Most ,if not all of the viewers of this site have been using one of two operating systems.
There are those of you who have a MacIntosh,or a Apple Power PC G4,a newer G5,or the newest Intel-based Mac,which uses the Apple software OSX 10 or whatever version is installed on your system.
Then there are those of you using an IBM compatible system ,usually with a Pentium or rough equivalent processor such as an AMD. These usually have the Windows operating system on them. Most users now are using Windows XP,or maybe Windows 7, which is the latest offering from Redmond.
Then there are those of you already cruising around the Internet on a Linux distro.
Here is my page with some information on where and how to get Linux up and running on your system.
First ,the good news.
This is usually a free operating system if you can download
from the internet.You have your choice of several distributions as they
call them from various groups or companies.
Some of the more well known sites are here. Just click
on their logo's to go to the homepage.
RedHat Linux
Debian/GNU Linux
Slackware
What is Linux?
So far the one question you might have right now is what
the hell is Linux?
Well to begin with ,it's a fast and very powerful
operating system which has a lot of things going
for it. The main difference between Linux and Windows
is one word. STABILITY!!
How many times has Winders gone and cracked a pane or
two in the pc not to ever boot up again ? Or had a program crash
and wiping out everything else in the meantime. IF you're like me,it's
happened a lot,even with sufficient memory to run some big programs.
Linux offers a totally different way of using the memory,cpu
and other drives on the pc.
Using mount points to kickstart floppy drives,cdroms,and
secondary hard disks,that alone saves a bit of space in the memory
resident areas.If it's not needed ,it's not mounted.
Linux also has a variety of desktop environments as opposed
to Windows,and maybe even Apple OS's.
The two main desktop environments are Gnome and KDE.
Both of which offer a variety of programs to suit your needs. Also
which are for the most part fully compatible with one another without the
use of special programs to switch back and forth. Try running an
Apple application in Windows and see how far you get before it crashes
without the help of a Apple\Windows switch program which takes up even
more space on a hard drive.
And last but sure as hell not least, the entire
program is available to modify in whatever way you care to as long
as you don't mess with copyrights of the original distro. They provide
the source code for the entire program ,unlike Microshaft ,who is now being
sued over this very same issue by various programs
I wouldn't be lying if I told you this machine was
up and running on both Windows and Linux.
How did I do it?
I started with Windows 98 on this elcheapo Emachines
366i2 a couple or three years ago. It's original configuration was a TG-Florida
mainboard based with a Celeron 366 Mhz cpu, onboard sound by Cirrus
Logic,4 megs of AGP video with an ATI Rage2Turbo onboard chip,cheapass56k
Winmodem by Rockwell/Conexant,32 megs of ram,and a Samsung 4.3 gigabyte
harddrive.
After tinkering with it some and getting tired of the
usual MS(Microslut) crap going on , I first tried out the WinLinux
program on the original configuration . I soon found out why Winmodems
are so cheap. It's because they are software driven and the cpu(in this
case a Celeron) does all the arithmetic.
So I took a step back and installed an ISA internal modem
of only 33.6 kps capability and got online with it. This version of Linux
runs in the Windows environment and boots from Windows. It uses the DOS
type of disk management and file management ,so it wasn't much different
from Win 98 in many ways. But,it gave me an idea of what Linux was about
and that's what I wanted.
A little more time spent and aging not so gracefully
with Win98 as that main culprit on my pc, I went for the full monty. I
found a 20 gigabyte hard drive and another memory chip to boost me to 96
megs.
I went out and bought the standard edition of RedHat Linux 7.1 for 49.99 at Staples.
What I did here was somewhat unconventional,but it works.
With the TG Florida mainboard bios only allowing for
harddrives up to 8.4 gigabytes in size,I was forced to use the Maxblast
software to fake my pc into accepting the 20 gig hd.
I installed Win98 on that drive and made it my secondary
master. I took the 4.3 gig hd and made it my primary master(first to boot)
and installed Linux on that one. So ,with a boot disk,since Maxblast
wiped out the configuration ability of Linux,I can boot into
either Win98 or RedHat.
I should sue Microsoft for making such a crappy product,but
I leave that up to the Dept.Of Justice.
Ever since I installed RedHat, I have very rarely
used Windows.
