another vote for Ubuntu - found it the easiest installation for a 'newbie'
try it here

THank you Jet II, looks like I'll give Dapper Drake a shot, pending of course more vehement recommendations from other Prooners :)

Breezy Badger, Dapper Drake, Feisty Fawn...

And they wonder why normal (boring) people think geeks are crazy! :}

Ubuntu (Kubuntu if you prefer a more Windows-like appearance - I prefer KDE to Gnome anyway) or Mepis.

I'm a Mepis guy me'self. Forums are better. Whole distro benefits from having Warren as the Fuhrer.

Welcome to freedom!

:ok:

Mac

Latest Ubuntu (feisty fawn, or 7.04 ) just came out of beta and comes as a 'live CD'. I think the final acknowledged probems were mainly hibernation/standby related. It's the first release that 'just works' with my latest motherboard. Hard drives are cheap, just install it on another disc and dual boot. Well worth playing with.

Mepis has slightly better hardware detection capability than Ubuntu/Kubuntu in my opinion. Mepis also has multimedia capability as distributed , whilst Ubuntu and derivatives do not include the "non-free", as in proprietary, code such as mp3 codecs. So for a live cd linux taster I would recommend Mepis. Knoppix has more geek tools than Mepis and is therefore a better emergency toolset live cd than Mepis but the menu structure is a bit messy and potentially confusing. Mepis has an icon on the desktop to initiate an install to your hard drive whereas to install Knoppix to a hard drive partition you have to run the command "knx2hd" in a command shell.

If you do decide to install Linux on a hard drive partition at a later stage, then Mepis is still good until you may want to install several flavours of Linux on different partitions (I have 3, one for working use and 2 experimental). In that case the Mepis installer will only write the Mepis instance into the grub boot loader and ignore the others. You will then have to modify the \boot\grub\menu.lst to add the other instances of Linux, or run grub install again from a knoppix live cd

Ubuntu claim to have addressed that in the latest release.

The Feisty Fawn / 7.04 Tour page includes a couple of updates:

This is a departure from earlier releases - as you say, it used to be down to the user to manually install anything that was proprietary or licenced.

RC

Just popping in to say that I'm posting this from Firefox inside Ubuntu's Dapper Drake LiveCD running off me computer! :ok:

So far so good - had to configure my network options - was wondering why the internet wasn't working and then had a Doh! realization. entered my local IP and default gateway and away she goes!

Now only if this thing would allow me to change from 640x480 to something less ghastly.... well, here goes some more tinkering!

Thanks one and all, and stay tuned for more silliness!

(Might even download Mepis tomorrow night and give that a shot too.... I love my DSL connection!)

Downloaded Kubuntu 7.04 yesterday and just loaded into one of my experimental partitions. Attempted to play an mp3 file and Amarok (a multimedia player for those that may not know) put up a dialogue box asking whether to download the codecs required (good) but then hung, not responding (bad). So it appears that there is probably an error in a script or perhaps it is not finding the expected files in the scripted respositories.

I tried using automatix to configure the codecs, but the automatix2 script was not in the directory described on the automatix web site. So for now the automatic configuration of proprietary codecs doesn't work. Shame. Otherwise the kubuntu install provides a clean, an unconfusing desktop with a clear menu structure that provides one application for each commonly used pc activities except games - there are no games loaded. Additional applications, including games, can readily be added using the adept package manager, but for a taster of what linux can do I think I still recommend mepis before kubuntu.

Is there any way of accessing your original hard drive from a LiveCD OS? Say if I wanted to play music from my hard disk while running Dapper Drake?

I don't think so, but since I am yet a n00b, I sit to be corrected. Of course I could load them on a USB drive and access the drive through linux, but that is just one option...

Sure is - you need to mount the device to access it, but this is usually simple. I can certainly do so with Knoppix.

I'm sure that others with greater experience can give you more details.

SD

I started with Knoppix when it was the only "boot from CD" that I knew about. It's pretty impressive. If you have a dud Windows installation, it's great for recovering stuff you don't want to lose. I've given out several Knoppix boot CDs to folks who've asked my help to recover their stuff.

