Can you make Linux easy?

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The original and still the best

Yagotta B. Kidding 1st Dec 2005

Pop in a Knoppix disk and boot.

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Linux for Dummies

Michael Kelly 1st Dec 2005

by 'maddog' is how I got started (I think it was SuSE specific). Laugh all you want, it was a great way to get my feet wet.

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I am with Yagotta on this. Knoppix.
Slap that Live CD into your Windows PC and set your boot-up sequence to CD then Harddisk and presto-chango 'Here'sszzzzzzzzzzzzzz Johnny!!

Da Dat, Dah Dah Dahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. (think Johnny Carson)

Ok, I also have to say, to be fair, Apple really have their sh*t together and I just might buy when the Intels reach the channel in January 2006 (MINI and Laptops).

Prediction: There will be a Linux Distro market 'consolidation'.

I use SuSE 10.0 myself for personal home use.

If you've got no experience then maybe I'd side with JJ on Apple, but, JJ I can't help myself, sorry I recommend Linux, why?, because it's got that 'open' thing going for it.

Most excellent article Dana!

Ok then. Later! happy

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Sedimentation

Yagotta B. Kidding 1st Dec 2005

Prediction: There will be a Linux Distro market 'consolidation'.

Like to do the easy ones, don't you? wink

The Linux distro scene has been "consolidating" from Day 1, but it's classic Darwinism: old distros fail, but new ones are constantly appearing to rise up.

A couple of good examples are Ubuntu and Gentoo: popped up as spinoffs of Debian, and if you look at the latest OSRL survey results on corporate adoption Ubuntu is #1 on the desktop with Gentoo nearly as popular as Mandriva.

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I install Knoppix to hard disks now

hipparchus2001 1st Dec 2005

The knoppix hard drive install facility means you get a working knoppix from hard drive in very little time.
This PC is a bitza my son and I are builing, with him customising the case. We've got lots of neon, green LED fans and so on. (getting the angle grinder out on the weekend for some more serious customisation).

All the bits we just threw together, and Knoppix just saw it and worked with it all, including the unbranded network card, the unbranded sound card and the TV card. Amazing.

--------------LAPTOP---------------------
On my dual boot WindowsXP/Knoppix laptop, as Knoppix is a debian variant, I've trimmed it down, (apt-get remove packagename).

I currently run X, twm (the most primitive window manager, by the way, if you edit .twmrc to include RandomPlacement, you don't have to manually place windows).

It's really easy to customise twm to list the apps you want, which is the latest firefox mainly, xterm.

Basically on this laptop, Linux runs incredibly fast (because of my trimming, and Firefox 1.5 is incredibly fast).

What I have found is the wireless LAN driver (which I had to download and compile - suboptimal but the results were great):
(a) runs like stink compared to in windows. (much faster)
(b) Never ever drops out, whereas in windows it keeps losing connection.

So basically, my knoppix runs much faster and better on the same hardware.

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Linux is easy

tracy anne 28th Dec 2005

I use Mandriva Linux, currently Mandriva 2006, purchase a copy of the Power Pack version and install it.

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What we need is Gentoo for Dummies

Michael Kelly 1st Dec 2005

Gentoo is an excellent distribution with tons of excellent step-by-step documentation, an excellent online community willing to help out the least knowledgable questioner, and a wide range of applications. What it is not is a distribution for dummies (by I mean Linux newbies).

If only the GUI installer would get up to speed, and one of the GUI Portage front ends reached a level of maturity, and a GUI for the most common text config files were readily available... not everybody needs a stage 1 install.

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For the illiterate?

Yagotta B. Kidding 1st Dec 2005

Hmmm...

In Summer 2003, my daughter and a 50-something friend of mine (neither particularly technical) had a go at doing a Stage 1 install on the 'puter that she was about to take to University. I was forbidden to help out.

As they reported when they finished, it was pretty much a straight case of following the (quite good) instructions.

Since then, DD has discovered that the boys she meets are paralyzed by awe of a woman who runs Gentoo on a water-cooled Opteron box. Best weekend she's ever invested, she tells me.

