I've recently considered moving to linux, but I have never used it or encountered it before in my life. I have a few questions I was hoping some of you could answer:

1. What programs are used to connect to the internet? Are they free as well?
2. How do you play media files? Is there a 'winamp' equivalent?
3. Does linux operate just like any OS? 4.What are some of the basic commands/tips for using this?
5. Are files stored in a similar way to Windows? Is there a directory, for example, I'd be able to get into to open a file, or would I need to know where specifically it is stored?

Thank you for your help. (Please, don't let this degenerate into a Windows/Linux is better debate)

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Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream, For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not as they seem. Life is real, Life is ernest, the grave is not it's goal; Dust thou art, Dust thou returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
~William Shakespeare

1. That will all be included with it, depending on the distrubution (any newbie friendly one has what you need). If you're doing dial-up, I'm not quite sure how, but it can't be that hard. If you have cable, it's really easy. If you are getting your internet from a LAN (i.e. another machine directly connects and then shares), you probably won't have to do any work at all. And everything is free.

2. There are a number of apps that can do so. As a matter of fact, XMMS is exactly like Winamp. The best app for playing other media files, like video, is easily MPlayer. Don't even worry about codecs, it plays everything you want natively! (Includes codecs? I never really checked- but it works).

3. Depends. The command line is far more sophisticated than Windows, but a lot more powerful. There isn't just one GUI, either. There are desktop environments like KDE and Gnome, KDE being the more newbie friendly. They ship with distributions like Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE. Most others, too. There are other window managers like Fluxbox or Enlightenment, which are really lightweight interfaces; not a lot of junk, simplistic and very fast, but very different from Windows. Best stay away from those at first.

4. For the most part, yeah. Except there are no drive letters. Partitions are mounted to directories, and you have a root directory of your system, and then partitions are mounted in other folders... A bit confusing at first, but eventually you'll learn it's a lot better and easier and more flexible than drive letters. E.g. If you wanted to access a secondary drive (perhaps with Windows on it) instead of doing cd D:\Shared\Music or something, it could be (depending on where it is mounted) cd /mnt/windows/Shared/Music. Or maybe cd /mnt/12GBdrive/Shared/Music, wherever you decide to mount it (which can be changed). Same goes with CDs, DVDs, USB Flash drives, etc.

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Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.

Wait, let me get this strait... Youve never used Linux, but you want to dive into it anyway? A braaaaave soul you are, indeed.

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

What, I did that, and I was fine. I assume he's planning to dual boot or run it on another machine.

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Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.

Congradutions! Welcome to the world of linux. Make sure you don't wipe out your Windows OS in case you decide to roll back. And remember that google and linuxquestions.org are your friends!

Do you have a distribution in mind?

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

Yeah yeah, but he said "moving to...", which implies a cold switch. Thats never a good idea...

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

Gentoo is great.. *biglick emerge*
But it has no real gui's or installation instructions built in, but there is a very good guide on their site.

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[Blue Mink Bifocals !] [fsck -Rf /world/usr/] [<!-- kalimonster -->] [Capite Terram]
Applecore scowled. "What does that mean, 'real'? Amn't I real, you? If you cut me, do I not bleed? If you piss me off, will I not kick you up the arse?" -War of the Flowers
NPC.Interact::PressButton($'Submit');

Thanks for the responses guys.
Actually, I have all the computer parts to build a new one, so hopefully I can install from an ISO to the new one I'm going to build. I'm not sure if I want to attempt a duel boot...suggestions? yay or nay?

I haven't researched any distributions yet...once again, suggestions?

And guys, I'm a girl, refer to me as she

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Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream, For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not as they seem. Life is real, Life is ernest, the grave is not it's goal; Dust thou art, Dust thou returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
~William Shakespeare

oh crap...

Dont dual-boot. Its a bloody waste. Build another box, because if you try to dual-boot, youll just end up using the OS your more familiar with - Windows.



Mandrake is good for n00bs, but it requires a decent system.

Suse is good, easy to install, goog GUI administration tools, *tons* of pre-packaged apps, fairly fast on slower systems...

Redhat . . . umm . . . dont go this route. RedHat's desktop distro is dead, and Fedora Core is basically *always* unstable, so youd be smart to steer clear of them.

