linux o/s

just insalling a ubuntu 10.10 netbook edition ono an old laptop (i say old, other than it's 512m of ram it would still kick most budget laptops arses today, even at 10 ears old )

I just wan suse again for the lovely colours and pretty themes

kina' I use OS X I used Xenix from SCO back in the 80's and Debian a few years ago after getting frustrated with Microsoft. Once I got the hang of OS X, I haven't gone back to anything else.

to be fair OSX is technically Unix <3

Once I got my Mac, I haven't really used anything else. My ubuntu box only get's used via SSH from my Mac

i'm just tired of crash reports, program not responding, and the freezing up i've been experiencing with windows. from what I heard and researched, linux will more than likely not experience any of these problems. planning on going with ubuntu.

six8 said:

i'm just tired of crash reports, program not responding, and the freezing up i've been experiencing with windows. from what I heard and researched, linux will more than likely not experience any of these problems. planning on going with ubuntu.

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You won't experience nearly as many issues as you do with windows. Even with windows 7. Everything is pretty much plug and play now. Using wine (which has come a long way) will allow you to run a large number of windows software and games if there is something you can't live without. Don't assume linux is impervious to error it does happen (most of the time it's something you fucked up). Kiss the bsod's goodbye and have fun.

If you need any linux help in general I wouldn't mind helping you out, I'm sure some of the other linux users on here wouldn't mind either.

Another tidbit of advice, even though you can use the modern linux operating system 100% from the gui, you should learn the command line. It's pretty simple once you get the hang of it, especially if you used DOS way back in the day. Once you get the hang of it, you'll probably find yourself using the command line more than the gui for a lot of tasks. And to boot, when you use the command line (or when I do anyway haha) you totally feel superior to the computer... it's weird. maybe it's just me...

six8 said:

i'm just tired of crash reports, program not responding, and the freezing up i've been experiencing with windows. from what I heard and researched, linux will more than likely not experience any of these problems. planning on going with ubuntu.

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If you start getting into porting Windows applications to Linux, you may experience some lockups, but with Linux it does not take the entire system down. Native applications do not seem to present problems at all. The other cool thing is actually opening virus coding to see how it is written without fear.

brandon. said:

to be fair OSX is technically Unix <3

Once I got my Mac, I haven't really used anything else. My ubuntu box only get's used via SSH from my Mac

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unix base... but its risen so far beyond that it can hardly be called unix.. just unix based ya know

brandon. said:

If you need any linux help in general I wouldn't mind helping you out, I'm sure some of the other linux users on here wouldn't mind either.

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I second that. I've been using Ubuntu as my main distribution since 4.04. I love helping people out with computer issues, although Ubuntu 10.10 has sorted out MANY of the quirks. Wireless/Nvidia drivers are one-click installs now, and WINE is becoming a respectable piece of software.

Linux may take a few minutes worth of mild configuration depending on your hardware, but it will give you YEARS of faithful service with little to no crashing. I've had my desktop powered on for a month now with absolutely no crashes. When a program does crash, it handles the freeze-up much better than XP/Vista/7.

I have been using Ubuntu for about 5 years now. Three years ago I completely wiped Windows off the face of my earth and haven't looked back. Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora are the three I would recommend in that order. They have the biggest user community and in their respective forums there will always be 10 people aching to solve your problem for you. There is a bit of a learning curve with taking on the task of diddling with a new os but if you've familiarized yourself with basic computing techniques they will be minimal. The one thing that is nice about Linux/Ubuntu is that you can literally change everything, and I mean everything. Linux is like a manual transmission, you are the pilot. I am also a fan of the bling. Compiz-fusion has come along way from the Beryl days. A screenshot of the expo and wallpaper plug-in.

HEhe, so i installed the latest copy of ubuntu onto my laptop, clicked the activate restricted drivers notification. Laptop doesn't really work anymore just hard powers down randomly.

Haha, What driver did you install?

Nvidia display driver, version 17, something like that, all an automated isntall and such, was always fine in the past, not now. Other than it somehow having caused some conflict in the software, the only thing i could think of is there is something in those drivers that has severely effected the fan speed and that it's overheating (the bottom does get too hot to touch) but would be odd that the driver would configure it this way by default. Reason i say temperatures is that prior to clicking that the laptop had worked for an horu or so in ubuntu and for days on it's windows install without crashing.

It's an old laptop with old parts though, so might just beb having issues with unsupporte hardware. Who knows, it's for web browsing so there's no need to have that driver activated anyways