I've got an old PC here with Mepis, Fedora, (k)Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, and Knoppix on it. Mepis was probably the quickest install, and did very well at finding all my hardware. It did extremely well booting from the CD.

Fedora has been the most "competent" - more of the obscure stuff worked first time round with that. It is a little harder to set up than Mepis (in my experience).

Networking and sharing folders/files/printers is difficult with Linux - Fedora was best, Mepis tricky. I've sussed it now, but the utilities don't seem to do what they say on the label. Plain old text editing on the Samba config file sorts it.

To be honest, Ubuntu didn't do well on my machine. There wasn't much included software, and download/install took forever. Mine's not sure whether it's Ubuntu or Kubuntu now, and does wacky things.

If you're just starting with Linux, download the Mepix ISO, burn a CD of that, and boot from it. You'll be impressed.

If you decided to use Linux as a network server, go through the normal setup routine. If it works, you've won. If not, send me your smb.conf file and I'll send you back the Keef version.

This afternoon I downloaded and installed Kubuntu and I'm using it now.
However, if my experience is anything to go by, it is likely that you will experience difficulty in connecting to the web.
In the past I have tried Suse Linux 10.0 which would connect to the Internet using the KDE browser but resolutely refused to do so when using Firefox.
As that was my preferred option I didn't pursue that distro any further.
I've also tried two versions of Ubuntu with no internet connectivity.
I'm using KDE at the moment but I suspect that if I try Firefox (as above) it too will fail.

Be prepared!

Can't say I've ever had any trouble with any distro (even Damn Small Linux and Puppy). Never had to do anything.

How do you connect? Dialup? ADSL? Cable?

Good Evening, Mac..........

I use a Safecom SWAMR-54108 broadand router. I did consider bringing out of retirement the original ADSL modem that my ISP supplied and seeking out the necessary driver but didn't pursue it any further.
Carrying out both web and Distro Forum searches reveals that the problem is far from uncommon, and in many cases insoluble.

N o t a

Edited to add:

In the last few minutes I've installed Firefox which seems to be working fine.
Another of life's little mysteries!

With all the Linuxes on mine, I've not had a problem getting different browsers to work - if one does, they all do. Sometimes it takes a while to set up the connection to the router (it's all cabled or wireless LAN in my house).

Networking the different machines can be a challenge with Linux, although it's normally very simple with Microsoft (unfortunately also a bit insecure, but that's what firewalls are for).

I like Kanotix (www.kanotix.com) although unfortunately the distro is having some upheavals. It's a Knoppix based distribution with some good improvements and some really good scripts. Being Knoppix based means it's also a Debian based system so benefits from Debian's excellent package management system.

It has rather good hardware detection, a plethora of software and useful fora/forums if you have a problem. It's the only distro I've found that got my laptop's winmodem working automatically.

Keef,

Thanks for your advice. I was reading up about Mepis last night and was very impressed. Decided to download it but after around 70% the website went down at the other end. Could not resume as I was forced to use IE's in built downloader, my Firefox has been messed up by Download Accelerator on uninstalling the latter. (If I wasn't in the presence of a chaplain here, I'd have cursed it :} ) I'm planning to give it a shot again, tonight.

No, my use of Linux will be limited to personal computing only, there will be no networking (in the LAN/WLAN/WAN sense), only the use of the internet through an ADSL line. So I guess I have no worries on that front.

But meanwhile will try to mount my existing hard drive from the Dapper Drake CD and see if I can get hold of data. As you say, will be most useful for data recovery. (Touch wood)

Now if only I could get it to run at 800x600.... Googling for a solution has not helped so far, tried to set it before installing, after installing, via the GUI and terminal both, but no luck.

AS A COMPLETE BEGINNER with Linux, I have downloaded and run both Ubuntu and Knoppix(5). Of the two, K seems to be more 'intuitive' during boot.

However, try as I may, neither will recognise/see my wifi. Is the fact that I have disabled SSID and MAC limited it the reason?

Getting Linux to "see" WiFi is a bit of a black art. It will work but easy it ain't. I got my Linux PC happily accessing my LAN via WiFi - using a PCMCIA WiFi card: the PC has two PCMCIA slots - leftover from an earlier Jeppesen/Garmin GPS card writing setup.

