You got CVS working? I was always too lazy to try... Yeah, I'm sure you have your best shot with Windows, but if you pay for Winex you get Point2play which has wonderful install shield and copy protection support. I can play Max Payne, Warcraft III, Jedi Knight II, Battlefield 1942 1.3, Road to Rome, Diablo II, Starcraft, Morrowind, Soldier of Forutune II, Red Alert II, Half Life... you get the picture...

It's not without flaws, however... I can't play Jedi Knight 1 , Ghost Recon, Brood War, Need for speed underground, Rise of Nations, or Mechwarrior III. Not to mention that ALSA makes it sound like crap.

I'm just too much of an ignorant linux zealot to install Windows...

Edit: All those blue and green smiles make me seasick...
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[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited April 16, 2004).]

This thread has become a 1 on 1 conversation...

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Acutally PW is correct about his assessment of the "average joe" using the different operating systems. No, Linux is most definitely not unusable. Given time, one can learn the basics of Linux. But the operative word here is time. Most people won't or can't devote needed time to learn Linux. There are still a LARGE number of people out there who are scared s***less of computers. Don't think it's relegated to like the older generations. Spend a day with me working at my school's help desk and you'll now how technologically unsavvy people still are. But I digress.

In comes Windows. It's design is geared for the average user. I still have yet to see a bigger "button" than the default start button in Windows XP. Someone mentioned that Windows XP has to account for a lot of devices so it has a lot of default drivers and with all these devices you lose some stability. Very true. You want easy hardware detection, you take off some stability. Computers are not magic. They cannot perform the impossible.

But one should not fault the OS so much. I learned this fact during my tenure as help desk techician. 85% of my incoming calls can be reduced to six letters, PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair). I've seriously pushed the mute button and said "how in the hell did you do THAT??!" People will always break the "idiot-proof" seal.

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.

One thing that I've found is that windows xp has much better plug & play capabilities than the version of redhat that I used does. (mandrake may be different) In Winxp, you pop in a solid state usb drive, digital camera, or whatever, and its ready to run in seconds. In redhat, I heard that you have to download enhanced usb support, and then manually mount the devices after locating linux drivers for them. (if they're even supported in the first place)

Nothing against linux, but that's not working smart. The goals of many users is to get work done quickly and efficiently, not to spend extra time tweaking with their OS when they have work to do.



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Point2Play isn't too bad, but isn't all that great either. I just don't like the interface I've gotten plenty of games working under WineX, but they're just not the same. It sucks to see the fonts all screwed up, delayed sound, screwed graphics, and so on. But WineX is still a great program though - interpreting DirectX calls without reverse engineering Microsoft's propriety DLLs can not be easy

And ALSA does sound like crap I paid $400 for a professional grade sound card (96khz/24bit, Phantom power, 7.1 sound) only to find out later that it is barely supported under Linux

[edit] It seems that there were too many smilies and that I couldn't post because of the 8 images limit...


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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

I don't think you can have worse hardware detection than Debian does.

Gentoo auto-detected my system just fine. I recommend Gentoo to everybody. Gentoo is perfect. It only installs what you tell it to install. Go get it now. I command you!

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You've probably been asked this before, but have you tried Knoppix? It has excellent hardware detection, and you can run it off a CD without doing a hard-disk install [edit] and without all the trouble of installing Gentoo (which is long as hell). If ever you chose to do a hard-disk install of Knoppix, it should take no more than a half-hour. Just ask Brian


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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

[This message has been edited by MaD CoW (edited April 16, 2004).]

Linux is still growing. It's interesting to think were it will be in 10 years from now. (Oh wait, I forgot, we'll all be dead by then)

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Yeah I noticed that, Debian takes about 5 minutes to install and get setup... assuming you're lucky enough to have all the right pieces of hardware. I just gave up on Debian because every install mode I used gave me a different piece of hardware that wasn't being detected. Gentoo is certainly the most appealing distribution, but I have no inclination at this time to have Linux back on my machine.

not yet.

It's daunting to download 3 6xx MB iso files just to find out. Even with broadband, thats not a fast job.



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Ironicly, Knoppix, which has great detection, is based on Debian. (See my comment a couple posts up. )

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Knoppix uses only one CD


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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

I checked linuxiso.org and it can be run off of a cd.

Even then, it must be incredibly slow, unless it extracts stuff temporarily to your HD.



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

I've used it before. I don't paticuarily like it because:

• It uses KDE and is VERY cluttered(sorry GBK )
• It hangs every once in a while
• It's geared towards n00bs, which distracts me from doing whats important.

