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LAN_403

Part Scavenger

Tue Jul 10 2007, 01:24AM

Registered Member #79 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 11:35AM
Location: Arkansas
Posts: 673

Ok, I know this is about as objective as discussing which of us is better looking... I digress. I'm getting a bit lost.

What would you guys suggest for a noobie Linux distro? I'm interested in two things. I would like to run my laptop so that I can run it in class. Can I have a "standby" option so that I can boot it instantly like I do with XP right now, or rather used to? D*mnSmallLinux is looking really nice, but a bit restrictive. Wifi is VERY important. I have a Toshiba Satellite:
Intel Celeron M 1.6Ghz
256MB RAM

Secondly, for my desktop, I would like something "cool" but nothing so fancy that it bogs down like XP (or the Ubuntu Live I was playing with yesterday). Is Gentoo a good choice? I'm going to use it primarily for video and audio processing so it needs to be pretty clean and powerful. I also need to be able to hook up my Sony Camcorder via Firewire.
My desktop is:
Homebuilt
Intel P4 2.4Ghz processor
750MB RAM

MISC STUFF
1. I am VERY attached to little programs like ExpressPCB, PSpice/SwitcherCAD, Wintesla, ScanTesla... Is this going to be a problem or will WINE take care of me?

2. DRM stuff? I hear it doesn't work on Linux is that true? This won't be a big deal though, my favorite CDs I buy instead of subscribe.

3. Hot pulgging? Some of the distros (DSL and Dynebolic and GentooX) I have tried will not recognize my flash drive unless it boots with it plugged-in. Is this a limitation or something I need to fix?

4. Am I going to have a problem with drivers? Already (again on LiveCD's) I've had problems with wireless and sound... But I don't mind getting drivers.

BTW, feel free to suggest any other distros and I'll go check them out!
Thanks

...

Tue Jul 10 2007, 03:53AM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

I personally like fedora (on my pentium M 1.3GHz laptop, dual P3 .8GHz server, and P4 2.5GHz desktop, they all have a ton of ram but I never use more than a few hundred MB), and as long as you don't click the 'omg install every package known to nerd!!!' option it isn't too bad. And since it is based on redhat most anything that has precompiled binaries has a rpm for it.
Wifi support is completely independent of the distro your running, since you will probably want to use the packages directly from the source (a lot of distros will cut out a lot of the packet sniffing/etcparts). It really just depends on your card...

It does have a 'suspend' button that brings it into low power mode (which uses well under 5W judging by the internal power meter), or a hibernate button that I never use. BTW, when it comes out of suspend the wifi comes right back up.

Firewire support is pretty good, when I needed to capture from my firewire camera I installed Kino, plugged in the camera, and it JustWorked.

As to the win32 apps, you can use wine (it should work fine for most of the simple progs), although a lot of the more complex stuff will throw errors. I personally prefer to run VMware, with an XP image, for all of the complex stuff (you know, SolidWorks, MPLAB, my pic programmer, etc). Since I have more ram than I care to deal with, I created a tmpfs to put the .vmem file (I set it for 250mb, more than enough for a clean XP install) in, and it runs just as fast as it does locally, and doesn't use practically any processor time. The best part is that it can emulate USB devices, so I just plug my programmer in and use it normally!

You can't nativley play any DRMed media, except maybe with RealPlayer (if that even supports DRM), but you can play it in a virtual machine... Although if I were you I would do anything I could to 'unDRM' your media....

I belive your hotplug problem lies with a missing/misconfigured automount, you might try looking in the logs to see that a device was created when you inserted the stick, and then you just have to mount it somewhere useful

The 'drivers' really depends on the hardware. If the vendor refuses to release anything about the hardware, someone has to hack a module together by trial/error, and of course that doesn't work too well. But most devices I have come across have pretty decent support... What WiFi/sound chipsets do you have?

Steve Conner

Tue Jul 10 2007, 09:48AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

I like Ubuntu. It runs a lot faster once you install it to hard drive. Hotplugging of USB sticks, and wi-fi both worked fine for me.

DSL probably has trouble with hotplugging because it sucks.

WINE can't always be relied on, but if you already have XP installed, why waste your XP license? Just convert to a dual boot.

I'm not sure about using Linux for video and audio processing, though. My own experience with it for professional audio recording and mixing has been fairly dismal. I imagine if you only want to do consumer-level things with video it would work fine, but the problem is that free software tends to be written by amateurs who have no conception of what a professional workflow is actually like.

Alex

Tue Jul 10 2007, 09:43PM

Geometrically Frustrated
Registered Member #6 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 04:18AM
Location: Bowdoin, Maine
Posts: 373

... wrote ...

It does have a 'suspend' button that brings it into low power mode (which uses well under 5W judging by the internal power meter), or a hibernate button that I never use. BTW, when it comes out of suspend the wifi comes right back up.

Note that the information provided there is highly subjective. Suspend/resume in linux is flaky (but a lot of major changes are being made, so this should change); add on top of that the fact that a large number of PC motherboards have pathetic ACPI implementations, and you get a pretty hit-or-miss situation. You'll just have to try it. My ipw3945 wireless device needs special handling before hibernate if I'm going to expect it to come back up properly. I also have an nvidia video device, and the nvidia binary drivers aren't very sleep-friendly. An intel video device and ipw2200 wireless device would put you in good standing for STR and hibernate capabilities.

