[adunnyByday]

Just install Ubuntu and play around with it.

[vulikox]

I want to argue with Asher. No, no, no. That's not arguments, that's abuse.

-Arrian

[capeAngedlelp]

Asher

[rolex-buy]

Originally posted by Lorizael
I did that...a few years back. I'm straight now. If I had a nickel...

[usatramadolusa]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
...leaving more cute women for me! It's really a tragedy, it pollutes the gene pool. Less attractive people are born every year.

[geraint.faughn]

What do you want us to say?

**** > Linux. Why would anyone talk about Linux?

[casinobonusnolimit]

Originally posted by Lorizael


I did that thread a few years back. You weren't a dick in it. I'm straight now. Wait, um... are we still talking about Linux?

[Sironimoll]

Jon, stop threadjacking.

[VeniHemealm]

Originally posted by Lorizael
The appeal of running a computer absent the constraints of licenses and DRM and other restrictive policies is also there. The ideal is there in linux, but you'll find in order to do quite a few things and for cross-compatibility purposes, you'll be using restrictive licenses and DRM here and there.

When I was much younger I used to dabble with computers, programming, and hardware a lot more than I do now, and I would like to get back to that. Stepping into a whole new OS is one way to do that. You'll find that with many Linux distributions "ready for the desktop", like Ubuntu, you won't be doing much with programming. Indeed, a lot of it's gotten to fairly decent plug-and-play levels.

So what is there to know about Ubuntu and Linux? What should I be warned of before jumping into this? What other distros might I want to try? Other potential "easy" distributions include Xandros, Fedora, SuSE. The first one is most similar to Ubuntu in its attempt to be as powerfully easy to learn as possible.

How easy or hard is it to get online, Wired? Not very hard. Wireless is a bit trickier.

set up a chat client, Easy. Gaim. Or, if you have access to KDE (for instance, with Xandros), Kopete.

find drivers for my devices, Depends on what they are. Removable/flash devices are easy as pie; mainstream sound cards are easy; wired networking cards are easy. Graphics cards are trickier, as none of them have OSS drivers; nVidia's closed-source drivers are superior to ATi's, but to be honest, unless you want to play games, you don't need the advanced functionality provided by those closed drivers.

plays games (*cough* Civ 4)? $15 for a few months ($15 buys you a subscription for a bit, during which you can download the program and any updates...) will get you Cedega, which will allow you to run many games; you could get it for free by downloading the source and compiling it yourself, but that would require a fair amount of learning investment and time on your part.

How customizable is Linux? I don't know about Ubuntu--I use Gentoo, which is insanely customizable. I'd wager Ubuntu is far less so.

How easy is it to **** my system so hard I need to format the hdd? As difficult or easy as you want to make it. Don't operate in the root account, and you won't **** anything up. Though you will need to access it occasionally to install things...

And monkeys? Spank 'em.

[dosyrotsbop]

Originally posted by Asher

It's really a tragedy, it pollutes the gene pool. Less attractive people are born every year. So you're saying that the Neanderthalliconservatives are correct and gays should be forced to be straight??

[PRengine]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
It impressed my Linux nerd freind (who runs Gentoo or some other distrution that is known to be hard). It can boot of the CD which is a really nice feature (it also installs from that CD so you don't need a DVD or 6 CDs to install).

The GUI looked nice but I didn't play arround with it much.

Jon Miller Gentoo now has a bootable graphical liveCD.

That said, I still Gentoo. Hardness be damned!

[AblemTee]

Because Linux is a different Operating System then Windows. Just like Mac is a different OS than Windows. Why would you expect them to be able to run the same games?

JM

[Lolita Palmer]

Originally posted by Lorizael
Why can't you run games normally in Linux, and what does Cedega do that allows you to do so? Specifically, many of these games use DirectX, which is Windows-only.

Cedega is a reverse-engineering attempt to mimic and translate many of those calls into something useful to Linux. It's fairly good at what it does.

If things can be tricky, as you say, why do you do it? What does Gentoo have over Windows that you're willing to put up with various complications that may arise? Well, for one, I like spending that time tinkering. Admittedly, Gentoo is a lot of headaches, and it forces you to learn the innards of the system with a decent enough risk of system breakage.

I like it more than Windows for that reason--I like to tinker.

[Malinguenem]

Originally posted by Asher
This thread sucks (now). So would talking about oral ministrations on pee-pees.

Well, then the thread would be about sucking, so...

[Kt-viagra]

Go ahead and try Linux. The best argument against Linux can be made by inviting casual users to try it as a desktop.

[astefecyAvevy]

An Asus W7J. One of the only laptops I could find that was under 5 lbs and smaller than 15", and had a decent graphics card.

[Psymoussy]

It's extremely powerful, a lot moreso than the default Windows one.

If you want a powerful shell on Windows, install Windows PowerShell: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserv...l/default.mspx

There's a ton of advanced features of such shells (such as scripting) that is pretty tedious to explain, and useless to most casual users.

[XYTommy]

Linux's CLI, which has shells such as BASH, ASH, KSH, and the like, all have advanced scripting abilities, the ability to pipe results into other programs, launch multiple programs in parallel or split them off into different processes, and so on.

The default Windows one can do batch files, which is about the extent of the scripting it can do--and is only linear in that capability, so if one particular program in that batch file hangs, the rest won't get done.

As far as PowerShell goes, I hadn't heard of it. Is it a derivative of what Microsoft was doing with Monad?

[Assungusa]

Originally posted by Lorizael
I have a lot of (outdated) programming and computer knowledge, so I will probably have a vague understanding of what you mean if you give a few examples. Here's an obvious one.

Search and replace in text files...

find . -type f | xargs grep -l 'foo' | xargs sed -i -e 's/foo/bar/g'

Lets start from the beginning and work to the end:

1. "find . –type f" will recursively print to stdout every file name in the directory structure, starting from the current directory.
2. "|" takes what’s is stdout and uses it for stdin in the next command
3. "xargs" takes what’s in stdin and executes one command per line in stdin, using the line as the last argument in the command
4. "grep –l 'foo'' will find 'foo' in the files that are passed to it by xargs.

I think we need an example at this point. Using what we have so far "find . -type f | xargs grep -l 'foo'"

In the directory we have
deal.cpp
deal.h
dealUtils.cpp
include
src

'foo' is found in deal.cpp and deal.h

The find command will print out:
src/deal.cpp
src/dealUtils.cpp
include/deal.cpp

"| xargs" will take these file names and use them in a call to grep. The calls will look like:

grep –l 'foo' src/deal.cpp
grep –l 'foo' src/dealUtils.cpp
grep –l 'foo' include/deal.cpp

The '-l'option for grep is to just list the file name and not the line that contains 'foo'.

The output from grep at this stage will be:
src/deal.cpp
include/deal.cpp

5. "sed –I –e 's/foo/bar/g'" this command will do the actual replacing in the file. It operates on the file supplied by the preceding xargs.

Continuing with the example, sed will be called twice:
sed –I –e 's/foo/bar/g' src/deal.cpp
sed –I –e 's/foo/bar/g' include/deal.cpp

The 's/foo/bar/g' argument that you pass into sed is what tells it to replace foo with bar. This is the same format as used in vi so you can look it up if you don't understand it.

[Michaelnewerb]

Originally posted by Asher

Here's an obvious one.

Search and replace in text files...

find . -type f | xargs grep -l 'foo' | xargs sed -i -e 's/foo/bar/g' This is exactly the sort of thing I was referring to. Glad to hear that windows has caught up. Does it do regular expressions too?