What I'd do is to make it as easy as possible for it - turn on DHCP and SSID and all the rest, then get it working, then tweak.

I've not tried lately - next time I have a spare evening (June looks promising) I'll put the Mepis Boot CD in the laptop and see what happens.

So I put the Mepis CD in the laptop, and switched it on, and ten minutes or less later, here it is connected to PPRuNe using Firefox with NO configuring or anything else needed! I call that pretty good.

It's using the wired LAN, though. The next step (back soon!) is to try the WLAN.

Edit: no, it can't see the PCMCIA or the USB wifi devices. I don't think WiFi is built into the boot CD.

Stoopid disk wont boot at startup. Yes, before you ask, boot from optical drive is enabled and is number one priority, wouldn't have got Dapper Drake running otherwise.

Maybe I have to download a new copy, but this one was off the VTech server which is listed on the website? :confused:

Oh well, another mirror will have to do.

I think I'll blame slim_slag :) - after seeing the comments on Ubuntu 7.04 in this thread I decided to go for broke & upgrade my own PC.

The good news Keef is that the new 7.04 saw my USB Wireless adapator & configured it automatically from the live CD - Wow!. Bad news is that once installed I had to manually configure it, but it seems to be working fine now. Compare that to Ubuntu 6.10 where it took me a week & a lot of compiling of code to make the device work so that at least is impressive, and dare I say even more than Windows XP could do.

The bad news is that whilst the 7.04 Live CD was more than happy co-existing with the XP partition, the install options were either to overwrite the XP partition or to overwrite the XP partition. OK, so with this level of wireless support I don't need XP now as a safe option to download code to, but I would have preferred if the options had worked correctly.

rotorcraig - the auto codec load seems to work (albeit not perfectly) if you have gstreamer configured - a big improvement. However the codecs I pulled down for mms support didn't work and froze my PC so I regressed to xine & manually getting codecs.

Overall though, Ubuntu 7.04 is a big step forward and I would suggest about as easy to install as XP SP1 was. I would definitely recommend it - it is all I have on my PC now :ugh:

Oh - and out of box internet performance is much better too

Disregard previous! Posting this from Mepis 6.5 :ok:

Had a couple of problems once I told the comp to behave itself and book from drive (I think the bios has a liking for MS :rolleyes: ) - first time over it the monitor went blank with the power LED blinking, but the system was running under the hood as num lock could be toggled, and it responded to the three-fingered salute and rebooted :ugh:

Next time around, I told it to stick to 800x600 and 60 Hz and it worked like a charm. Nothing needed configuring. One glitch was that the taskbar (or equivalent) was blinking continuously, I have stopped it by locking it but dont know why it happened first off.

Still, This is much easier on the eyes than Ubuntu and its default settings, it seems to have a tremendous set of apps too. I'm off to explore :)

Bad news - the sound does not work. After some serious hunting, I found out that there is no fix for my particular board. Honestly, without sound it is rather useless, so till there is a fix for that, it aint no fun.

Edited to add: The list of tools is impressive, with partition managers and likes. It even has an antivirus, though god alone knows why! Sadly, Berly crashed the system on launch, so I didn't get to see the eye-candy. Still, I liked the itnerface. And it gave me access to my existing hard disk very easily. So this will make a rather good emergency disk....

However batninth - you mention you got Fiesty Fawn running as LiveCD? maybe I'll try that next :)

I'm running this installation of Kubuntu on a separate hard drive for evaluation purposes, ie: I disconnect the WinXP hard drive and plug in the Linux drive.
I've decided to keep Kubuntu by making the machine a dual boot job with two HDDs. Does anyone know if GRUB is included in the Kubuntu download?
I'm keen to avoid mistakes and don't really want to be faced with re-installing XP. Life is too short.

Ta,:ok:

N o t a

BombayDuck

It seems that the folks who have nothing better to do than write viruses to pain you & me are now looking to MacOS & Linux for their kicks:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6059140.html

batninth

Yes, the Kubuntu 7.04 installation will also install grub. You get the choice of whether to install it to the mbr of the first hd or not. I've never had a problem installing it to the mbr.