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I'm paralyzed in awe also

hipparchus2001 1st Dec 2005

wow!

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Maybe it runs in families

Yagotta B. Kidding 1st Dec 2005

My license plate is GENTOO
and the ladyfriend's is RTFM

I still say it's just a matter of carefully following directions.

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That's just it though

Michael Kelly 1st Dec 2005

Gentoo has EXCELLENT directions, so all you have to do is carefully follow them. Not all directions are that good. If they were I don't think there would be such a fear of Linux.

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Once you get away from the distro ...

Too Old For IT 8th Dec 2005

... a lot of the application "instructions" read like sanskrit.

I sometimes think they are purposefully written that way so that Linux fans can tease Windows pros who are trying to transition to Linux.

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The first Linux I tried was TAMU 0.92 kernel and later slackware 3.3

hipparchus2001 1st Dec 2005

In both cases, all I did was carefully follow instructions and both installs worked great.
At both times, I had minimal knowledge of Unix.
(and Linux was just being invented).

Most people will never go to these lengths. I still have great respect for slackware. It's quite unixy, and simple. This is what I like about the BSDs also. (especially OpenBSD).

Have you seen you can get a booting minix3 cd now, and also, bootable hurd cd. I've got both. Most impressive.
(I like Minix for the fact it has a microkernel, and on minix3 everything else is usermode code, and also the code actually had unit tests built in - not sure if this has been re-established, mined was a great editor, and all the binaries are miniscule). Installing additions was easy also.

Hurd has immense future promise, it could do with a good book describing how the whole server messaging system works. Instead of just giving you a command to mount the cdrom, explain the command and variants. I'd like to write that manual by looking at the code, but I don't have time.

Just too many linuxes, too many kernels, too little time. What a great world we live in tho.

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Message has been deleted.

hipparchus2001 Updated - 8th Dec 2005

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Message has been deleted.

hipparchus2001 Updated - 8th Dec 2005

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it's great but....

hipparchus2001 1st Dec 2005

I gave up on gentoo as it was taking forever to compile KDE etc.
I like the idea of it compiling everything to really match your setup very well. Perhaps things could be distributed compiled into java byte code (a pretend microprocessor code), and then GCJ could translate it into your specific machine code with optimisations.
I really like the idea of that!
(sort of in-between debian binary and portage).
You'd end up with a single distributable binary for all CPUs!!!!!!!!!!!!

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KDE compile

Michael Kelly 1st Dec 2005

I just did the 3.5.0 upgrade last night (overnight actually). It's really best to have a whole weekend, Friday night included, to do the initial install and do the major upgrades (gcc, glibc, X, KDE, GNOME, OOo if you insist on compiling that) overnight. Most other upgrades, if you do it weekly, take an hour's combined time at most, but it's not like you have to stand over it or can't do other work while it's running.

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KDE 3.5

D T Schmitz 1st Dec 2005

Hey, apparently you have no life too. wink

I installed KDE 3.5 last nite to SuSE 10.0 with Yast Installation Source set to the url at Novell's ftp.suse.com/pub site.

It didn't require any makes compiles--just rpms-- watched Yast do its thing and done in about an hour.

KDE 3.5 is pretty nice compared to 3.4.x

Just curious: How long did it take and how many Desktops were involved?

Thanks Michael

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Actually

Michael Kelly 1st Dec 2005

if anything I have too much of a life, because
right now is the first chance I've had to restart
X and take a look at 3.5, even though I compiled
it two nights ago. And actually with Gentoo
there's not much to the compile process. It's no
different than doing any other system update
"emerge world -u", or if you really want to make
sure everything's up to date "emerge world -uDv
--newuse". Then wait patiently, in the case of a
full KDE compile it's an overnight wait (I didn't
time it exactly, but it was done when I woke up).
The only thing it didn't do automatically is keep
my old settings, but that's a simple copy and
paste from ~/.kde3.4 to ~/.kde3.5.

