LINUX on a PC ?

[Vx]

Has anyone installed LINUX as the operating system instead of Windows, on a PC ? How well did it work compared to windows and will windows-style programs run on it ?

[matelot]

Vx,

Yes - not very - and no.

Linux is a viable operating system, usually instead of NT4. It is UNIX based, requiring programmes designed for such systems.

It is also 'open-sourced' - i.e. you can get the code, and as such many firms produce their own version (or 'distribution' e.g. Red Hat, Mandrake, Susie, Corel etc.), provided it meets certain criteria.

It is not as easy to use as Windows: some distibutions are command-line based, others are more Windows-like. It's basically free, which means it's on the cards to take places like Asia by storm, and knock out Windows (maybe that helped Bill Gates quit!)

Many people have horrendous set-up problems initially, because you want to keep Windows in case Linux goes haywire. Then you are in to doube-booting, with Linux defaulting the master boot record. And then if you re-install Windows because IT glitched, the mbr is overwritten and you can't get in to Linux...

Search on 'Linux' for various web sites connected with it, and also try askme.com for all sorts of help.

At the end of the day, I found it interesting to look at it and experiment a little, but it sure isn't straight forward (yet).

If you're going to try it, use a buckshee machine that you can trash with impunity!

Have fun.

------------------
When I was on motor patrol...

[Vx]

> but it sure isn't straight forward (yet).<

Matelot you have answered my question completely - and the answer is I will stick with windows and use it as least as possible ! Thanks.

[Cornish Jack]

Vx
If you want to try it without losing Windows, there are a couple of programmes that allow multiple OS installations with individual booting ability. I use System Commander and it is very good. You just decide at boot-up which Os you want tgo use and it keeps the operation completely separate.

[PPRuNe Dispatcher]

Linux can run windows apps using third-party software. But they do run fairly slowly, unless you've got a very powerfull PC!

As a matter of interest, this website uses Linux as the operating system and Zeus as the webserver software.

[QNH]

out of interest linux powers most website servers, it is unix for windows after all.

[OzmateBugsmasher]

try http://www.linux.com/getlinux/ for some of the various distributions of Linux.

Linux Mandrake and Phat are pretty easy get running alongside your Win9x setup.

[justapax]

If you use RedHat 6.x distributions, the installation process is straightforward. You just sit and watch it recognise your hardware. If you have unusual hardware - or something which is new since RedHat 6.x came out - then you have to knife and fork it a bit. The old problem with soundcards and scanners which gave Linux a bad name as being unfriendly have gone in 6.x (except that you still have to enter esdctl off as a command-line prompt before using sound).

The only application I have *not* found, and that I want to use, is voice recognition software. I still have to go back into Windows for that. Many of the applications you need every day come as part of the distribution. Most others are free downloads off the net. The user interface for most of them is identical to, or very similar to, the Windows product of the same name; it's generally better to run XYZ for Linux than to try and run XYZ for Windows under WINE or one of the other Windows emulatorsas these rarely support direct video calls, which are increasingly common in modern software.

The main reasons I migrated from Windows to Linux are cost and uncrashability. Your only costs with Linux are a book to understand how to drive it (say £ 20), and the CD (£2.50) with the distribution on it. I chose to spend twenty odd quid on StarOffice 5.2 to get the manual - I use StarOffice a lot - but like all Linux s/w it is also available as a free download. StarOffice does everything Office2000 does, and is more compatible with Office2000 files than Office2000 is. No, that's not a typo; Office2000 has a bug which means that there are problems reading files that people e-mail you. This bug does not exist in StarOffice.

The only way to make Linux crash is to pull the plug out of the wall. When you turn the PC back on again, it uncrashes itself. This takes about five minutes.

Individual programs can and do crash. You then kill them. No Blue Screens of Death! Generally, if a program crashes, I find another one on the net which does the same job, download that, and delete the one that crashed; I now very rarely have program crashes either, except with games which I've downloaded - many of these are quite poorly written. But, hell, they're free, and a lot of them are quite fun. (There is about the same variety of game under Linux as under Windows).