Thanks for that IT (? )

I'll have a go at dual booting tomorrow or at the weekend. Just finding my way around the system at the moment. I've arrived at the age where thinking presents something of a challenge so it might be a little while until the system becomes second nature.

Thanks again,

N o t a :ok:

Anyone tried running it off a USB stick? I have a 2gb Cruzer.

Will it cock up XP?

I'm now up and running with Ubuntu "Feisty Fawn" and doing very well with it.

With my previous "Edgy Edge" setup I had real problems getting the nVidia drivers for my Asus A7N266 motherboard configured correctly. Using legacy drivers I could get most things working, but I never did get Google Earth or streaming video on sites such as BBC News to be stable.

Upgraded to Feisty hoping that it would sort these issues out - it didn't. Struggled on for a couple of days and convinced myself that it was the A7N266's onboard GeForce2 video setup that Ubuntu could not handle.

Bought a new cheap video card (Tornado GeForce FX5200 for 30 quid), stuck it in the AGP slot - and hey presto everything now works absolutely fine.

RC

PS I dual boot with XP and have had no problems. Set up your NTFS partition as the first on the drive, and install XP into that. Then install Ubuntu specifying partitions 2,3,4 as Ext3 for Linux root, swap, data etc. The installation process should spot XP in the first partition and ask whether you want to set up GRUB for dual boot - say yes.

Once you've got the hang of dual-boot, and subject to hard drive capacity (I've got three big ones, all partitioned heavily, in the Linux machine) then you can install several different flavours of Linux and switch between them. Sometimes they change the "primary" Grub partition, but that's easy to suss out. Then you edit menu.lst to offer all the options, and off you go.

I've now got Mepis running via WiFi. The USB WiFi dongle didn't come with Linux drivers, and I couldn't be bothered to search for them. But the PCMCIA WiFi card was fine. A little tweaking using Kwifimanager, and the card saw the router. It just didn't ask it for a DHCP address, so no "connection".

ifconfig and iwconfig told me what the various devices are - the Wifi card is wlan0.
A root terminal, and the command dhclient wlan0 led to some beeping and twittering, followed by the message that it had connected and obtained DHCP address 192.168.8.10 - and off we go!

I'm liking Mepis more and more!

Today's statement from Dell on the subject can be found here:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/g...=us&l=en&s=gen

Not just Dell. Today one of the sidebar news items on Groklaw reported that Toshiba Italy is considering Linux for a range of their products.

From the Times:

Microsoft in Linux warning

Microsoft has stepped up its campaign against free and open-source software by claiming that the Linux operating system and other popular open-source products infringe more than 235 Microsoft patents.

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez made the claims in an interview with Fortune magazine, published yesterday.

"This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement," said Mr Gutierrez.

"There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed."

In a subsequent interview with the US business magazine, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer pulled back from saying that it would pursue individual users of open-source software for royalty payments.

Mr Gutierrez's comments have surprised some, as Microsoft appeared to be thawing in its attitude to open-source software in recent years.

Last November, it entered into an agreement with Novell, a leading provider of open-source software, which both sides said would improve interoperability between open-source software and Microsoft's products, as well as providing assurances over patent issues.

Con Hennessy, chief technology officer with Irish open-source services firm OpenApp, described the Microsoft comments as "sabre-rattling" designed to sell more software through its relationship with Novell.

"If you did a real analysis, a lot of the Microsoft patents would be thrown out," said Mr Hennessy. "They are either really obvious or you would find that someone else had created the same thing before it."

Mr Hennessy pointed out that Microsoft holds the patents in the US and said that software cannot currently be protected by European patents, so Microsoft's threats would have no impact in Europe.

Microsoft itself has fallen foul of US patent law recently.

In February, a San Diego court awarded $1.52 billion in damages to Alcatel-Lucent after it found that Microsoft had violated patents it holds related to MP3 digital music technology.

But of course, they won't specify which patents GNU/Linux/OpenOffice is supposedly infringing....oh no.

Just noise and FUD, hoping to scare companies away from Linux.

"No, we really don't want to litigate, just make a deal with us and we promise not to sue."

Path-etic!