Gentoo, Slackware, Debian, et al . . . pains in the *** to install and configure. Maintenance is a peice of cake in Debain though... 'apt-get install ProgramName'




A female Linux user? Excceeelllleent...

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

Dual Booting is your friend. Download a good partition program (there are a few free ones) and boot from a floppy, split up your new HD in your new comp, and install a boot switcher (also downloadable). Then you can choose the partition to boot from on startup, and wa-la, two different OSs.

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The Mega-ZZTer's Gaming Haven!

Bot Pack JO | Let's Roll JK | Bespin JA | Patch Enforcer JK/Mots | Pac-Man JK

But beware when you are using a boot loader that modifies the boot sector, like LILO or GRUB, because in ALL my experiences uninstalling Linux (What? uninstall Linux? No, it's not God's gift to computers) you need to be very careful with what you are doing. I've lost at least two full computers of my work because of this.

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1 of 14 | 6-16 Never Forget. | Click.

Gentoo is not a pain; it takes a while, but it's extremely well documented, and is quite easy, albeit takes some time. A newbie could technically run it, but I wouldn't.

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Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.

Hmm.
I looked into some of those suggestions about distributions, but all of them appear to cost money... I thought linux was free

Any specific, n00b friendly free ones? Or am I a total idiot and looking in the wrong places?

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Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream, For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not as they seem. Life is real, Life is ernest, the grave is not it's goal; Dust thou art, Dust thou returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
~William Shakespeare

Every version of linux is avalable for free download at www.linuxiso.org except for SuSe, which costs money because of certain applications on it. Of course you can always try their web FTP, but that is kinda tricky.

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I appear to be the latter then. Thank you much. Right now, it looks like I'll go for mandrake...

[Actually, changed my mind. Doing the little demo-type thing for Suse off of a cd. But I just thought of an easier way of finding a good distro. What distributions do each of you use, and why do you like it?]

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Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream, For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not as they seem. Life is real, Life is ernest, the grave is not it's goal; Dust thou art, Dust thou returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
~William Shakespeare

[This message has been edited by Silent_Rhapsody (edited January 17, 2004).]

Big mistake....big big biiiiiig mistake.


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<scribbly handwriting barely resembling name>

If your looking for a demo CD, try out Knoppix. Itsa version of Debain that runs entirely off the CD. No installation, no configuration, just a GUI...


As for which distro I use, I, currently using Suse 8.2 on this workstation, and Red Hat 9.0 (Shrike) on my server.

Ive been using Suse on and off for a long time, its a good solid distro. Redhat, on the other hand, I hate with a bleeding passion. The only reason Im using it on my server, is, well, umm, I dont remmeber anymore... But Im gonna switch it soon, I swear!!

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

I would start with RedHat 9

When you get that going, there are three or four commands that are your friends:

command -h
Short help on command

command --help
Short help on command. Same as above, but sometimes used instead of -h. If one doesnt work, try the other.

whatis command
What it looks like. Tells you what the command does.

man command Manual on command.

apropos something
This beauty tells you the command to do something. Eg, you wanna burn something, but you dont know how to do it? "apropos burning" could tell you.
If you want to be able to scroll through the list, do this:

apropos burning | less

The | is called the pipe command is above your enter key. Well it is on my keyboard
With less, you can use the arrow keys to go up and down. Press q to exit.

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Founder of the Massassi Brute Squad (MBS)
Ab Hoc Possum Videre Domum Tuum
(I can see your house from up here)
"But he's not going to carry you three" said Death.
"Why not?"
"It's a matter of the look of the thing"
"It's going to look pretty good, then, isn't it" said War testily, "the One Horseman and Three Pedestrians of the Apocralypse"

"I am the signature virus! Copy me into your signature so that I can take over the world! Moohahahee!"

i have gentoo on an older laptop, and it was free. Also, if you need to find any sort of programs like games, text programs (i reccomend OpenOffice) i suggest looking at either www.linux.com or linux.org
They are both good, but i think linux.org is better. Linux is alot more battery eficient and faster than Windows XP, at least on a laptop. All linux stuff is free, except the profesional versions and stuff like that. Good luck if you decide to dowload it.

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Sometimes you drink the milk, sometimes the milk drinks you

As a server Redhat is ok . . but for Cripes sake, never use it as a desktop!


