Decided to give ubuntu 9.10 a try on my new build :)

So far it boots faster than the mazdaspeed rx-8, i'm just getting "used" to the way you install apt's and everything. So far I love it, now if I can only get WOW working lol.

Any other linux guys out there? Care to share your experience?

I know Ubuntu is the flavor of the month. I have a copy of Suse Linux & Solaris that I have thought of throwing on to a extra pc that I have lying around. It's getting the hardware configured that I don't know how to do and that has to be done before you can really get into the OS.
I taught my self a little machine language back when computers had switches and lights on the front. Then I picked up CP/M, MS DOS and Windows. Windows enough to pass the MCP in 2 different versions. I'm sure, if I was properly motivated, I could pick up Linux to.

^.................."little machine language back when computers had switches and lights on the front" :rollingla
You are one old dude!
Remember the boot sequence on a PDP-11, might have been a PDP-8 now that I think about it? :ylsuper: Believe that's about the first I started on........the newer ones had a friggin punch tape reader!

I can remember my first job right out of school was debugging non-working 1M memory boards that were composed of 1k x4 RAMs! These were all wire wrapped and the boards were about 16 x 16 inches!
Can you imagine buzzing those address and data lines out, and then having to undo the wire wraps to find the offending one! they were about 6-8 wire wraps deep on each pin.


In terms of Linux............I use it some at work in a couple of particular systems but it's several bastardized versions of Redhat. Even though it may be open environment, I'm just not all that thrilled with it. This probably has to do more with the uniqueness of what I need than anything else and the person that originally constructed our so-called systems. I got too much crap to do rather than spend my time trying to figure out how he bastardized everything!

Rofl. You don't have to be old to remember that stuff, just the right circumstances. ;)

One of my earliest memories was helping my Dad build a rocking 286 system with a massive 8mb hard drive! He also brought home one of the computers he used in college, which had programs on punch cards, and his own tic tac toe program he wrote via the punch cards. :)


...and I'm only 29 :)

^..............I still got a brand new Shugart 8" floppy drive(never been used) in a closet from about 1982 and some other stuff. Think I should donate it to the Smithsonian!
I was in an Advanced Development Lab making one of the very first desktops(laptop wasn't even close to being on the radar screen). We just wanted something smaller than a large freezer or room.


sorry for the thread jack.................just brought back some memories!

I just got windows 7 in the mail. I remember windows 3.1 and learning to program in qbasic.

Never messed with Linux though.

Just got rid of my alienware desktop, in favor of an MSI Wind netbook. It originally had OSX, and ran great. Sadly though Apple does not like us using it!

Now i run Ubuntu 9.04 on my MSI Wind netbook. It runs flawlessly, better than OSX.

So far I love it, now if I can only get WOW working lol.


If you plan to game do yourself the favor and switch to Windows 7. The thing with Linux is that its made to make working with computers easier. Pretty much the theory is "for developers by developers". When you want to work, Linux is awesome.

I work full-time with Linux, both on desktop and embedded systems. However, I have totally given up on running Linux at home, simply for games. By running Windows you are on the target platform the game is aimed at. Granted, you can always get troubles on Windows too, but the gaming companies will try to resolve these to have satisfied customers.

However, the gaming companies will not care about the Linux community because these are compsavvy people who dual-boot anyways and have an XP partition for just games. Problem solved.

So if you only play WoW and manage to get it to work using Wine, then good for you. However, if you plan to play other games than WoW, spare yourself the headache and install Windows 7. A Windows 7 license is not that expensive compared to the amount of hours you will spend in frustration trying to get that new cool game, you really want to play, to run in Linux.

Oh and here is a little article for running WoW under Linux. Good luck whichever path you choose.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Linux/Wine

If you plan to game do yourself the favor and switch to Windows 7. The thing with Linux is that its made to make working with computers easier. Pretty much the theory is "for developers by developers". When you want to work, Linux is awesome.

I work full-time with Linux, both on desktop and embedded systems. However, I have totally given up on running Linux at home, simply for games. By running Windows you are on the target platform the game is aimed at. Granted, you can always get troubles on Windows too, but the gaming companies will try to resolve these to have satisfied customers.

However, the gaming companies will not care about the Linux community because these are compsavvy people who dual-boot anyways and have an XP partition for just games. Problem solved.

So if you only play WoW and manage to get it to work using Wine, then good for you. However, if you plan to play other games than WoW, spare yourself the headache and install Windows 7. A Windows 7 license is not that expensive compared to the amount of hours you will spend in frustration trying to get that new cool game, you really want to play, to run in Linux.

Oh and here is a little article for running WoW under Linux. Good luck whichever path you choose.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Linux/Wine


Good advice, which indeed it did take a little while to get it working, manual divx install, getting the new C++ code from microsoft, setting my own permissions for the folder, but finally got it working last night. As for now its the only game I play on the PC, and it was kinda fun tinkering around trying to get it to work perfect. BUT I can't imagine doing it again and again, so I may just partition windows 7 (or just buy it its own harddrive) for the future.

i've been using ubuntu for the last 5 or 6 releases....

9.10 is probably the worst as it has taken a dump during updates 3 times so far, which is 3 more times then I have ever experienced before.

^really? I'll keep an eye out. On another note I found that it has a built in bittorrent which is brilliant. I was searching around to download one when I found one already in the system folder. Last top gear episode took about an hour to download (720p version.)

Rotor, do you run any antivirus? Would you suggest one since for work i'll be remoting into a windows platform?

That answer is a "depends" on the anti-virus.

I installed WINE on ubuntu to try out some less then legit windows software I had "acquired". I turned out a virus got installed into the WINE virtual drive and under the right set of conditions the virus was able to be executed in WINE and transferred itself onto a usb stick that then tried to infect a windows computer.

If you dont install WINE then there is no practical way for a windows virus to be executed.

Installed wine on Sunday.......

ClamAV is in the ubuntu repositories. I dont't think it actively scans though.

You can also install something like Malwarebytes Anti-Malware through WINE and use that to scan your wine c-drive. From what i understand in theory the only way to get something in your wine c-drive is while installing something from wine - so you can run something like MAM after doing an install and then your good... thats what I currently do and thats how i cleaned my wine install

These will also work if your a dual boot and your windows partition gets infected... just boot in ubuntu and scan your windows partition from there and you dont have to risk setting off other virus crap

I used to run Ubuntu, back when most distributions used to have you mess with the xorg configuration to get widescreen working properly.

These days just about anything works, doesn't really matter which flavor of linux you run. the desktop options are the same, so the things you touch is similar.

ubuntu has no root login, you sudo for super user. Also their file system dirs are nicely named, for example php has a cli and apache separated. On the other hand, any production box you touch will not use that structure, so it becomes a hassle as you try to change into dirs that don't exist on every other platform.

With that said, RHE/CentOS is my preferred OS for servers, and Fedora for development.

waaay back in the day I used to use slackware. For no other reason than it was painful to download anything over a 28.8k modem and slack only needed about 7 floppys worth of data to function :)

Out of boredom I have just recently started using Ubuntu after a many year hiatus. The only thing that I can really find to gripe about is that the new GDM is not user friendly with custom configurations. Oh that and getting the Medibuntu repositories to keep working, they key keeps dieing on me.