I have my ECS G31, E5200, 4Gb system running..started it up with nothing else attached except monitor. It booted fine, so I set up a bootable USB drive and fired it up again. No keyboard, no mouse, no hard drive, no optical drive. Linux booted to menu..made its choice after a few seconds (no input), then brought me to the desktop. I plugged in a USB mouse and began playing games.

It just doesn't get any easier than that!

Just curious, which distro?

KDE 3.5... slax 6.0.9

why not ubuntu?

because it sucks?

of course, it's a linux distribution

I just searched for a small one that I could run off a USB drive and this is what came up. I have Ubuntu 8.10 already burned to disc, but I have no optical drive in this system..didn't bother downloading it again because my intarwebs are too slow.

And thusly is revealed the only true problem with Linux.

You do know Ubuntu 8.10 has an app specifically designed to make a bootable Ubuntu USB drive? Worked great for me.

If it had come up when I searched, I might've used it.

It's an icon right on the Live CD desktop. >_>

Tough to find when you're not running Linux, then.

No optical drive on this thing, remember?

<.<

I mean on another PC. ANY other PC. I imagine you didn't burn a disc just to use it as a coaster.

My mom is sending me her old computer in the mail (Old, but newer than mine) since she got a new one. I'm thinking about installing Linux for no reason at all on my computer, and in all likelihood, screw up my computer and not be able to use it until I re-install windows. (Windows has been giving my problems, about once a week my computer will seize up for a day)

Getting the latest Unbutnutu or whatever. Does it come with interwebs or do I need to burn a copy of FF before I install? I'm about to install in ... 10 minutes.

This edit was made in Ubuntu ... trippy. Looks cool so far! I just did a "preview." I think I'll install it.

I burned the disc because I was going to install Linux on my main system...but for some reason it won't automatically do all the partitioning stuff that I don't know how to do..so I didn't install it.

Full install of Unbutno. Like it. Faster than my clogged down windows.
Off to class, I'll have to check out all the features later.

so people post cool stuff for a person whose linux cherry was just popped.

I'm going to pull one of my HDs and try installing Linux on my other system. We'll see how it goes.

Yay!

a version of flex that isn't 11 years old.

It's not that old.

Flex 2.5.4a was released June 27, 1997.

It's almost 12 years old.

Hahah, wow. I didn't realize that. I only looked at "last updated." Why is it so out of date? Surely it's not hard to recompile it.

What is wrong with Ubuntu though? What does something newer have that this doesn't?

So far I'm liking this. While it is a bit different, (Installed VLC ... wtf, I have to click 3 things and ignore 20) it's all explained somewhere.

For one thing, I'm sure it has far fewer comma splices.

I'm not entirely sure, but it's more complex than just compiling it in Visual Studio. It depends on GNU gettext and libregex and some other stuff.

It wouldn't be that big of an issue except the GnuWin32 version of Flex doesn't produce a reentrant scanner. This is a huge deal-breaker for any non-trivial modern use of the tool. The scanner compiles fine though, as long as you have a UNIX-like environment to generate one.

Ubuntu is basically identical to Debian with some changes to make it more accessible to the average user and more practical for a desktop configuration. i.e., no 'root' account and users existing in the 'wheel' group by default.

There are basically only two types of people who don't like Ubuntu:

Paranoid schizophrenics who think people are trying to steal their star wars bestiality fanfics and insist that their home access policies should be so complex that they have to be manually configured and maintained 24/7 by a team of system administrators.

and OCD nutballs who are used to doing a whole lot of extra typing for basically no gain (i.e. C, shell and perl programmers) because it's the way they learned to do it and without even a shred of logic or reason it must therefore be the way everybody must do it until eternity.

FreeBSD is still using 2.5.4 as well, though there was talk about updating it back in January (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2009-January/002185.html). Not surprisingly, the lack of a reentrant scanner was noted in there as well. Luckily, I do not write many complicated lexers (and I prefer to take the easier route when writing parsers via Boost.Spirit and ANTLR), so I am not really worrying about it.

Sure, which are all ported, are they not?

Certainly you could compile it under Cygwin?

That's why you leverage the power of a Live CD and run gparted.

Also the partitioning in Ubuntu's installer is better than what Windows Setup gives you. Neither is meant to be a full partitioning tool anyway, and certainty not to resize existing partitions (which it sounds like you want to do... and it's tricky to resize NTFS since it's proprietary, best to use a Windows tool like Defraggler to defragment the free space on the drive and then use Vista/7's Disk Management tool to shrink the partition to the desired size.).

The Ubuntu installer had an option that looked like it would work, but it appeared to want me to make the swap file partition/etc all by myself..didn't want to do it automatically. It worked fine today when I told it to use the entire disk...didn't want to share, I guess.

I still get stomach flutters from using the middle-click paste. It's just so handy. Try it out- highlight text and click elsewhere with the middle mouse button.

I also recommend installing Wine and playing some JK

Yes, a UNIX-like environment. It's not a huge amount of effort to use cygwin or mingw for Flex and Bison but it's still not an ideal solution to the problem.

There has been a lot of noise to get gnuwin32 to update flex and bison but there has been absolutely zero movement on the front. The last I heard it's because Flex has some odd dependencies and the maintainers are pretty much deliberately preventing compatibility with other toolchains.

Still, the fact remains that the current Windows-native version of Flex is very likely the same exact version LucasArts used to build the release version of Jedi Knight and that's really awful.

didn't bother to read all the posts. I installed ubuntu about 7 months ago, and first it was pretty frustrating. Then when i learned things and got used to it, it's awesome. Now that i've customized it to my likings, i'm loving it. Now, Latis sent me his Zune, so i had to boot to windows for the first time after 7 months, and it was horrible. HORRIBLE. I cry blood every time i want to put music on the zune

edit: fixed -mb

Unfortunately I do. I find LALR grammars much more intuitive than LL(*), which is the main reason I still prefer Flex and Bison over ANTLR.

Install Amarok with MTP-Device Support so you can leave windows behind entirely.