Nah, it's fine.

Most Linux distros don't need a lot of drive space. The root partition (where most of the operating system is stored) on my laptop is only using about 8GB, and I could slim that down a LOT if I really needed to. (Mostly programs that I've installed, used a few times, then forgotten about.) So even if you put /home (and, as a result, your Steam games) on the SSD with the operating system, you aren't going to see a storage issue any time soon.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

It might also be worth mentioning that Gnu/linux does n't duplicate dependencies so much as windows based api's and so is faster and saves space, how much difference this makes on java based games, I don't know but as a rule of thumb??

Fred.

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Something weird happened tonight and I'd like opinions on it.
As I mentioned, my two HDDs are questionable due to them all of a sudden showing 400+ bad sectors each out of no where. I noticed it after doing a Windows update and restarting at which point Windows did a checkdsk which really surprised me and lead me to looking at the SMART data.

Anyway, the system was fine for the most part until I tried Xubuntu from the DVD. I burned a DVD and tried it out for a bit just to see what was what. When I went to reboot, Windows now says it's boot manager is damaged and must be repaired but I need the disk which I have no clue where it is and don't really care right now. I've got a feeling this has nothing to do with Xubuntu but rather perhaps another sign of a failing HDD? What does everyone think?

I'm typing from Xubuntu right now as I decided to just install it on a tiny 32GB SSD I had my Minecraft on until my new drives come. So far, the main issue I'm having is I can't get Minecraft.jar to open as an execuatable by double clicking even after selecting it under preferences. The only way I can get it to open is from Terminal and then I couldn't get the game to run, yet.

I'm falling asleep so I think I need to give up for tonight. I just wanted some opinions on whether or not Trying out Ubuntu from the DVD could've had anything to do with Windows boot manager getting damaged.

Hi...

Yeah, I don't think Xubuntu would touch the MBR unless you actually went to install it to the hard drive. You might want to try getting the diagnostic utility from the manufacturer of the drive in question and see what it says.

Regards...

I wouldn't even try using a diagnostic utility. It sounds like those drives are failing very quickly. (But that doesn't matter, because you have a backup, right? ) If you haven't backed them up recently, I'd suggest trying to get the important stuff copied off of them as soon as possible.

I'm proud to say I haven't lost a single file since the 1990s.
I also keep all of my stuff separate from my OS drive so it's easy to back up. Sadly, I can't say the same for any of my friends or family that any time I need to fix something they can't tell me where all of their pictures are.


It seems really strange that the drive is failing that fast, I've never had a drive fail to be honest going all the way back to my IBM autoparking 30MB MFM drives. I didn't even realize there was a problem other than for months now Chrome was taking forever to open for some reason, which may still be unrelated. But, Windows 7 updated the other night and when it restarted it did a checkdisk on everything and that got me concerned. So I ran CrystalDiskInfo and both of my drives have a bunch of bad sectors now and pending sectors which I've never seen pending sectors before and last time I checked, they were still pending. I try to keep an eye on the SMART data from the day I install the drive just so I have an idea of what's going on.

My only guess of what happened and why both drives could be failing is either because they are both the same exact drive and age (Hitachi 1TB), or, more likely, my son is trying to learn how to walk and he used my tower to pull him self up and he knocked it around a bit when he fell back down. I know drives don't like shock like that when spinning, but I didn't think the tower rocked that much. I was more caught up in the moment than worried about the computer at the time so I didn't really pay attention for obvious reasons.



What I don't understand is if the damage was caused by that, why would more sectors be failing after the fact?

Sorry for the long response.

i think valve has ported over all their source-2 engine games into linux native versions. for the non-valve games on steam, only about half the developers make linux native versions. some mite work with something like wine but i've found wine to be hacky.
https://appdb.winehq.org/

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I'm no hard drive expert, but my guess is that it may have caused a head crash. Basically, in a head crash the heads come into contact with the drive platter, destroying the magnetic film. This causes a bunch of debris to suddenly be floating around in the drive, which can get caught between the heads and platters and cause more damage. Once you get replacement drives, it would be interesting to see if there's visible damage like in the images in the article I linked.

Don't be. Long, detailed responses are much preferred over short replies that hardly tell anything. You wouldn't believe the number of threads that I've seen where someone asked the OP to give the output of a command, and two pages later they still haven't posted it.

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by definition, live-dvd's/cd's/usb's/sd's/... do not make any modifications to the internal hard drive (unless the user manually mounts it and changes files).

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So what distros does everyone like and how do you recommend to install it e.g. separate swap partition, where to put home etc?
I still don't follow exactly what home is?



So far, I'm liking the sound of Xubuntu 14.04 lts but Mint also seems tempting? A guy I work with gave me a Netrunner 14.1 disc to try but from what I saw that's an energy pig?
I like light weight and stable.

For playing Windows games on Linux, you should investigate Crossover:

https://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/

Good luck making the switch. Your computer will be far more secure and stable on Linux than Windows. I don't play games, but I have a multimedia PC running Linux in my living room. It acts as my DVR and DVD player. I also use it as a file sever for a smaller computer in my bedroom, use it for web browsing, and sometimes do video transcoding and editing on it. I haven't rebooted it in months. It has Xubuntu installed on it with Mythtv for my television stuff. I'm notified of security updates automatically.

If you use Ubuntu or one of its variants, you will find lots of help on the internet and it can be upgraded without re-installing the OS for years. It is possible to upgrade to a newer version of the OS using the internet to download and install everything (similar to installing a new service pack on Windows).

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