First of all, great fourm!

After a week of messing around I have Red Hat 9.0 installed and connected to my wireless home network. The goal is to try and use it to go through the VPN to monitor the Linux machines at work with SSH.

Now that the machine appears to boot & connect to the internet, ...wheres the beef?

Many people here seem to hate the 'Evil Empire' operating system. I dont like/dislike them (although I feel competition is a good thing).

What I love on the 'other' OS is all the cool applications. What is different/better on Linux that could convince me to make Linux my main OS?

Let's break this down a bit:

Games: Forget about it. The best games are Win based these days and my cobbled-together computer for Linux is several generations behind a gaming rig. (Although, if someone wanted to point me to a Linux version of Rogue or Hack - that would be fun). So let's ignore games.

Newsgroup: What is the latest/greatest newsgroup reader? Something with Yencode support and regular-expressions for filtering? (I miss Gravity ) Is there a PAR and RAR utility for Linux that is better than WinRar and SmartPar and QuickPar for the PC? Is there something that does-it-all for multi-part binaries under Linux?

Web Surfing Ok, I am starting to like Mozilla despite a few mysterious crashes. But I have been hearing about something called "FireFox". Is this available for Linux?

MultiMedia I DO hate that RealPlayer/Windows Media Player connect to the internet and broadcast what I am watching/doing for "Market Research". Whats the best AVI/MPG/MOV/RM viewer/player for Linux - hopefully something with the latest Divx support. (How hard is it to download codex's to Linux?)

CD Ripping: I dont listen to CD's very much, but for fun, I decided to convert my entire collection of CD's to MP3's. I discovered a program called CDEX. One button reads my CD, hits a internet database to get the title and names of the tracks. Another button rips the CD putting:

• All the files under a directory with the CD title as the name
• All the tracks with the name of the songs
• Using the LAME Codex which seems to be well-respected for creating very good MP3's

Is there a Linux program that works as well?

Something Else: Are you guys all out there spending time with some other killer application I dont know about? Share please.

Well why in the world did you choose red hat!? Red hat does not come with all the spiffy neato things you are looking for. Try an ftp install of SuSE pro. You CAN however add spiffy stuff to red hat, red hat is pretty server/business oriented. IT's like poppint in Windows NT and asking why it's no fun anyways on to suggestions

Games -- tons of timewaster games like tetris and mahjhonng and the such are all over the place (add the games in Red hat to see), Unreal Tournament is for linux, and other, I just don' tfollow the games that much. I get my linux 3d Kicks from Tux Racer!! lol. Oh yeah! how could I forget, have you used wine or winex??? wine is a windows "emulator" and winex can use a lot of directx games.

Newsgroups -- never used them in windows or linux...they are around though...google.

Webbrowsers -- Here is a list. Mozilla, Firefox, Opera (my favorite), Safari, Dillo, netscape, lynx, links, links2, and many more.

Multimedia -- Real player, XMMS, KsCD, Kaffeine, mplayer to get started

CD ripping -- cdparanoia, KaudioCreator and for burning there is cdrecord, Gtoaser, Xcdroast

Something else -- One of the most fun things I have done w/ linux is used Apache and Bluefish and GIMP to make my own website, it is totally free if you don't care if your website is http://127.0.0.1/ (replacing 127.0.0.1 w/ your actual IP address) and anyone in the world can view it whenever you are online and have the website turned on. You can also buy the domain name if you want and have a DNS server. As for anything else, there is not much else to do w/ a computer on any OS that I can think of. I had fun trying IRC for the first time if you are interested in that.

Well for starters, no one is here to convince you either way. Which OS you use is completely up to you. Personally I would not like to see another M$ vs. Linux thread again, that would not be any benefit to anyone.

Not everyone hates the other OS, most still use both windoze and linux, I know I do. Linux may not be supported by every product available, this is not the fault of linux, but the manuafacturers of devices or software who do not provide the support for it.

I feel most people who have never used linux before, seem to think that it is supposed to be a alternative to windoze. But it's not an alternative, people just use it as one.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Linux-Software and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

WOAH! lol First off I didn't try to turn it into an M$ hater's thread. Linux is an OS, Windows is an OS, how is it not an alternative? If you want to say that the playing field isn't even then yes, you are right, Windows isn't that good, it just has lots of industry support and linux is really good, but not much industry support. It is up to the user if they want crashing, but tons of paid for apps and most hardware to work or if they want stability and free apps but w/ more time consumed learning it. I chose stable and free not buggy and money. Linux is DEFINENTLY an alternative, hey even DOS is an alternative, it is an OS and you can use it on that windows machine so why not try it and see ifyou like it better. I still use an all DOS machine Also I suppose linux is more server oriented than windows, but that is changing....but in the mean time take advantadge of it and make a fun websit at no/low cost.

sorry vdogvictor i wasn't implying that were, sometimes I do not word things the right way, please except my apologize

I went with RedHat because that is what we use at work for all the blade servers and we have stacks of the CD's.