Mandrake or Suse would be the route to go. Mandrake if you want it free, Suse if you want to invest a little.

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

Im kinda liking Debian...cept I wish I could get the bloody whatis and apropos commands working.

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Founder of the Massassi Brute Squad (MBS)
Ab Hoc Possum Videre Domum Tuum
(I can see your house from up here)
"But he's not going to carry you three" said Death.
"Why not?"
"It's a matter of the look of the thing"
"It's going to look pretty good, then, isn't it" said War testily, "the One Horseman and Three Pedestrians of the Apocralypse"

"I am the signature virus! Copy me into your signature so that I can take over the world! Moohahahee!"

Are commands universal for all linux distrobutions? (I'd assume so, just making sure)

Sith:
"With less, you can use the arrow keys to go up and down. Press q to exit."
What do you mean with 'less'? is that a command or something?

Also, with commands, where exactly would you type it? Is there a specific program or window in all linux versions?

Right now, I'm 3/4 of the way through SuSE's live evaluation download. If I find I don't like SuSE, probably going for Debian or Mandrake. But my question is will I have to partition it if there's no OS already on it? It once had ME, but it appears it's been reformatted...So would that mean I could forego the partitioning part of it?

Thank you all, your help is uber-appreciated.
*hands everyone a cookie*

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Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream, For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not as they seem. Life is real, Life is ernest, the grave is not it's goal; Dust thou art, Dust thou returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
~William Shakespeare

When we say commands, we mean type them in the command line. If you run without X (the GUI), all you will see is the command line. Think DOS.
If you are running X, then you open up a terminal window. Think the command prompt in windows.

Ok "less" is a program like Notepad...kinda. It is used to view text files etc.
What I am doing is saying:

Give me the output of "apropos burning" and open it in a program called less.

Its kinda like getting the results from a ping in windows and saving them to a text file, and then opening that text file.

The pipe command is used to combine two commands together, or run them both at the same time.

Yeesh im getting sick of compiling. Ive compiled this bloody 2.6.1 kernel ive no idea how many times and it hasnt worked yet. Grrr....stinking cant find root partition error!

edit: I think these are all universal.

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Founder of the Massassi Brute Squad (MBS)
Ab Hoc Possum Videre Domum Tuum
(I can see your house from up here)
"But he's not going to carry you three" said Death.
"Why not?"
"It's a matter of the look of the thing"
"It's going to look pretty good, then, isn't it" said War testily, "the One Horseman and Three Pedestrians of the Apocralypse"

"I am the signature virus! Copy me into your signature so that I can take over the world! Moohahahee!"

[This message has been edited by SithNazgul (edited January 17, 2004).]

start simple, ask questions and remember:
irc.freenode.net IS YOUR FRIEND!
#linux
#redhat
#mandrake
#debian
#slackware
#gentoo
and the list goes on. just about any distro or piece of open source software has a support channel on that server (=

good luck and remember "Never give up... never surrender!" (thank you Tim Allen!)

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i thought about this being the anti-sig... or the sig virus... or the sig of your nightmares... but i decided that some painful rhetoric might work instead...
just kidding.

You know, if your dual booting you can just boot to a dos floppy and type "fdisk /mbr" to replace the windows boot loader. Then once in windows I used partition magic to delete the linux partitions and resize my windows drive. This was just because I moved from dual booting to have 2 dedicated machines.


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http://www.sporkaudio.com

I disagree. I'm running it on a 600 MHz computer with 128 MB of ram. I stuck a 80 gig hard drive in there, but it took up.. what? 1.5? 2 gigs? It runs like a dream.

Now imagine XP on that computer..

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MadQuack on Military school: Pro's: I get to shoot a gun. Con's: Everything else.
"I'm going to beat you until the laws of physics are violated!!" ! Maeve's Warcry

RIP -MaDaVentor-. You will be missed.

By decent I mean faster than a P2 200....

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

You call that decent?

Anyway, I have a couple questions of my own (thinking of going dual boot myself). Firstly, is there any hardware that isn't compatible with Linux? I get a few people in Fry's every now and then that ask this question, and I've always assumed no.