Desktops involved? Just one instance of Konsole.
By default I have Konsole run screen in case I
accidently close it or there's a crash, so really
I could have closed Konsole if I wanted and it
would have kept going.

The first thing I'm noticing on 3.5 is the
transparancy settings are much more uniform. So
my invisible taskbar is really invisible, it
doesn't have ugly grey task blocks in it, unless
I hover. The control panel is also better
organized, and the network controls have some
very useful improvements, especially in the Samba
section. The other thing I'm noticing, since I
decided to use Konqueror to write this, is that
html rendering is really pristine, much more so
than I remember last time I used it before
switching to Firefox. Now if I can find that
trick that allows Flash to run in a 64 bit
Konqueror I may be sold on it. Since it's late
now I'll try Kontact tomorrow. And I want to see
if KNode has gotten anywhere close to Pan yet.

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Agreed

Rokstar83 6th Dec 2005

"If only the GUI installer would get up to speed, and one of the GUI Portage front ends reached a level of maturity, and a GUI for the most common text config files were readily available... not everybody needs a stage 1 install."

Porthole however is coming along, even though its still ~x86, the maintainers are working at it. Last I checked they were testing for language compliance as not everyone wants it in english. Besides, there are many unstable apps in portage that are there in name only and are rock solid. I suppose it is just the stigma associated with the word "unstable" that gives people pause.
I think of all of the distros without a gui installer Gentoo would be the easiest to set up as the instructions for it are better than any other documentation (IMHO) and its current installer is already a live disc that does hardware detection on its own pretty well I might add.

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Naming Conventions

Edward Meyers 6th Dec 2005

Unstable- Either hasn't passsed QA (breaks the distro), Has a Lib that doesn't pass QA, or hasn't been fully evaluated. Software or dependant libraries may have bugs.

Testing- Has survived in Unstable for 14 days or more without reports of it or dependancy breaking the stable branch.

Stable- Doesn't break the last released distro and is realativly bug free. Has gone through extensive QA.

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no, no we don't

tyme 19th Dec 2005

Gentoo is not meant for "dummies", and should not be used by them. Such users would be irritated by the extensive amount of time it takes to compile and install a program, and couldn't care less about the optimizations. You'd basically be losing the whole point of Gentoo - it's meant to be highly configurable and require atleast a novice knowledge of the inner-workings of a linux system. If someone wants simple and easy then they don't want Gentoo, and I tire of people who constantly want to make Gentoo the next Mandriva/Red Hat/whatever. That's not what it is.

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oh, and another thing

tyme 19th Dec 2005

People would just end up complaining about how slow installing programs is because they wouldn't understand what compiling is, so you'd just give them another reason to dislike Linux.

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Try the Mac...

JJ_z 1st Dec 2005

Yes, I know, it's not exactly Linux and it's not exactly free either. But what we really needed is a real standardization effort to merge all the various Desktop Manager and Distribution into 1 SINGLE standard. Not "X" number of combinations that anyone can pick and choose. Yes I know I know, it'll never happened. But we are trying to answer the question 'Can you make Linux easy'. Looked, if Apple can do it using a BSD based *nix, someone should be able to do the same thing with Linux.

All the stories about Linux desktop. This is WHAT Linux desktop needs. Some company with some real muscle (both R&D and $) comes out with a 'THE' standard.

Flame away cuz I know that's what's going to happen.

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Apple could...

zztong 2nd Dec 2005

Apple could release the Finder as an application for Linux. I recommended that to Apple in several emails over the years. I don't think there's a reason why most of the Mac experience couldn't be installed as an application on top of any Linux distribution.

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I don't know

DannyO_0x98 25th Jun 2006

Or, maybe, I don't think it's such a certainty, and this from a guy
typing in on a Mac... I think Linux (and open source) generally
stands against the concept that one size fits all. vi vs. emacs,
perl vs. python (or both against ruby), compiled vs. interpreted,
kde vs. gnome, gpl vs bsd, mysql vs. postgresql, swing vs. swt,
csh vs sh, etc., etc.; given all the bandwidth used debating the
merits, the obvious conclusion is everyone's mileage does vary,
and including both packages and letting the user choose costs
nothing, except possible confusion for those new to the
platform.

