OT: Linux

[Thilock_Dominus]

Just wanna say I've complete the download Mandrake 10.0...next step burning

While I'm at it, I have some questions.

Seems there is alot of filesystems to linux, which one is "best"? and where do I find them? Or should I go with the one which comes with mandrake?

On my XP I'm using Nero to burn, is there something similiar or better to linux?

I like to mess around with PSP8 on XP and it would be cool with a paint program as good or better to linux?

I stumble on the web with a program called Wine, is it any good to run M$ application and other windows program with?


best regards
Thilock

[ July 25, 2004, 18:00: Message edited by: Thilock_Dominus ]

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Thilock_Dominus:
Just wanna say I've complete the download Mandrake 10.0...next step burning

While I'm at it, I have some questions.

Seems there is alot of filesystems to linux, which one is "best"? and where do I find them? Or should I go with the one which comes with mandrake?

Well, there are a lot of filesystems - some of them are possibly higher performance, some (reiser, I think) provide journaling, etc. If you're new to linux then you probably ought to just go with the default - there's books full of information about filesystems, and I doubt you want to go into them starting off.

I stumble on the web with a program called Wine, is it any good to run M$ application and other windows program with?

The more recent Versions of Wine I've heard some people speak favorably of. Note that with Wine, you generally won't be able to run any of the newer cutting edge games, because Wine will always lag somewhat behind M$ (having to play catchup).

Since I have zero interest in running M$ apps (to the point of uninstalling IE and OE), I wouldn't know about using Wine for that - from what I understand, some apps run okay under Wine, some don't. If you also have a Windoze partition, I'd think you're better off using them from Windoze, but if you get to the point where you're in linux most of the time, I can see where it'd be worthwhile to experiment to see which apps you can Wine and dine.

[nakomus]

On writing to NTFS partitions:
Well the current Linux kernel drivers don’t support writing to NTFS well, there is a tool called Captive NTFS, which loads a windows filesystem driver and runs it in a (Wine-based, I think) emulation, and uses that to give read-write access to NT partitions.

I have used Captive briefly under Debian to fiddle with some files on an XP drive, although I can’t vouch for it beyond that.

Captive NTFS: http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

On distributions: I personally use Debian; the latest network installation disk I downloaded had a friendly menu driven installer and very nice hardware detection. Debian is much easier to install than it used to be (in my opinion at least), but I don't know how it compares with Mandrake and friends.

On drive arrangements: Using a separate drive for Linux is a good way to go; you are much less likely to accidentally clobber your existing file system this way.

With Windows 98 I used to recommend installing your Linux drive as Primary Master and Windows as Primary Slave, and install the LILO (before GRUB was the standard) on the master boot record of the linux drive, with a hook to boot the windows system. This way you could always just disconnect the Linux drive and strap the Windows back to Master and have a system that would at least boot.

My Last attempt to do this with Windows XP however was unsuccessful, Windows has its own boot loader and didn’t seem to be happy about having its drives rearranged. So it looks like your XP C:, Linux D:, etc arrangement is a good one.

One thing to be aware of: In Linux systems drives are identified by there position on the IDE bus, rather C,D,E,etc, so your C: drive would normally be hda, (primary Master), Primary Slave would be hdb, Secondary Master would be hdc, secondary slave would be hdd. Note, that these include CD-ROMS as well, so your drives may not appear in quite the order you expect.

I have no knowledge of how Mandrake’s installer presents disk choices during installation, so the above may or may not be helpful.

You should make sure you have access to a bootable disk with the windows Recovery Console incase you clobber XP’s boot loader. If you have a real MS setup disk this should be on it, but if like me, you just have an OEM recovery disk (grr!), it will probably *not* have Recovery Console. Fortunately, you can download a setup disk on floppies from MS support. Unfortunately, it takes 6 disks.

On the dual boot configuration, I have to admit, I ended up taking the cowards way out. I have XP’s boot loader on the Primary Master (XP) drive and GRUB on a floppy disk. On the floppy disk it works fine and can boot easily into XP or Debian. One neat benefit of this arrangement (and probably others) is that XP’s hibernate to disk function works completely independent of Linux, so I can hibernate XP, restart the machine, boot Linux, work there for awhile, shut down Linux, boot into XP, and come out of Hibernate right where I left off.