And no, I dont want a Linux vs Windows comparison/war - I have capacity for both.

But people here (and on other fourms) have a bit of fanaticism about Linux. I was hoping to discover what one application, or way of doing things, sparked their change/love of Linux. (and avoid the "...because Windoze sucks" type of reasons).

So what turned you guys on about Linux?

Aren't rogue / hack both unix games anyway? Search google for nethack and if you want a gui for it look for glhack.

win2k3 server is what turned me onto linux in a much more then just oh wow look at that...

few things. i am good at windows and know it well enough to be happy in my skills, but also know what i dont know about it and am not afraid to ask before i do something stupid that could compramise/crash the system/network.

at my small business i run a win2k server as a DC and use it to thin client for QuickBooks(QB) pro so i can gain easy single point access to it from any workstation, and remote via terminal service(TS).

with win2k3 you are now cut down to 1 license for TS and this means that if you are droped or your session hangs you are fubar and have to have someone physical touch the server to repair that issue.

2nd thing with win2k3 server if you are not running winXP pro as clients you have to buy brand new license for all of your workstations, or you have to upgrade them all to winXP pro.

3rd thing, those license are leases for 18months unless you are running winXP pro. so if your company does not want to upgrade to a horrible domain workstation of XP you are force to every 18months pay M$ again for a license that you already OWN when you bought the OS. thus M$ is double, tripple, quad billing ppl etc. or forcing them to replace a good viable workstation just because.

same thing goes for exchange 2k3... every client license is only a 18month lease. this seems to be the trend of M$, thus i am looking more and more into a stable platform that can do as much and more then windows, is free, is more stable, etc.

that is what drove me to really start looking into linux to replace my network at my small business. over the next year or 2 i will be 100% linux at the office and have nothing more to do with M$ from a work stand point.

as of right now the only thing M$ offers me that linux does not is games, so i will keep a few M$ systems at the house to play games. other then that. ill be 100% *nix as soon as i get my linux skills to a level close to or better then my current windows skills.

Been here 10 years or more now. At the moment have just gone totally MS free as I no longer need my 98se running on win4lin on linux. Initially I went linux because I want a stable work platform that doesn't lock up and lose data without warning. I use it so I can get on the net without having to install a whole bunch of protection software to try and close the holes. These days it has most of the software I want, but you need the right distro. RH never included certain things - the first killer for me was when they didn't include KDE in the early days, and they lost me. They still do the same things, even with fedora. So you use something like mandrake, slack or SuSe or whatever. Mandrake will play mp3's and edit animated gif's out of the box, for example Most of the things you are looking for are available in linux native forms. Even games are available. There are linux ports for a lot of them and there is WineX/cedega that will play a lot of windows games. And you can stick with the MS stuff you need with things like crossover - ie run IE, MS Office, photoshop right on the linux desktop for like $40...

These days there is no fight with the MS vs linux thing as a user can do what they like. The choice is there and it's easier than it's ever been.

I was starting to getting bored with computers, after 8 or 9 years I wasn't playing as many games as i used too, not learning anything new. And then I discovered linux, and found it to be so versatile, compile kernels, make it fit onto a floppy disc, live cd's like Movix, knoppix, Mandrake Move and firewalls, routers you name it, you can do it with linux. This was really giving me a new learning experience.

Spyware in windoze programs was really starting to give me the S**ts. Sending information out to someone I dont know, without my consent.

I do enjoy the stability of linux, I know with my windoze boxes they can give me some greif sometimes. Now that i'm an IT student, it's a bonus to be able to setup any kind of server at home with out having to buy additional or special software and licences.

Bash...the possibilities are endless.

Do some digging, There are way more things for Linux than most people know. As far as browsers go there are tons of them. I would recommend something based on mozilla. Most of them are anyway.

Graphics, media, the possibilities are unlimited. You might want to check "abcde" (command line program) if your just wanting to get mp3's done. There are countless gui's out there as well if you want that. I don't really think anything can compare with "The Gimp" for a drawing program, If you have a year or two to learn what all it can do, considering the unlimited number of plugins and file type support. I saw a book on it one time that was pretty large, that was quite a while back. It's come a long way since then. If it won't do it no problem. Just write a plugin.


Games, yep there out there if you have a system that will run em. winex has some support for windows games, but people do write Linux games as well. The thing is you can't really say "I like this Windows game, make it work." It's not nearly that simple. You must settle for what works. 3D support is good on Nvidia and ATI cards.

email..
I would not even attempt to count them all. I would so if your into eudora / outlook check out evolution.


news..

I can't really see where it sould be a problem. There must be a wide choice of clients available for that.
Same for burning cd's or dvd's. There are so many frontends for doing that you could spend all your time trying them all. Or you can just simply do it with no frontend at all. Pop in the disk run a command, it's done.