(Though I guess even though a Linux rookie, faced with the
installation choice of GNOME or KDE, may think that Linux is
harder than Windows while not understanding that, at their level
of experience, there is no "wrong" answer.)

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Message has been deleted.

JJ_z Updated - 8th Dec 2005

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Yes...MAC !!!

JJ_z 1st Dec 2005

Yes, I know, it's not exactly Linux and it's not exactly free either. But what we really needed is a real standardization effort to merge all the various Desktop Manager and Distribution into 1 SINGLE standard. Not "X" number of combinations that anyone can pick and choose. Yes I know I know, it'll never happened. But we are trying to answer the question 'Can you make Linux easy'. Looked, if Apple can do it using a BSD based *nix, someone should be able to do the same thing with Linux.

All the stories about Linux desktop. This is WHAT Linux desktop needs. Some company with some real muscle (both R&D and $) comes out with a 'THE' standard.

Flame away cuz I know that's what's going to happen.

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Ease of use: various

hipparchus2001 1st Dec 2005

I find knoppix great and fast for installing to hard disk, but in addition to this:

Debian now has a graphical installer.
It's not made stable yet, but it looks pretty good!
I like debian, because you can have a tiny boot image, and just install everything over the network (and only the bits you want).

I imagine all the Debian derived distros will use this installer in the near future:
Ubuntu, Knoppix and so on.

Most commercial distros have excellent installers:
mandrake/mandriva, xandros, redhat, and so on.

They also have package managers for adding/removing software.

I really like Linspire's Click and Run idea!

Anyway, I think the ease of use argument often means ease of install, and in actual fact, I find that Knoppix (which I mainly install) installs in a very short time, and recognises all the hardwar I throw at it.

This PC is a bitsa made from rubbish parts I collected as a project for my son. I put the parts together, unlabelled network card, unlabelled sound card, some voodoo graphics card, and it all just worked. No need to install any drivers. This process can take days on Windows. Also, loading all the other stuff off CDs takes days, whereas with a debian type machine, you just apt-get install packagename (there are gui tools as well), come back with a coffee, and it's installed an waiting!

The only thing that takes some effort (going to manufacturers website) is installing 3d drivers for graphics cards (OpenGL). A lot of the commercial distros just have this stuff built in, but for Debian-ish you usually have to undergo some minor pain to install this.
(if you plan on using 3d - most of the time, for work etc, I just don't need it).

This is still a lot less pain than installing all the drivers in Windows.

My Wifi card for my laptop is the cheapest of the cheap, and I had to find a driver and compile it for it. However, I've spent ten times as long trying to sort the driver out in Windows XP since it keeps dropping connections etc, but in Linux, it is (1) much faster (2) never ever drops the connection. The Wifi was harder to install, but works SO much better.

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Singing out of the same Hymnal

D T Schmitz 1st Dec 2005

I think we're all singing out of the same hymnal here.

Varied experiences with L-Distros, but largely, it has been a 'serene' experience compared to Windows XP (my previous O/S before I wiped it out).

Windows drivers?

Some things work beautifully, but when they don't, I'd rather poke my eyes out with a sharpened #2 pencil!

As for Wifi, Netgear WG511 PCI and had to use ndiswrapper with the Windows driver (*.inf, *.sys).

It only took about 1/2 hour of googling to hit on a wiki that gave good documentation on ndiswrapper. Works fine.

Then I was up and running.

OK Folks! Later. happy

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Ease of use: various

hipparchus2001 1st Dec 2005

I find knoppix great and fast for installing to hard disk, but in addition to this:

Debian now has a graphical installer.
It's not made stable yet, but it looks pretty good!
I like debian, because you can have a tiny boot image, and just install everything over the network (and only the bits you want).

I imagine all the Debian derived distros will use this installer in the near future:
Ubuntu, Knoppix and so on.