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[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited April 16, 2004).]

Actually, no, it runs pretty well off a CD Of course, there is a slowdown, but it's not too noticeable. Give it a shot, and if you like it, you can install to hard-disk and reap the benefits of Debian with excellent hardware detection at full speed!



PW seems to be looking for a decent Linux distro to try and to learn Linux without all the hassle of other distros. I still think he should give Knoppix a try

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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

[This message has been edited by MaD CoW (edited April 16, 2004).]

Yes, but I think it may give him a bad impression. I really hate Knoppix. Maybe it's because there is so many programs and clutter, and such little functinality. The most useful thing I found was k3b. Knoppix is not linux, it's psudo-linux. If you want what knoppix does, get Windows. If you want to learn linux, get Slackware or Gentoo. It may sound extreme, but I don't recommend Knoppix.

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I actually recommend trying Slackware. It was one of my first (satisfying) distros, and it is simple, lightweight, minimalistic, and "just works".

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I doubt that I'll get around to trying all the distros, b/c at 2 - 3 cds each (except for a few) I would run out of Cds pretty quick, plus all the bandwidth.

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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

You can load install debain from one 180mb ISO, and then let it download the rest by itself. That way you only download the packages you are going to use.

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http://www.sporkaudio.com

I can send you the CDs if you need them. I have Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, Knoppix, Mandrake, Redhat, Mepis, Componentized Linux, and FreeBSD.

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Don't get Debian, it can't detect the broad side of a barn.

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I'm using konqueor on knoppix right now. Not that bad so far, but I haven't really gotten into it yet.

What I really like is I can access my winxp partition, which is infinitely more than I could do in redhat.

more to come.

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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited April 16, 2004).]

Updates?

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so far, it looks pretty good.

It gives you lots of software, so I'm stil lfiguring out what everything does.


I like KDE better than Gnome so far. (the version of redhat that I used previously had gnom which was harder to use, imo)



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Youve got a half a brain, at least...


The problem with Knoppix's implementation of KDE, IMO, is two things... The default theme, and the color scheme. Keramik is kak-aweful, and the 'bright-beige' is just terrible. Change the both of those, and its all good.

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I used to believe that we must fight the future, lest change come without our consent. I was wrong. The truth is that we must embrace the future, for only with change can we remain the same.

No! Do not fall to KDE! GNOME is your master.

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I kind of like both of them, although I tend to prefer KDE. I prefer Konqueror to Gnome's file manager.

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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

The main thing that keeps me away from KDE is:

• The menu is... small, hard to read, not anti-aliased (I think?), and cluttered
• The default theme gave me a bad impression.

I guess you could compare KDE to Perl and GNOME to Python. GBK and all you KDE people like 100 ways to do the same thing, while I think there should only be 1 way to do it.

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OMQ, leik, 3 linux threads in a row!!!1

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It's amazing how much software debian/knoppix comes with. There's something for pracicaly every purpose.

at first, I couldn't believe there's even two office suites -- kword and openoffice. you don't even get works with a clean windows install.



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited April 17, 2004).]

I don't think Knoppix includes it, but there is also Abiword and Gnumeric, the equivilants of word and excel.

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what's so bad about it? The others look too much the same.




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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

I guess its just a matter of opinion...

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I used to believe that we must fight the future, lest change come without our consent. I was wrong. The truth is that we must embrace the future, for only with change can we remain the same.

where can I get more themes at?



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

http://kde-look.org

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I used to believe that we must fight the future, lest change come without our consent. I was wrong. The truth is that we must embrace the future, for only with change can we remain the same.

Okay, what version of KDE does the latest version of knoppix use?



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

I would tell you to go to http://art.gnome.org, but it looks like they got hacked. (running linux??? GBK blames it on GNOME ...)

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[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited April 17, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited April 17, 2004).]

3.1.something, last I checked. Its an older build.

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I used to believe that we must fight the future, lest change come without our consent. I was wrong. The truth is that we must embrace the future, for only with change can we remain the same.

Windows is just badley build simple, Users have to much freedom with it and can break it too easily. Im amazed this didnt turn into a Windows v's Linux v's Apple topic

Doesnt anyone else use a Mac?

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Attack of the Clones TC For Jedi Outcast

http://www.aotctc.com

Clone Wars Project

I hate apples. I can't freaking find my way around, and they *hid* the terminal! How do they expect you to executre commands if there's no terminal???

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