Personally, I would not recommend Fedora. rpm-based package management systems often have dependancy issues, and their installation tools are slow as hell. I would definately recommend an apt based distro.. Ubuntu is a good choice, it's a well polished distro with excellent hardware support.

It's hard to say whether or not you'll have driver problems. For a start, you'll have to tell us what devices your machine has.

...

Wed Jul 11 2007, 01:13AM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

I wouldn't let the package manager decide what distro you use, they are one of the easiest things to replace. You just install apt and synaptic and you are good to go

I will admint, that in general, ubuntu is probably better for an average user. It takes a while to get all of the color to look like something other than africa, but they make up for it by making all of your hardware work without too much messing with

Part Scavenger

Wed Jul 11 2007, 02:54AM

Registered Member #79 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 11:35AM
Location: Arkansas
Posts: 673

Ha, I'm not too big on the dirt theme either.

I downloaded Fedora, Ubuntu, and Gentoo today. I haven't tried Fedora yet, I don't have a DVD burner on this thing. Get this, I got the first distro (700.3MB) in 20 minutes!!! That's over 500kB a sec. I love school.

Anyhow, I was impressed with the new Ubuntu distro, it's tons better than my other one. And it's really funny, Gentoo is embarassingly similar to Ubuntu. They both run better than an XP clean install in the Live version!!! I'll probably go with Ubuntu, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to mount my Hard drive so I can look at my windows files like I did in all the other distros.

So far, I've tried DSL, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Knoppix, Dyne:bolic(some weird Xbox/PC version I had), and a couple others... somebody gave me a copy of Auditor. WHEEEEEEEE! That was totally frightening and thrilling at the same time!

Am I getting the right idea when I say Linux is all Linux, and the distros are like a prepackaged collection of open source junk found all over the net. So basically, Linux is like K'nex and you just *pop* in a kernel here and a GUi there...whatever apps make it look pretty...

Thanks guys, if I have anymore trouble I'll post back with my chipset and all...

krenshala

Sat Jan 05 2008, 02:27AM

Registered Member #143 Joined: Sat Feb 11 2006, 04:25PM
Location: Austin TX, NorAm, Sol III
Posts: 28

In case anyone still needed the info:

wrote ...
mount -t ntfs /dev/PARTITION /mnt/c-drive

This will mount an NTFS partition (most 2K/XP installs are NTFS) as read only on /mnt/c-drive (or whatever you want to call it). PARTITION is whever Windows lives on the hard drive; usually /dev/hda1 for PATA (IDE) drives or /dev/sda1 for SATA.

thedatastream

Sun Jan 06 2008, 08:12PM

Registered Member #505 Joined: Sun Nov 19 2006, 06:42PM
Location: Yorkshire!
Posts: 329

FWIW I'm using Debian to run my file server with no problems. Am I right in thinking that Ubuntu is based on Debian?

krenshala

Tue Jan 08 2008, 04:52AM

Registered Member #143 Joined: Sat Feb 11 2006, 04:25PM
Location: Austin TX, NorAm, Sol III
Posts: 28

thedatastream wrote ...

FWIW I'm using Debian to run my file server with no problems. Am I right in thinking that Ubuntu is based on Debian?

Unless I'm mistake, yes, Ubuntu is a Debian based system.

I use Gentoo which at least originally was Debian based as well. I like it because it lets you load what you want and only installs what the package claims is required for it to run what you want (dependencies). Its not perfect, but then none of them are. ;)

Tonic

Tue Jan 08 2008, 09:02AM

Registered Member #528 Joined: Fri Feb 16 2007, 10:32PM
Location: Warsaw, Poland
Posts: 166

I also recommend ubuntu. Keep in mind that there are many versions, which differs in graphical themes and softwares. The most basic are Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu. The most complex GUI (clicky one) can be found in Ubuntu, Kubuntu is a bit lighter and faster and Xubuntu is the most lighest version and I'm using it. I just love hot keys, power of Mighty Terminal and minimalism :) See the official webpages of those ubuntus and see which suits you.

All ubuntu linuxs allows you to choose what you want to install and automatically installs needed packages (also it's not perfect, it sometimes downloads packages that aren't completely relevant).

There's a great support - so many howto's and big, very big forum. Because of open source, I typically paste error message into forum searcher and usually find solution.

If you're used to windows programs, then you have few options:

1). Using WINE, which doesn't always work (or it will work, or not, or not completely)

2). Find linux alternatives. For example, I've found a freeware CD/DVD burning tool k3b which I do prefer much more than Nero one.

3). Using dual boot, where you have two separated partitions for linux and windows OS, but it has disadvantages - it takes disk space, changing between OStakes some time and it might be annoying

4). Using virtual machine. It's a solution I do prefer and is more comfortable thatn changing systems with restarting. Virtual machine is a virtual PC created in linux OS which allows to install another OS systems (windows, dos etc.). VirtualBox is a software I use for it. It's user friendly and pretty well builded and has freeware version.

Thanks to VirtualBox, I just click a icon that launchs virtual machine with windows OS. It's set to be seamless, so there's no desktop, only a bar with Start menu and windows - it integrates nicely with linux OS. In that way I don't have any problems with launching complex programs. The disadvantage might be a memory requirements, since with launched virtual PC you have two OS. At least 1GB of RAM would be enough (if I remember correctly, Windows XP takes 200-300MB). There's no full 3D support, so you won't play in new games (and it's the only reason I keep dual boot).

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