Most commercial distros have excellent installers:
mandrake/mandriva, xandros, redhat, and so on.

They also have package managers for adding/removing software.

I really like Linspire's Click and Run idea!

Anyway, I think the ease of use argument often means ease of install, and in actual fact, I find that Knoppix (which I mainly install) installs in a very short time, and recognises all the hardwar I throw at it.

This PC is a bitsa made from rubbish parts I collected as a project for my son. I put the parts together, unlabelled network card, unlabelled sound card, some voodoo graphics card, and it all just worked. No need to install any drivers. This process can take days on Windows. Also, loading all the other stuff off CDs takes days, whereas with a debian type machine, you just apt-get install packagename (there are gui tools as well), come back with a coffee, and it's installed an waiting!

The only thing that takes some effort (going to manufacturers website) is installing 3d drivers for graphics cards (OpenGL). A lot of the commercial distros just have this stuff built in, but for Debian-ish you usually have to undergo some minor pain to install this.
(if you plan on using 3d - most of the time, for work etc, I just don't need it).

This is still a lot less pain than installing all the drivers in Windows.

My Wifi card for my laptop is the cheapest of the cheap, and I had to find a driver and compile it for it. However, I've spent ten times as long trying to sort the driver out in Windows XP since it keeps dropping connections etc, but in Linux, it is (1) much faster (2) never ever drops the connection. The Wifi was harder to install, but works SO much better.

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Klik

Edward Meyers 1st Dec 2005

http://klik.atekon.de/

Any KDE enabled system can run it. I am using it right now and this system started out as BeatrIX (Added KDE Core to it to get it running and ran the script on the Klik page... well I've modified the heck out of the system before this anyhow).

Another make linux easier to use by windows users project is autopackage http://autopackage.org/ the problem with autopackage though is that only a handful of projects use it and then some of them don't include all the dependancies.

Between Synaptic, Klik, and Autopackage most people should get along pretty well.

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BeatrIX

Edward Meyers 1st Dec 2005

It is a Knoppix variant based on Ubuntu packages. http://www.watsky.net/

The approach they took was assuming that the reason most people get confused by Linux was too much software in a Linux Distro so they stripped it down to the Gnome Desktop, OO, Firefox, Evolution, and GAIM. Instructions are there to add Synaptic so as to add more software via a graphical interface.

To really learn Linux though you need a few good reference books. The O'Reilly "Learning Debian Gnu Linux" is a good starting point, better than the Dummies Books, as it doesn't spend as much time on apps like Mozilla and OO unlike the Fedora Core or SuSE for Dummies books - although most people aren't really interested in learning their OS but rather only want to know how to do very basic things, hence why the dummies books are written as they are.

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Mepis for newbies

broper 2nd Dec 2005

Mepis is a good place to start for newbies -- it's pitched to them and their forums are hospitable to those just getting started with Linux. For those with a little more experience, it's easy enough to upgrade to Debian testing/unstable.

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SuSE 10.0 Compares 'Favorably' to Other Distros...

D T Schmitz 2nd Dec 2005

Here's an article reviewing the SuSE 10.0 OSS Distro..compares 'favorably' with other distros and in my *personal* opinion stands out as being relatively EASY

URL to article:

http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=5684

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This is nice,,,

broper 2nd Dec 2005

A thread about Linux that doesn't refer to that "other" company. It's encouraging to see a conversation on ZDNet about Linux that is just about Linux.

Wish there were more of them.

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Isn't it though!

D T Schmitz 2nd Dec 2005

Maybe this is a trend!? wink

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To fully answer the question

Edward Meyers 3rd Dec 2005

Start here http://news.zdnet.com/5208-9590-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=15596&messageID=311585

A good way to play with Linux and get used to it is a Live CD or even one of the micro-distros that can run within Windows with QEMU. the micro-distros aren't really an acurate way to get a feal for Linux as they tend to have older or lite file managers. This has been suggested several times here.

Before you even start ask yourself why you are wanting to learn Linux?

