Alternative OS for IBM PC.

[Edward]

What is out there? Windows, linux .ect. There several versions of both avaible. What are some avantages and dissavantages for the different virsions? What do different versions cost to own?

[Nevermore]

Windows freezes up alot and is slow, but easy to use and understand. Linux doesn't freez, and is open source, but requires a bit more computer savy.

[Dave]

Don't forget about BSD for all you hardcore users out there

 

I can't think of anything else that springs to mind that's not overkill. Linux is coming on a treat in terms of usability though tbh. I dualboot with Gentoo Linux and Windows XP myself.

[Apple3.14]

If you want to go with windows, XP is the way to go. It's more stable, and more user friendly than any other current version.

Linux is of course your best alternative to windows. I don't have much experience with linux myself, but I'm sure someone else here could fill you in on the details of some of the linux flavors. I've only played around with red hat a long time ago, on a crappy computer I got for free. Never got good hardware drivers for its super old hardware, and essentially never got much going on it.

[Dave]

In terms of Linux, there's a couple of options.

 

For the hardcore performance people, Gentoo is quite a nice option and has one of the best package-management systems around (imo) - it's certainly my choice of OS. Debian is pretty good if you can't be bothered compiling everything. Fedora Core I've heard good things about, but I'm not overly keen myself. There's quite a few others (read: lots), but they're the ones I prefer to talk about.

[Klaynos]

In terms of Linux' date=' there's a couple of options.

 

For the hardcore performance people, Gentoo is quite a nice option and has one of the best package-management systems around (imo) - it's certainly my choice of OS. Debian is pretty good if you can't be bothered compiling everything. Fedora Core I've heard good things about, but I'm not overly keen myself. There's quite a few others (read: lots), but they're the ones I prefer to talk about.[/quote']

 

I'm currently using windows XP, within the next month I'll hopefully be using ubuntu, which is bassed on debian, and uses debians lovely apt package management. Fedora Core I've also heard some quite good things about.

 

Good site for linux distrobutions:

 

http://www.distrowatch.com

 

A good (read simplistic) linux for the beginner is mandrake, but I am not a fan personally.

[psikeyhackr]

I've tried Slackware, Red Hat and Mandrake. I'm currently trying an accidental discovery and liking it. I bought the book, POINT & CLICK LINUX! by Robin 'Roblimo' Miller. The book is broad in coverage but shallow in detail. That is good for showing what Linux can do but bad for learning how to do it. Chapter 20 on THE GIMP is 5 pages long. It would probably difficult to cover this program with 50 pages.

 

The best thing about the book is the SimplyMEPIS CD that comes with it. It can boot and run from the CD or it can be installed. It found the network connection and printer with no problems. I've downloaded cartoons from the internet. Transferred them to a page and edited it with OpenOffice.org and printed to an HP 4550 color laser printer. NO PROBLEMS! I once had a Red Hat Linux that would print a great test page to an Okidata printer but I had to fiddle about for hours to get it to print from a text editor.

 

Three problems so far. When I tried to set up a dual boot on a Win 2000 system with a 30 gig drive. The repartitoning worked and data was preserved but it won't boot 2000. It says "NTLDR is missing". I can boot with NTLDR on a floppy but not from the dual boot menu. The MEPIS disk doesn't have the KOrganizer information manager that is on other distros. A rather wierd thing is that the UNIX/Linux 'at' command isn't on the system. I find that very odd but plenty of people would never learn about it.

 

To learn something about Linux I'd suggest HOW LINUX WORKS by Brian Ward. It has well organized info that is scattered around in 5 other books I have.

 

Lastly LINUX DESK REFERENCE by Scott Hawkins. This book goes into far more detail about Linux/UNIX commands than HOW LINUX WORKS and the commands are organized by function instead of alphabetically like most books. How do you find a command you know exists and what it does but can't remember the name of?

 

Psikeyhackr

[Dave]

When I tried to set up a dual boot on a Win 2000 system with a 30 gig drive. The repartitoning worked and data was preserved but it won't boot 2000. It says "NTLDR is missing". I can boot with NTLDR on a floppy but not from the dual boot menu.

 

This is a pretty common problem - I've had it a fair few times. Which bootloader are you using? You'll probably need to chainload your drives. I'd suggest grub for your bootloader, as it's far to superior to pretty much anything else.