Secondly, how do drivers work? Would I be able to find Linux comparable "drivers" to my sound card, video card and the like? Would I notice the same visual quality if I ran say Tribes 2 in Linux instead of Windows?

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Please frame your insults in the form of a question.

"What a bunch of blowhards." - Kieran Horn

You can get most if not all hardware working, the hard part is making it all work upon installation. This is why it's best to keep your old OS initially. When I installed Debian my network card wouldn't work, ie no internet = no help.

Thanks you guys!

One last question, and then I promise to crawl back into my hole peacefully

Mostly towards Dud, but to anyone else with Mandrake: Is it necessary to have all three disks for installation? I've downloaded the first one, and am working on the second, but the first one took more than 11 hours, and I'm on DSL. What exactly is on each disk? Do you need them all?

/hands entire box of cookies to the uber-helpful massassians

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Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream, For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not as they seem. Life is real, Life is ernest, the grave is not it's goal; Dust thou art, Dust thou returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
~William Shakespeare

You don't need all the discs if you don't need the programs on those discs

The first disc should suffice, you can download the stuff you need afterwads

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Of war, we don't speak anymore

Yes, but finding Mandrake RPMS for stuff is a pain in the ***.


Download all three, youll thank yourself later.

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

Frankly I hate Mandrake. It was buggy and slow on my CPU. I switched to SuSE, and all was fine with the world (It installs via Web FTP. You can also burn the entire FTP directory to CDs if you want and install that way. But there are no real ISOs, save the FTP installation ISO and the knoppix-like Bootable SuSE on CD)

Slackware is very, very, very nice also, but it takes a bit more work, and the installation isn't as pretty as the others. (Although if you do a full installation, it's easy as pie. It just doesn't look very good. Sort of like Bios-type graphics. But its fine as long as you don't get scared.) I used Slackware for a long period, but then scrapped it to try other distros.

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.hack//SIGN - The World - Just Believe

(Yes, This is Cool Matty)

Oh. heh. Nevermind.

I just figured that a rig like that (minus the 80 gig) wouldn't cost very much.

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MadQuack on Military school: Pro's: I get to shoot a gun. Con's: Everything else.
"I'm going to beat you until the laws of physics are violated!!" ! Maeve's Warcry

RIP -MaDaVentor-. You will be missed.

I started as a linux-noob on Slackware and then moved on to Gentoo. The installation (along with the step-by-step instructions in the manual) was very newbie-friendly and also explained all steps very well. You have the choice between a full-automatic install, a half-automatic install where you install most programs yourself and a manual install where you install everything by hand.
The best thing about Gentoo is a little command called emerge. With this program you can install almost* every linux-program on the world and it also checks if you need any other programs/libraries to run what you want to install.
IMHO you can only run into problems when you have a slow internet-connection (I'm on dial-up ) as you download most of the stuff directly from the internet.

* there is a hourly updated program-list you can automatically download with emerge. If you want to use a program that isn't on the list you have to install it manually which can be pretty hard if you're used to windows

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Sorry for the lousy English

W00t!!!!!!!!!
I come to thee, for the first time ever, off SuSE linux.

Heh, now all I need to figure out is how to change the desktop backround...

/says screw it, and tosses the Keebler cookie elf in massassi's general direction.


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Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream, For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not as they seem. Life is real, Life is ernest, the grave is not it's goal; Dust thou art, Dust thou returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
~William Shakespeare

I assume your in KDE. If your not, log out, and switch. Right. Now.


1) Right click on the desktop
2) Click "Configure Dekstop..."
3) Click "Background"
4) Click the "Wallpaper" tab

Theres a crapload of wallpapers that ship with Suse, but your not limited to those...

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

Expanding on that, if you have Windows XP on dual boot, it's really ironic and funny to use the default Blue sky and green grass background that comes with XP on Linux.

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.hack//SIGN - The World - Just Believe

(Yes, This is Cool Matty)

I actually figured that out about 10 seconds after posting that... lol

Once again, much thanks to all you very helpful massassians.

[One last newbie question, I swear. If I am in KDE mode, how do I get to the X window?]

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Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream, For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not as they seem. Life is real, Life is ernest, the grave is not it's goal; Dust thou art, Dust thou returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
~William Shakespeare

[This message has been edited by Silent_Rhapsody (edited January 18, 2004).]