Keep in mind that if you are married to certain Windows applications or don't want to learn anything but the Windows way of doing things you will not be very happy. Keep in mind that Linux is a Unix-Like system by design where as Windows NT (2000 and XP) VMS-like, which rejected the Unix way of doing things. Also Windows is about intergrating everthing where as Linux is modular. Although there are GUI Desktop managers and most distros have GUIs to setup and run eveything, you may still from time to time need to manually edit a text configuration file or use the CLI to troubleshoot or fix something.

There are many good books to get you started- some have already been mentioned. "Linux for Non-Geeks" (Includes a Fedora Core distro) and "Moving to Linux, Second Edition : Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!" (Which includes Knoppix).

A good free starting point is here
http://www.linux.org/lessons/

and

http://www.linux.org/lessons/short/index.html

To really really understand Linux this is a good resource;

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

and the refferences found here http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/prologue/prerequisites.html

and here http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~matthew/LFS-references.html

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Great Links, thanks!

__howard__ 4th Dec 2005

You provided some great links. Since I'm in the middle of building a multi-media only system, those links were very timely.

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Linux is great for MultiMedia

Edward Meyers 6th Dec 2005

The Hollywood Studios Use Linux for their productions. Some of the most advanced and best Multimedia creation software exists only on Linux. Which is odd when you consider the MPAA stance on the encyrpted DVD player and Linux...

Anyhow Media Players for Linux;

Xine http://xinehq.de/index.php/home . Xine is the back end Totem (Gnome), Kaffeine (KDE), Gxine (GTK- This is my preffered Linux Player), Xine-ui (xlib), aaxine (ascii art frontend), opie (Xine for xaruas and ipaq), flxine (fltk frontend) , and so forth and so forth.

Mplayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html Most people like MPlayer... I don't care for it though.

VideoLan http://www.videolan.org/

Xmms http://www.xmms.org/ winamp inspired media player (Xmms used to be the defualt player in fedora- As of Fedora 3 I think, it should be HelixPlayer)

Ogle http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ DVD player for Linux

Helix Player https://helixcommunity.org/ This is the REAL Player OSS comunity project. helix is the REAL Player for Linux without some of the closed formats from REAL. RedHat includes Helix where as Mandriva includes REAL Player for Linux. There is also the content producing tools (helix-producer) linked on that page.

Beep http://www.sosdg.org/~larne/w/BMP_Homepage beep started out as a fork of xmms. They have sinced strted to rewrite the player form scratch.

quicktime-x11utils http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/quicktime-x11utils These are for playing quicktime files

FOSS software for producing MultiMedia;

to begin with there is an entire Live CD distro devoted to this. It is called dyne : bolic http://www.dynebolic.org/ some of the software I am going to post is also on this CD;

K-Toon http://ktoon.toonka.com/ Toonka Films was concerned that not enough intrest in creating animated films in spanish speaking countris in paticular in South/Central America so they produced this nice animation package.

LiVES http://lives.sourceforge.net/ Linux Video Editing System

FilmGimp/Cinepaint http://cinepaint.movieeditor.com/ used for frame by frame video editing and retouching

JaShaka http://www.jahshaka.org/ this is an HP funded project.

Kino http://www.jahshaka.org/ Basic Video Editing - Simular to Windows Movie Maker

FreeJ http://freej.dyne.org/ realtime video manipulation and editing.

and these are just the free ones.

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Join a LUG

lundyd 7th Dec 2005

Join a local Linux Users Group (LUG). You can find them at http://www.linux.org/groups/ or similar sites. Many of them hold regular meetings and / or host a mailing list where you can talk with other Linux users in person or via e-mail.

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It must be true!

Tahuyahick 8th Dec 2005

I dont know but I just now unplugged the good hard-drive with XP-Pro and tried installing linspire on one of my freebie drives. Something wrong with the freebie, so how am I able to run this from just the cd? And because I was caught up in the absurdity of all this, I turned on my cable modem which is plugged into a ethernet card. It works! I didnt install drivers, configure settings or anything, not even a hard-drive, wow!
I am so very impressed! Can it get easier? Im about to float...just one glitch, no apostrophes, just makes my motherboard beep, huh? But still, its like magic! Compared to windows anything...