[psikeyhackr]

I'm using GRUB 0.95. The Linux 2.4 and 2.6 both boot fine but win2k gives the error. It is merely a nuisance to stick in the floppy at home but I couldn't get away with this on a user's machine.

 

What does "chainload" mean? I never heard of it.

[psikeyhackr]

http://atu.cjb.net/software/grub/GRUB_Guide.html

 

Found this. Haven't studied it yet.

[1veedo]

Downlaod the lattest Knoppix. If anything goes wrong w/ your bootloader, you want a way to get things back to normal. Booting into the live CD will allow you to run

#grub-install /dev/hda.

 

You can also look into the /boot folders of your installed OS's and copy the kernel images, etc. You may even find the grub config file still in the root HD partition; just copy it to a safe place, reinstall grub, and put it back

 

I speek from expirience.

[Dave]

Win2k likes to be the on the primary drive. Basically, the idea is to map the hard drives over so that win2k thinks it's on the primary drive.

 

Off the top of my head, if you had linux on hd0 and win2k on hd1, then:

 

map (hd0) (hd1)

map (hd1) (hd0)

chainloader +1

 

Might do the trick. It's in the grub documenation. I found WinXP to be an even bigger pain in the ass (had to chainload individual partitions to get it working).

[P403n1x]

phlak is awesome! (Professional Linux Aussalt Kit) that would be good. redhat is cool as is knoppix. it just depends on what your gonna use this os for.

[Silencer]

^I seriously doubt you know how to use PHLAK. You probably just think it is cool because of all the hype around it.

 

PHLAK is nowhere near useful for a newb. I don't even like it for its intended purpose because it's really a piece of shit.

 

Also, Red Hat isn't even in the desktop market anymore. You probably mean Fedora. And in any case, the RH corp screwed the whole OSS and general idea of linux in the bum.

 

In other words, I think you have no clue what you're talking about.

[1veedo]

The new ArchLinux looks pretty goot for noobs. I tried installing it but it wouldn't let my partition the drives

 

I'm sure you can but I couldnt find a way. Definitely though, from waht I saw of the install, this distro is probably made for simplicity.

[Aeternus]

Also' date=' Red Hat isn't even in the desktop market anymore. You probably mean Fedora. And in any case, the RH corp screwed the whole OSS and general idea of linux in the bum.

[/quote']

 

How so? The source is still open, they simply charge for RHEE and give out FC for free. RHEE offers more support etc and these people do put time and work effort into the distro they produce and things like that cost money. I personally have no problem with companies offering pay-for open source as, as far as I'm concerned, its not the 'free' (as in beer) quality that makes alot of open source projects so good, its the freedom of source and the willingness to let others contribute and learn from the code. I don't think something has to be completely free to be open source.

 

Sorry if i've misunderstood what you meant, just i do know some people who think that open source is free, all software should be free, no-one should get paid for their hard work and that they should piggy back off hardware and tech support and that if it isnt free, it isnt open source, which i don't agree with.

[flash]

Windows freezes up alot and is slow, but easy to use and understand. Linux doesn't freez, and is open source, but requires a bit more computer savy.

Cent % tru

but MAC OS X (Jaguar) is a superb piece of os which is so simple and easy 2 use but yet damn stable

[Silencer]

No, it's not that they charge for their enterprise support, I'm fine with that (other distros like SuSE do it too). It's that they substantially edited KDE and the linux kernel to fit their market scheme, and managed to butcher them in the process. They went through like 3 or 4 major release in a period of 1-2 years just to fix all the bugs. You'll see that other distros went through major jumps at this point (like Slackware going from 4-7) just to not seem "behind."

[1veedo]

I agree.

 

The open source philosophy is nothing like what RHAT has been doign recently.

 

It is fun to note, though, that RHAT is released for free under the name CentOS. It's more or less like Fedora but it was compiled entirely from the sources to RHEL, which is what certain industry products are compatible with.

 

This just goes to proove that nobody can make a monopoly from Linux or any other open source GNU released software.

 

It also proves that open source is more efficient as Silencer mentioned:

They went through like 3 or 4 major release in a period of 1-2 years just to fix all the bugs.

[flash]

linux is much faster than winxp sp2 on the same hardware

 

BUT MAC OS X although on a old hardware beats windows xp badly in terms of OS speed

the games there give more FPS than in windows xp on same hardware

[Dave]

Although I am an avid Mac supporter, I'm not entirely sure that's true. From my experience, games play quite a bit faster on XP than OS X, although I haven't tried for the past couple of years.