Heres one for the geeks

Im looking at giving my legit copy of win XP pro to my sister - its her bday and im broke...

So for myself, I am checking out alternatives that will allow for windows games, apps etc to run whilst not being windows... or not free for that matter. I am sure some of our guru's have had a hunt through the options before, so I am curious what the best option would be. Bare in mind though, i dont so much care for ms office (open office is great) but graphics programs and web authoring tools cant be lost...

So what do you guys think?

PS: In research I have done, Xandros seems a good linux alternative - but costs $99 per machine, solaris is very "windows NT"... windows vista - costs over $300 and is to much admin.

VERY keen to see what your opinions are.

I, and many others, have been please and very happy with a distro of linux called ubuntu

there are no costs associated with it and the transition from windows is fairly easy.

Download one of the cd isos from their website for intallation later.

The great thing about linux for windows users is you can use WINE (wine is not an emulator) to run most windows apps - it even gives you a mock c-drive with my documents and program files directories. i know one person who has got photoshop working under wine

There are linux distros of open office as well, as well as many other cool things.

One catch - myself and others have had issues with wireless network drivers. not impossible to overcome but sometimes frustrating

Great, I actually received the ubuntu cd in the post just the other day, have not tried it yet. Are you using it as a development platform as well as a general desktop os? Or dare I say, do you still run windows on a separate partition just in case?

I have two computers at home

My desktop runs MS XP; my laptop came with MS Vista Basic so I put Ubuntu on it.

I use both for all things. My desktop is easier to use - because it's a desktop with two screens and wireless controls - so i tend to do most work on that.

Ah, that makes sense. I will wait till I get my hands on laptop before I switch then. My desktop at home is my work horse so perhaps it isn't best to experiment with it until I have a backup plan. Thanks for your input Northie. Any experience with Solaris?

RAESteyn wrote:

Any experience with Solaris?

None

I have to say, Ubuntu is probably the way to go if you're looking for an easy transition.

Open Office should come with the standard installation (I think) and its pretty easy to get yourself up and running.

Wireless drivers can be a b*tch, you'll have to use some command line (well, they've been increasing support for hardware so I guess you may get lucky) and maybe modify a conf file (I did).

But, if you've got a day to spend on it, or even a few hours, you should be able to figure it out.

Additionally, you can always run the Live CD, which is just a bootable CD that lets you run the distro without installing anything, to get a feel for how everything works.

Good luck, my friend.

I've been using openSUSE Linux on my home server and my laptop, though I don't go as far as playing Windows based games on Linux yet.  There is another option as far as graphics programs in Linux.  GREP is a fairly powerful graphics tool similar to Photoshop, which comes with most if not all distributions of Linux.

One thing you might want to try before fully converting a computer to Linux is the Knoppix live DVD from here: http://www.knoppix.org/  This will give you an opportunity to try out Linux without affecting your Windows installation.

I have a second machine that I let the kids run Ubuntu on. That way, if they're on any 'free game' sites, I won't get hammered with undesirables.

I play with it off and on, and it's a pretty cool OS. It works and runs really well, and you don't need to be an uber-dork to figure out what how to do things.

I REALLY like the package installer (or whatever it's called). You can download free software right from the desktop. However, I wish it was presented a little better. It's kinda like this huge list of files you can download, and most of them are only pieces of software made to work with the overall software you want.

Someone online told me that it's done that way, so that you can get ONLY what you need, instead of being force fed 2gigs of useless tools and addons. I like the idea, but I wish they'd give you a better user interface when downloading... some sections literally look like a train wreck. Add the fact that I'm new to linux and don't know what all the file types are, and you'll see large question marks above me head.

Other than that, I haven't tried to play any games via WINE or anything else. I sense that the emulator thing is going to present small problems here and there to overcome, to get the game to run how I like, and I have practically 0 for time.

I was wondering tho - Can't you run a linux server for games like Quake, Doom, etc.? If you can, why couldn't you get a copy of the game in linux format? I'm assuming it's one of those super-geek things that I don't understand yet.

Cool,it is becoming abundantly clear that a second pc is the way forward

As far as gaming goes, there was a company that converted games... they went bang. Other apps have popped up here and there to install games but they only work on a few games... I read stories of people getting COD and WOW to work, as well as half life 2. That just isnt good enough

Are  you sure about GREP Steven? All the googling I have done point to it being a command line for unix/linux systems?

I can't imagine games would work that well under WINE, especially given that WINE defaults it's self to a colour palette of just the 16 basic windoze colours

RAESteyn wrote:

Are  you sure about GREP Steven? All the googling I have done point to it being a command line for unix/linux systems?

The only thing I can think of is that Steven was busy and confused the command-line search function GREP with the open-source image editing software GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).

MarkCCDC wrote:

RAESteyn wrote:

Are  you sure about GREP Steven? All the googling I have done point to it being a command line for unix/linux systems?

The only thing I can think of is that Steven was busy and confused the command-line search function GREP with the open-source image editing software GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).

Ah, that makes sense, GIMP I have heard of... actually played with it a bit on red hat... wasnt particularly impressed... then again, didnt know what I was doing either

GIMP is also available for windoze users

GREP is the *nix version of search and is unbelievably powerful (takes regex etc)

However, the power of linux comes from the command line. Without knowing what to do there (like me) linux operating systems can feel quite limited.

Like most things in life - it's all about choosing the right tool for the right job.

It's not the best OS for gaming, but is pretty hot as a server (or anything connecting to it over a TCP/IP network - including gaming server, as all it's really doing is routing data from one place to another)

Yeah, grep is a very powerful search function for command line usage. I'm not an expert, but I've used it plenty and recognized it as soon as I read the post.

I don't use Windoze, so I wasn't sure if there was a distro for Win or not.

Gotta love open source - a free graphics program pretty comparable to Photoshop.

But, I still like Photoshop better

Yup sorry, I did mean GIMP, got my FLEAs* mixed up.

*Four Letter Extended Acronyms

I personally recommend Linux, But the bewildering choice and the ever increasing number of Linux distributions can be confusing for those who are new to Linux. So here is link which should help take some of the confusion out of choosing which distro to try

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

Hopefully this will help a little and good luck

Thanks T1 - That link is really great...

Ubuntu Ultimate has caught my eye... then again, Debian looks really good as well as Mint - I am gonna need a week of testing, tweaking and bandwidth stealing before I could even comprehend landing on one of these. hectic.

Ubuntu is based on Debian

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/Debian

Ubuntu Ultimate has caught my eye... then again, Debian looks really good as well as Mint - I am gonna need a week of testing, tweaking and bandwidth stealing before I could even comprehend landing on one of these. hectic.

its not too difficult if you know where to look, here is guide for latest version of ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) that should help you get up and running within a short space of time, ubuntu is popular because 1.there is a lot of documentation/help out there &  2. most new users find it fairly easy to adapt to from windows & 3. it debian based

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Intrepid

have fun & once again good luck:thumbsup: