Guest lightnix Posted April 6, 2004 Share Posted April 6, 2004 Further to my recent thread on viruses, my previous Klez thread and the discovery last weekend of this nasty little keylogger program on my C drive last weekend (installed remotely by some unknown scumbag), I have now lost all faith in Bill Gates, Micro$oft and their crappy, third-rate operating systems, to the extent that I am now dead set on switching to Linux (along with a few other improved security measures) in the near future. I already have an excellent local source of advice on the subject, but would still welcome your opinions on how to proceed, particularly with regard to which GUI to use and any other hints, tips and experiences you may have to share. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeR Posted April 6, 2004 Share Posted April 6, 2004 Linux? My advice - don't. Ive had various releases of it running on my machines most recently RH9. In my experience its highly unstable, ridiculously hard to use and incompatible with all of my clients favoured file formats despite all claims to the contrary. Its much easier and more efficient to take security measures and carry on down the microsnot way. Far from perfect but vastly preferable to the Linux alternative. I know I'll be alone on that but theres also a lot of guff produced by 1337 types who know not wherreof they speak. A good virus checker and firewall and windows is as secure as any other. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ike Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 Linux is not unstable if installed properly, if you haven't installed a linux system before I would suggest getting a bit of help or reading one of the many books on the subject. The first one I did I managed to muddle through with a little help from a guide on the web (don't ask for the URL as I have forgotten it and TBH it wasn't really that good) and it has only been shut down 3 times in the last year and a half none, I might add were to do with a software fault! I don't know a single file that can be opened in windows and not under linux with some prog or other, excluding shell command and other OS files that is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeR Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 As for unstable, in my experience RH 9 was totally unstable. Other older installations (suse and Mandrake) were much better. RH 9 was also far more power hungry than Windows was. In the end though it had to go because of incompatibilities with client files. For example I defy anyone to find me a linux based app that will address director files. Perhaps using Direrctor under wine or similar - but that sort of defeats the point and makes something like Director almost impossible to use. JUst my tuppence worth. As I said I know Im alone on this one:) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 My experiance with Linux is that it will not be 100% cross compatible with windows. If you are starting from scratch and happy to learn a new OS and applications then you should be fine. Applications like Open Office are Compatible with MS office - they are not 100% interchangeable. My partner has been recently job hunting and nothing I could do would get the *.doc files they sent her to oppen properly in Open Office - there were minor formatting errors, page structure layers and you lost all the embedded data fields. However I have never had a problem writing a document in open word and having it read in MS word. I personaly use RH8 - I find it rather bloated and fairly power hungry and I use Suse 7 which is slightly better in terms of bloatedness but a bit trickier to get your head round. I use a bit of Linux and Unix at work so have a bit of experience but I found instalation was simply a case of inserting the CD's, pressing go and watching. James Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 In the end though it had to go because of incompatibilities with client files. Of course you will have problems if you want to start using specific programming that doesn't have a linux distribution. In that case - how about using one machine for your email and random web browsing, letter typing, spreadsheets and powerpoint office type stuff and have another dedicated machine running a stable version of windows that you don't randomly surf on OE never gets installed on and you can have this optomised for any specific work that needs a windows platform to work on. James Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ellis Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 From an application point of view, Linux is inherently more stable - it will not let applications do anything that will bring the system down. Linux does, however suffer from a problem with some device drivers. Device drivers run at a higher privilige level than applications and a badly written one can cause instability. If you have a non-mainstream piece of hardware, you may have problems (Incidentally this can also be a problem with Windows - I have had this with [now disabled] internal modem). This may have been why MikeR has had problems. As for Macromedia Director, you could try to encourage Macromedia to produce a Linux version. Mac OS X is unix based, so it would not be too tricky for them to produce a linux version! If there are enough requests, they will realise that there is a market. The same goes for any other commercial package that you use! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
computer Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 I'd go for suse! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
P. Funk Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 used mandrake for a while but couldnt get the modem drivers to work... so gave up... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeR Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 Linux drivers will not work ever with software modems / winmodems. if your modem is an internal one theres a (good) chance it's a winmodem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IanG Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 Linux drivers will not work ever with software modems / winmodems. Not quite true. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeR Posted April 8, 2004 Share Posted April 8, 2004 I was unaware of that - thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peternewman Posted September 8, 2004 Share Posted September 8, 2004 I was going to post a new topic, but I thought I would drag this one back up instead (however feel free to split it if desired). Firstly please forgive any dumb comments I make, apart from Linux web servers this is a relatively new area for me. I'm off to Warwick to study computer science in a few weeks. Part of the course includes work on Unix and from my understanding Linux is one of the best ways to do this. I am not intending to install a particular distribution before I get to university, as it is bound to be different to the one the university will have. <_< Although if anyone has any suggestions for a good free distribution... However I am getting a new laptop for university, and so at the same time as partitioning the hardrive and copying the 2 drives from my current computer onto it I thought it would be sense to set up any partitions Linux may need. Therefore can people please suggest how large a partition Linux is likely to need, and does it just need one partition? Finally does this partition just need to be formatted as FAT32 to allow me to install Linux and dual boot alongside Windows XP? Thanks in Advance PN Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IanG Posted September 9, 2004 Share Posted September 9, 2004 Therefore can people please suggest how large a partition Linux is likely to need, and does it just need one partition? Finally does this partition just need to be formatted as FAT32 to allow me to install Linux and dual boot alongside Windows XP?<{POST_SNAPBACK}> How long is a piece of string? (seriously - it depends what you want to do with it and what you want to install) Don't format it FAT32 - leave it unformatted. The linux installer will format it for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Posted September 9, 2004 Share Posted September 9, 2004 PN Linux as standard doesn't use the Fat 32 file system and CAN'T use the NTFS file system. (I know you can get it to read NTFS but it can't write) I have a dual boot machine, Booting Win 98, Win 2K and Redhat 8 I created two FAT32 partitions for the two windows installs (Win98 first, then 2K) then I installed RH8 on the remaining space, Redhat Workstation installs 3 partitions as standard. /swap is the swap file. Unlike windows that just uses spare space on your specified hard drive Linux has an entire partition to play with that doesn't have anything else on it and doesn't move. By changing the size of the swap partition - like windows you can tune the performance of the machine. Unlike windows you can't easily change it on the fly. Think about 2x the size of your RAM. There is no point for windows to see this. / Then there is the main partition, the linux filesystem - I don't think there are that many distributions that will allow you to format this in FAT32 and I don't think it's that recomended something like x3 nfs or another linux filesystem is normal And you have the boot partition (tiny) if you have one. that will hold lilo or whatever you use to boot linux and switch operating system. What I did was create a FAT32 Data partition - called it the D drive for W2k and W98, and mounted it on the linx filesystem under /mnt/win or /usr/win Give users access to it and that is a good way of sharing information between operating systems. Good Luck James Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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