The list is endless on what you can get for free if you
have a dsl isp. If you are like me and have the rinky dink canonastring.com
isp ,you might be better off buying the boxed set of Linux from whatever
distro you choose.
IF you download from a dialup modem be warned.
Some installations take up 7 cdroms so you are looking at about 4 to 7 gb
of downloading to do. And it's a good idea if you have a cdburner,so
you can just burn the install files to cd and boot into
the install program.
I took the easier way after trying for days to download
Mandrake Linux and not getting anywhere on a 56k(cough cough ) connection,and
just bought the RedHat from Staples for 49 bucks.
Installing was very easy and it's almost idiot proof.
It gives you the choice of installing automatically or dyi.
It gives you the ability to choose exactly what programs
you want and which if not both desktops you want to use. I am partial to
Gnome since it seems to have everything I want and it's fast as hell.
I get a nice file manager that is fast and easy
to use. A kickass graphics program called GIMP I have been dying
to see just how much I can do with. Netscape Communicator and Mozilla are
the featured Internet browsers, I have Gnumeric to open up my shortwave
frequency databases.
I get a lot of programs for the money and even
more are available for free. If I was to add up all the costs of
buying full ware products for the pc (versus shareware/crippleware- try
before buy ) for Windows based pc's I would probably have spent
at least 400 dollars minimum.
At the moment, I am creating this webpage using
the RedHat Linux and Netscape Communicator.I'm sure that out there somewhere
there is a html editor that's dying to get downloaded and tried out
:)
Well, guess what? I have found an html editor . Located at http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/.... this site has a pretty nice litlle nice html editor called Bluefish. It is in a form that can be installed using gnorpm and it already has a nice little user interface.
In short I have nothing but good news to say about this operating system here . The fact that I rarely ,if ever ,boot into Windows says it all I think .
Everything that was above here was written sometime back in 2000,if I remember right. Now this is 2010 and a lot of things have changed.The distro's have changed,the computers have changed,even the internet has changed.
The pc I use now is a self-built computer.After spending 4 years in NYC working for a computer store,I learned a little bit on that subject.The pc is based on an Asus mainboard with an Intel Core2Duo E8200 cpu rated at 2.66 Ghz. I overclocked it a little to 3.2 Ghz stable.There is 7 GB of DDR2 800 Mhz ram installed,Nvidia 9800GT PCI-Xpress video card with 1Gb of memory,and for listening to my large MP3 collection an Asus Xonar DX PCI-Xpress 5.1 surround sound card.For data storage of all types I have installed a 750Gb WD Blue,500 GB WD Black,and a 160 Gb WD Blue hard drives.For switching between operating systems, I use a SATA hot swap bay and have 4 various hard drives loaded with flavors of the day .
At the moment, I am running the Mandriva 2010 x86_64,OpenSuse 11.1,Windows 7 64bit Ultimate,and Windows XP64. I have the usual suspects of Gnome and KDE,as well as some other interesting desktop managers and environments.For a graphical desktop that reminds me a bit of both Gnome and KDE there is XFCE 4.When I want a minimalist approach,I boot into blackbox or fluxbox,both of which work rather well,and I can edit the menus anyway I see fit.
There have been a lot of changes in Linux since I first started off with RH 7.1 a number of years ago. I am not anything close to a linux developer or anything like that,just the average end user who appreciates nicely written software.
If there is one main gripe I have,it's the new multimedia rights issue.Ten years ago,when you installed a distribution,you could count on playing all your music right out of the box.Now the rights of certains programs has been an issue when it comes to various codecs being available for free.YOu have to hunt around for specific files to make that pc play mp3's or even music you downloaded from Itunes.The other issue has to do with video drivers.ATI and Nvidia are the largest playmakers in the graphics business, however some of their open drivers do have issues at times.For people using older mainboard-based video chipsets,this probably won't be an issue.
For internet browsing,the always useful Firefox works well. For hanging out on IRC,Xchat or BitchX does that for me very well.For playing my MP3's Rhythymbox,Amarok,or XMMS2 works pretty good.
There is a lot more about Linux online at various sites,but this is just a little bit of my growing experience with it in various flavors and sizes. If you want more information on it, I'd suggest typing in Linux on google.com and seeing what you come up with.