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sure--try knoppix

T38 8th Dec 2005

If you just want to try Linux, without the hassle of dual booting or--if you're really brave--replacing Windows with Linux, try the Knoppix "live Linux on CD" Linux distro. While I prefer Slackware for my desktops, servers, etc., Knoppix is *REALLY* easy to use--it will autodetect just about anything (the only thing I had to tell it to do was turn off DMA--just pass the parameter "knoppix nodma" on the boot prompt if your boot hangs before Knoppix starts loading), and it comes with an incredible number of common apps already installed. Plus, if you're used to Windows, the KDE desktop (Knoppix's default window manager) is really simple...although a little slower than my two preferred desktops, blackbox or icewm.

In any case, Knoppix is about as simple and risk free as a Linux install can get--if you can download and burn an ISO, you can run Knoppix.

You can find it at: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

And yes, the Linux forums are an invaluable resource to the n00b. I used http://www.linuxquestions.org/ (I think the article above says ".com"--that's wrong) and http://www.justlinux.com/ extensively when I started, and they are still the first places I turn when I'm trying to figure something out.

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PCLinuxOS

HiRezL 8th Dec 2005

I had to put a Linx Distro on my wife's PC, she has only used WIndows and was very leery. I downloaded all the LiveCD DIstros I could find, the one she liked the best, that worked best and seemed most Windows-like to us was PCLinuxOS, so that's what we have installed on her hard drive. She has been using PCLinuxOS instead of WindowsXP for about 4 months now, her system crashed every day under XP, yes I know many people have very stable experiences with XP, I have an XP system that's been up over a year, but hers was not stable, even after wiping the partition and reinstalling. Anyway, she has been very stable under PCLinuxOS, and other than having trouble finding Lexmark Printer drivers for her printer, we have no regrets and she is very happy with it. It even logs into our Windows 2003 domain, using her old Windows account!

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Linux Info For Beginners

jgluck@... 9th Dec 2005

Subscribe (for free) to Tux Magazine at http://www.tuxmagazine.com - you can start by downloading the back issues...

Enjoy,

-Jerry

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Don't forget the grand web index of Linux ...

George Mitchell 10th Dec 2005

http://www.linuxlinks.com

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correction?? .com or .org...

thirtyeast 14th Dec 2005

is it http://www.linuxquestions.com/ or
http://www.linuxquestions.org/?

Me thinks the later..

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The Desktop Linux Book Roundup

tracy anne 1st Jan 2006

http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT8460665785.html

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Real Help without feeling put down ...

Linux_4u! 9th Jan 2006

Ok, I belong to the Linux Group linux-sxs.

It is located at :

http://www.linux-sxs.org/

We have several noted authors of Linux books, kernel developers, device driver authors, etc.

It came about from the OLD Caldera list group. Everone is treated with respect, and yes we even cover WINDOW admin questions.

If you are a NEWBIE, I would suggest joining or even just cruzin' on by ....

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Good resource for Windows developers who want to go to Linux

lmoroney 11th Jan 2006

Mainsoft make a VS.NET plugin that allow .NET developers to recompile their apps into Java Bytecode and deploy them to Linux.

They've got quite a few nice resources on their developer web site for Linux newbies etc.

Take a look at:
http://dev.mainsoft.com/Default.aspx?tabid=50

or

http://dev.mainsoft.com/Default.aspx?tabid=45

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maybe the easy to use linux isn't linux after all...

nix_hed 8th Jul 2006

now that solaris is open-source, maybe it's time for sun to develope an easy-to-use interface with common drivers for modern pc hardware that automatically install themselves. however, the biggest problem i'm coming across with solaris isn't the ease of use or the hardware...it's the installation. while mac os x will forever be the easiest desktop *nix, i'd love to have a reason to get an x86 box again (intel mac won't cut it for what i'd like to do, and i wipe my rear with windows coa papers.)