Oops, this turned out to be a longer post than I intended. I was going to mention Captive and than quit. Oh well. Good Luck with Linux!

[Gandalf Parker]

If its Linux and Windows XP then wouldnt it be easier to run the WinXP as FAT32 or even just FAT instead of NTFS?

[guybrush threepwood]

Just wanted to mention that I am also using mandrake 10.0.

With 9.2 I had a machine where win xp pro cam preinstalled. I then used partitionmagic to make a free partition for linux. After that I simply put in the mandrake cd's - told it to use the appropriate partition when I came to that stage of the install, and after that everything just worked, and the machine was automatically set up to dual boot with windows.

YMMV of course :-)

Cheers,
Thomas

[Thilock_Dominus]

Since I have zero interest in running M$ apps (to the point of uninstalling IE and OE), I wouldn't know about using Wine for that - from what I understand, some apps run okay under Wine, some don't. If you also have a Windoze partition, I'd think you're better off using them from Windoze, but if you get to the point where you're in linux most of the time, I can see where it'd be worthwhile to experiment to see which apps you can Wine and dine.

Most programs I'm using on WinXP is on Linux(writing, e-mail, some few games, music etc.), that is why I'm changing OS. But I have some old DOS games from "old" times I'll to install under Linux and that's why I stumble on Wine when I was searching on google.

But meanwhile I'm gonna run dual boot until I get familiar with Mandrake Linux...and then takes a decesion.

best regards
Thilock

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Originally posted by Thilock_Dominus:
Seems there is alot of filesystems to linux, which one is "best"? and where do I find them? Or should I go with the one which comes with mandrake?

They are all very fine filesystems, so don't worry. Each have their application; just go with the default. Very likely that will be either reiserfs (also known as Reiser 3) or ext3 (the successor to ext2, the original one Linus "wrote"). Both perform metadata-journaling, which means that you don't have to run fsck (think scandisk) at boot if the system is shutdown the hard way (think brownout).

Here's two benchmarks, in case you really care. Please be aware that benchmarking is quite difficult to get right, so don't take these benchmarks as "The Truth":

Namesys
linuxgazette

[guybrush threepwood]

Originally posted by nakomus:
On the dual boot configuration, I have to admit, I ended up taking the cowards way out. I have XP’s boot loader on the Primary Master (XP) drive and GRUB on a floppy disk. On the floppy disk it works fine and can boot easily into XP or Debian. One neat benefit of this arrangement (and probably others) is that XP’s hibernate to disk function works completely independent of Linux, so I can hibernate XP, restart the machine, boot Linux, work there for awhile, shut down Linux, boot into XP, and come out of Hibernate right where I left off.

Just wanted to add that this convenient benefit is not dependent on using a floppy to dual-boot. The one or two times I tried it with the dual-boot menu thats automatically installed by mandrake, it worked as you describe.

[Thilock_Dominus]

Some other questions:

What's the diffrent on KDE desktop, Gnome Desktop and Xfree86X ??? I know this might be a bit sensitive...I read there was a war going on between the two Groups (KDE and Gnome) But I couldn't find any information when I tried to compare them. Mandrake got all 3 desktop that are mention above...so which one

Any good games site for linux?


best regards
Thilock


Ps. By the way I found a site with 'Install mandrake 10.0 for dummies'

[Taqwus]

XFree86 provides an implementation for the X Window System, which provides a nifty standard for networkable windows. One normally uses one of a variety of window managers for it which generally provide a consistent means for manipulating windows (minimizing them, resizing, whatever) plus usually right-click menus. mwm, twm, vtwm, tvtwm, fvwm, fvwm95, olvwm (?) etc.

KDE / Gnome go further and try to provide an entire desktop environment with stuff like a taskbar, some basic applications, perhaps a control panel for configuration, etc. Much easier for the novice to use. Plus, they provide widget libraries and APIs for easier and more consistent application GUI development.