Free Operating Systems

I recently installed Ubuntu on a friends system, and also on mine running beside windows.Does anyone else have any experience with Ubuntu that might be helpful, I would appreciate any feed back.So far it seems faster than windows 7 on my machine, and seems to have given extended life to my friends 8 year old machine which was running xp pro, the only problem I have had was with Google earth. I couldn't load it from Google earth website, but found an other source for it.

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"I hate to advocate the use of drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they always worked for me." - Hunter S. ThompsonAd astra per aspera

Downloading ubuntu now. I have been wanting to setup a dual boot on my XP system for a while now. You have given me the incentive.

I am currently using opensuse 11.4.I don't know whether linux is faster than Windows. I don't use Windows enough for a fair comparison.I don't use linux "because it's free." Rather, I use it because it is better for what I want to do with a computer. Sometimes, I buy the distro DVD package, as a way of donating money back to the project.

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Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity

Can you tell me anything about virus protection?? I have set up a fire wall, but Linux is very new to me? I have much to learn, least Ubuntu seems too have lot of good resources as far as help goes.

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"I hate to advocate the use of drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they always worked for me." - Hunter S. ThompsonAd astra per aspera

I have never used one on linux. It never seemed necessary.When I use Windows, I normally do that with a limited user account. And AV is probably not needed there either, when you don't run as Administrator. But I use an AV because otherwise Windows complains about it.The firewall (iptables) is good, and most distros set it up with good default settings. There's also AppArmor available, to restrict what application programs can do.There are Anti-Virus applications for linux. But they are mainly used on servers, to scan the files that Windows clients might use.

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Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity

I record TV shows on a MythBuntu setup (Ubuntu + MythTV) and it's been pretty positive, for the most part:1) It's utterly retarded that, as far as MythTV seems to be concerned, there's no such thing as streaming internet video. Come on, it's 2011. My mythical media convergence box that wants to play SNES games and record off of cable should have heard of the internet by now. No Netflix? No Hulu? If I can do these things in a web browser they should be able to be done in MythTV. Come on.2) The system never crashes - not ever - except three or four days after I leave on vacation.I realize being a set-top box isn't a core competency for Linux, and in the grand scheme of things it's just an occasional annoyance. But, Linux has some problems which, because I see them pop up in Mac OS as well, seem to be inherent to its architecture. Hardware support is spotty and unpredictable. Frequently preferences and configurations set up via GUI don't ever take effect (the buttons work, but don't seem to actually configure anything); frequently preferences set up via config files don't ever take effect, either, because some other config file is overwriting it, completely contrary to stated behavior in man files.Linux programs have a namespace problem. There are at least 3-4 projects on the Linux system called "X"; one is the famous window manager, one is a video editing framework, and there are a handful of "Project X" projects that do assorted minor things because their authors were computer science douchbags who thought it sounded cool. Is the current version of Apache Web Server service called "apache" or is it called "apache2" or is it called "httpd"? The answer is - all three, but never at once. Depends on your distro.We're a fully heterogenous household around here - Win XP/7, Mac OS X, Linux, an iPod, a Kindle, a PogoPlug, an Xbox 360 - and the Ubuntu box, by far, is the one that requires the most attention and fiddling just to keep it up. So much for the vaunted reliability of Linux!

Congratulations, you have received the Linux virus. It works by the honor system. First copy this email to all your friends and family, then delete random files on your hard drive.

--Percy

What do you mean?? I don't understand?? Did I screw up?

That's just my best recollection of the Linux virus hoax. Before Linux was Unix, (Linux is a rewrite of Unix for the PC platform) and I began using Unix in the mid '80's. And sometime during the latter half of the 80's viruses became a common problem on PCs, and those of in the Unix world looked on with an amusement that produced the Unix Virus Hoax, now known as the Linux Virus Hoax.--Percy

He means (basically) that Linux/Unix doesn't succumb to virii.

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"What can be asserted without proof, can be dismissed without proof."-Hitch.

Set up a dual boot last night. So far so good. Been a while since I have enjoyed messing with my computer. This should be fun to figure out.