"Gimme $20 and I'll make sure your nice car's paintwork don't get scratched!"

Faced with major disinterest in their new soopa-soaraway Vista, MS have decided to start waving the big patent litigation stick to try and halt Linux. Demanding money with menaces used to be called extortion.

MS holds thousands of patents, most of them on matters so banal that the patents should never have been granted, like double-clicking a mouse or filling in a HTML form.

In the USA you can more or less patent anything in software, the patent system is so broken. The patent examiners have no time to search for prior art and few of them know enough about programming logic to know what they're granting but they grant it anyway. The status of software patents generally is untested in the US anyway.

Many of these patents are so broad that any one of us probably violates several of them a day when writing a letter!

Most of the patents that MS has scrambled to register in the last 5 years are laughable, like linked-lists (which have been around since pre-VAX days), so MS obviously hopes never to have to actually legislate their claims - it's just something to threaten people with.

What an admission of fear and lost confidence in their own product/s!

My advice? Ignore them and they'll go away (and good riddance!)

Interesting development, along with the news that Dell is again offering XP on new machines, 'amid significant customer demand' (CNet 2007).

As for going over to Linux, it's a really interesting experience, even if you're just a general tinkerer. As mentioned above, I'd recommend a second machine, or a dual boot (not as horrible as it sounds).

When I tried Ubuntu and Debian (two different PC's) I really enjoyed learning something new, but you need to 'un-Microsoft' yourself. For instance, you can't just plug a memory stick or portable CD drive into your machine - you've got to learn how to get Linux to mount these devices, then configure it to do so automatically. Again, not as nasty as it sounds, with a little persistence and some good reference material.

Performance is also excellent.


James

Ubuntu
 

Ubuntu
Does anybody know how well programmes like iTunes, etc run on UBUNTU OS, is there anyone who knows of anything that isn't compatible with UBUNTU, I am about to load it on my laptop and just wondering if something wont work, like my webcam for instance.

Cheers

s2h,
Linux, including Ubuntu, tends to have it's own versions of software rather than a Linux-ised version of something else - so you have to make the links or as JamesT73J said "un-Microsoft" yourself.
A good example is in media players - there isn't an iTunes binary for Ubuntu or any Linux. You could try running the Windows versions over WINE, or I would suggest looking at the various media players that are native to Linux - Rythmbox, Amarok etc and seeing how they stack up (Amarok seems to be a good iTunes alike for Linux)
I would strongly suggest registering on the Ubuntu forums and searching for iTunes there to see how many posts have been made on this subject. The Ubuntu forums are incredibly busy & useful (http://ubuntuforums.org/) - if this question hasn't been answered there, then post it & you're highly likely to get an answer, espcecially on if & how any licence rights could be migrated.
Best answer on your question is at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ghlight=iTunes

"[Microsoft] is no stranger to patent law disputes.

From April 2004 through to March 2007 the company paid

$1.25bn TO Sun Microsystems,
$536m TO Novell,
$440m TO InterTrust,
$60m TO Burst.com,
$6m TO private inventor Carlos Amado,
$115m TO z4 Technologies,
$74m TO Korean company P&IB, and most recently, $1.52bn TO Alcatel-Lucent

over patents allegedly infringed by Microsoft's software."

Infringe patents
Pay off the owners from your vast cashpile
Profit!

:yuk:

Calm down Mac,

Before you go too far down that track it is worth remembering that Microsoft is very acquisative. In that context what would be more useful is a break down of how many of the patent infringements came from products developed directly inside Microsoft, and how many from products aquired and subsequently developed.

Also I wonder how much has been paid by the other technology companies for similar patent infringements.

Knowing one of the patents my last company applied for, and how open ended it was, it would be quite easy to find infrigements against that patent as well - albeit that the companies doing it would probably be completely unware of doing so.

In summary, I'm not saying that Microsoft is blameless, but what I am saying is that patents can be easy to infringe without trying to do so deliberately, or that an attempt to produce something akin to an existing patent could then be liberally interpreted as an infringement (think AMD vs Intel here). I suspect in the numbers you quote as in the numbers for many, many technology companies there will be a mix of all three types of infringment.