A popular Browser, Netscape Communicator, is crashy for version 4.5, which unfortunately is the version on the RedHat disk. Download 4.7.x as soon as you have Linux up and running, or use the browser in StarOffice (very slick).

Linux does not get viruses (neither do Mac's). Viruses are a uniquely Windows disease. Nuking doesn't work either.

A very common setup is to have Linux and one or more flavours of windows on a PC. Linux comes with a utility called LILO to allow you to select which operating system to use when you boot up.

Powerquest's PartitionMagic is the utility I use for splitting up the hard drives into different partitions; Linux comes with a utility to do this, but it's not wonderful. PartitionMagic is. However, it costs money. Not a lot, though. System Commander does the same job and is also cheap.

Because most of the internet is written in Linux, many sites are read quicker if you are using Linux than if you are using Windows.

The only downside to Linux is that the default setup leaves your PC wide open to probing, as it is assumed that you will want to set up an APACHE webserver. It's a good idea to shut down all those open ports *before* you log onto the net for the first time!

Oh, and if you put linux on a laptop, it gets through batteries quicker because it accesses the hard-drive more often.

You can use Linux without typing a command-line ever, just by setting the user interface to Windows95, (fvwm95); it's very windows-like then, i.e., slow, limited, and ugly. Other interfaces are available to make Linux look like a Mac,a NeXT computer, and Alpha, etc. Most people start with fvwm95 and then find another one which is more functional and uses all three mouse buttons as their confidence with Linux grows. There are only two commands you might need, esdctl off (see above) and mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom (phew!) to make the cd drive work. A lot of applications turn the cd on for you automatically, so the latter one is rarely necessary now.

Where command-line prompts come in useful is in doing things which aren't possible under Windows. For example, Windows ignores the existence of Linux entirely. But Linux allows you to access your windows file system, and effectively run windows remotely. This is useful if you suspect a virus; shut down windows, and then read the suspect file using StarOffice under Linux. Then you can read the attachment with the evil macro or whatever without it infecting your PC. Also, you can write macros ("shell scripts" in Unix-speak); if you can remember "batch files" in DOS, these are essentially the same thing. Very useful, and disabled in Windows.

Some of the games are quite good, and all of them are free. Oh, and yes, there is a Flight Simulator! :)

[criticalmass]

Vx,

I had Slackware 96 Linux installed on a PC and configured the XFREE86 Windows System to work very acceptably. It (linux) knocked WIN95 into a cocked hat. BUT, like Windows, you have to obtain applications that run under it and a few years ago there was a real scarcity of them unless you downloaded them from the net and installed them yourself after uncompressing the archive file with all the command-line switches. In short, not very friendly, but impressive once running.

Tried re-installing it on my PCI SCSI-2 machine but the old Slackware 96 kernel is a little too old for the more modern cards etc so I will have to look at the latest releases, i. e. Red Hat or possibly S.U.S.E. I understand they install pretty easily compared to versions a few years ago.

I booted nto Linux using a boot-floppy. Leave it out of the drive and the machine booted up in Win 95.

If you can get a version that installs easily I'd recommend you try it. Corel now have released a suite of productivity software for Linux which matches or exceeds the usual bundled software you get ion a Windows PC. I was impressed with it, even though it took me nearly a week to get the XFREE86config file sorted out to run the X Windows System! I know quite a few people who have the two OSs on their machines and they co-exist quite happily. A pure Linux machine could be a very useful device as a firewall, if you have no other use for it.

"Anyone can make a mistake but it takes a computer to have a catastrophe".

[Vx]

Everyone; thanks for the advice. I have got Windows 68 running more or less sensibly so I think I will stick with it.
When I get a new laptop I will have a look at a Linux OS as per all the information, from scratch, instead of Widows.

(Although any more dramas with the present one and the thing will be on it's way to the pistol range... :))