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

We have been a 95% Ubuntu house for about a year now. I dual boot with windows as a crutch and it seems to be somewhat necessary to do certain things efficiently.My policy is that if I want to do something that I know how to do in 5 minutes in windows, I first take 15-20 mintues to figure out what application will help me do the same thing in Ubuntu and for most everything this works just fine. There are handful of windows applications that I haven't found an open source counterpart for (at least one that I like) and they almost all work just fine under WINE.The few things that are annoying are certain devices. A couple of my kids toys require little apps to download updates and new content onto them and I haven't quite tried to run them under WINE. The printer works just fine in Linux but the very easy to use photo touch up and borderless printing software that integrates with the printer really well only works in windows.When I have time to sit down and reconfigure my system I intend to do it a little bit different. I no longer want to dual boot windows. Instead I plan on running windows under virtualization so that I don't have to reboot when I need it. This should solve all the end cases where windows is needed yet get rid of the annoyance of having to dual boot and also the annoyance of having more than one file system format to accomodate both systems.I don't know about crash's experience. I wonder if it has something to do with MythBuntu. I have been messing with Linux as a part time desktop OS for 10 years and in every single circumstance it has been more stable, reliable, and perform faster than windows. The ONLY issue has been the desktop experience, apps, and device support but that gap is shrinking more and more as time goes on. I would say that Linux on the desktop is 9/10 the way to being a fully legitimate drop in replacement for windows.In terms of anti-virus, I have been preaching this to my family and friends for a very long time. Forget AV software. Its worthless bloatware that slows down your computer. It is a virus itself in my opinion. You are choosing a program that 99% of the time provides a vast inconvienence to get minimal protection. For the time being, simply running Linux is a good bet to stay away from viruses but that WILL change as more people use it as a desktop OS. If Ubuntu continues to dominate the desktop like it has it will also probably be the first target.The BEST defense against viruses is something you should already be doing anyway. Take good backups of things that are important to you. I cannot stress this enough. You can recover from TONS of bad things happening to your computer but you absolutly cannot recover from a loss of data. At the end of the day it is your data that is important, not the computer itself.Every year, spend ~$50 on a new external hard drive (the cost of a Carbonite membership, screw those guys), take the one you used last year with your most recent snapshot of your system and drop it into a fireproof safe where you should already be protecting your real world paper information. Use the new hard drive to checkpoint your important directories every month or so (I just have an app that syncs with the external drive every time I plug it in after I dump the contents of my digital camera). Rinse and repeat. Destroy the surplus drives after 5 or so years in your safe. Electronic recycling services sometimes offer certified hard-drive destruction services.If you are paranoid about ID theft, use encryption. There are plenty of directory or file encrypting applications you could use for this. I don't personally but I can understand someone who would want to. All you would have to do is set aside a special directory where you drop files that need to be encrypted, point your encryption software at it and viola (or so I understand). Someone who gets ahold of your encrypted data, even if they could break it is probably just going to drop it and move onto that 100s of other suckers who didn't bother to encrypt (like me!).Don't know if this helps but I am done ranting now. Good luck!

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If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. --Thomas Jefferson

One last tip!If you are new to Linux, get comfortable with your package manager! In Ubuntu I think it is called Synaptic Package Manager or something. I use the command line version called a"apt" personally but the most important thing to understand is the concept.Unlike Windows, most Linux distros have a direct line to a massive repository of nearly everything you could ever need in terms of software. This sequence of events happens to me constantly.1. I wonder how I could do in Ubuntu?
2. Goggle for "Linux software "
3. Find AwesemeSoftwareX that does
4. Check if AwesomeSoftwareX is in the package manager.
5. 9 times out of 10 it is
6. Install it from the package manager instead of going through some manual and perhaps unreliable method of installing software.This is probably the one BIG advantage that Linux currently has over Windows.

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If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. --Thomas Jefferson

that and that i got the 3d cube working on a computer that has trouble with win xp sp3I use ubuntu on my other computer when this one is occupied by my girlfriend, on this one i have win 7.basicly if you need a OS to work and surf on ubuntu is the OS, if you want games you sadly need windows, not that windows is a bad OS its just expensive as shit if you are not a pirate, pay for this pay for that .....