View unanswered posts    View active topics

All times are UTC - 6 hours





Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 17 posts ] 
Go to page 1, 2  Next

Print view Previous topic   Next topic  
Author Message
Search for:
PostPosted: Sun Nov 16, 2008 2:21 pm 
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location: /dev/null
Thanks to my experiences running several KM boxes, and to all the kind folks in these forums who have helped me out, I am now, happy to report that I finally switched over from Windows XP to Debian (lenny) as my main desktop (dual booting but mainly under Debian). I gotta say that Gnome/Compiz-fusion is a great desktop combo -- even got the wife about 75 % on-board.

I'm also leveraging knowledge acquired using KM about, apt, ssh, vnc, backups, kernels, SAMBA, networking, basic shell scripting, the Debian-specific stuff such as update-rc.d, etc.

Advice to people thinking about making the switch: once you get over the initial learning curve associated with running a LINUX system, I think you'll find that it is a much leaner and meaner product than Windows. Right now, the only Windows application I miss that I can't run under LINUX is MeGUI. Well, that and a few games, but most everything else runs under WINE or as a LINUX native app.

Anyway, thanks for all the help, guys.

Image

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.


Last edited by graysky on Tue Nov 25, 2008 2:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Nov 16, 2008 3:57 pm 
Offline
Site Admin
Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2003 6:37 pm
Posts: 2659
Location: Whittier, Ca
Looks nice!


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Nov 17, 2008 4:53 am 
Offline
Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2005 10:48 am
Posts: 852
Location: London, UK
Looking very nice graysky,

I'm about to ditch windows perminately all I need is time!!!! Maybe I'll save a copy for dual boot or as a virtual machine. As I currently run Ubuntu 8.10 on my second machine and my laptop, and of course KM under the TV it shouldn't be much of an issue.

But so far I have risisted on switching to Linux on my 'main' computer but since I'm using it less and less, so may go for the final switch over because apartfrom the exception of a few games I rarely, rarely boot it up.

What do you have installed on your Lenny install? I like the cpu info and clock you've got going.

I have to agree, Linux is much faster in all areas. Windoze, is sooooo slow.

Hope you continue to enjoy. Oh, and my missus hardly notices the difference.

_________________
Version:R8
Intel C2D 7400, Nvidia 5600 via HDMI to Samsung B37B650TW (PAL), Asus P5QL-E mobo, 4Gb PC6400 DDR2 ram, Samsung Spinpoint 500 Gb & 1Tb drive, Nova-HD-S2 (x2)


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Nov 17, 2008 4:19 pm 
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location: /dev/null
tophee wrote:
What do you have installed on your Lenny install? I like the cpu info and clock you've got going.


The cpuinfo is conky. The clock is part of screenlets. The dock at the bottom is avant-window-navigator. It's gnome desktop with compiz-fusion. CF is very cool and can be installed easily following this guide. Screenlets and avant can be installed via the standard lenny distros via aptitude or apt-get.

For the .conkyrc that I wrote, see this thread. You'll need to install several packages to get it to work: lm-sensors hddtemp nvclock.

Here is a list of the pacakges I uses as the base system in addition to the pre-installed stuff:

Code:
ntfs-3g htop vlc brasero icedove grub-splashimages lm-sensors hddtemp xtightvncviewer conky wine compiz-fusion-gnome fusion-icon compiz-fusion-extras compiz-fusion-plugins-extra avant-window-navigator screenlets ntp nvclock decibel-audio-player preload


I totally recommend keeping a list of the packages you have installed on your system in case you ever need to reinstall. If so, getting them back is cake via a single apt-get commend - assuming you have the repos in your /etc/apt/sources.list :)

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 8:32 am 
Offline
Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2005 10:48 am
Posts: 852
Location: London, UK
I've already got avant-window-navigator dock on my ubuntu machine. Others have recommended cairo dock, which I may look into. Right - that's 'conky' its one I've not used before. I've got the latest version of wine running wich makes installing the odd widows app fairly painless.

_________________
Version:R8
Intel C2D 7400, Nvidia 5600 via HDMI to Samsung B37B650TW (PAL), Asus P5QL-E mobo, 4Gb PC6400 DDR2 ram, Samsung Spinpoint 500 Gb & 1Tb drive, Nova-HD-S2 (x2)


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 11:32 am 
Offline
Joined: Thu Feb 12, 2004 2:54 pm
Posts: 392
Location: Beaumont, CA
Welcome to our side! I've been using linux as my primary desktop for many years and never looked back. (Thanks to Cecil!) The most important thing I ran into without thinking about is my email and browser settings and being able to have them switch back and forth if I wanted to go back.
If you want to try linux out, I'd recommend starting by using thunderbird for email and firefox for a browser. That way if you do need to switch back and forth it is extremely easy to copy over your email files and browser settings. You could always use gmail, but personally I dont like my important information "in the cloud".
In my opinion it is almost the same learning curve to switch from XP to KDE as it is from XP to Vista.
Lastly, ask questions. Remember when you first learned windows? You had lots of questions, therefore it shouldn't be any different than using a different OS.

Just my 2 cents...

_________________
ASUS A7N266 Micro-ATX Motherboard
Athlon 2200 processor
512K Kingston PC2100 Memory
MicroAtx Case
2 PVR250's w/remote
eVGA e-GeForce mx4000 (64 Ram with Tv/Out (Svideo))
Lite-on DVD cd-rw combo
120 GB Western Digital


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 1:59 pm 
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location: /dev/null
tophee wrote:
I've already got avant-window-navigator dock on my ubuntu machine. Others have recommended cairo dock, which I may look into. Right - that's 'conky' its one I've not used before. I've got the latest version of wine running wich makes installing the odd widows app fairly painless.


Cairo dock is glitzier than AWN, but for an amd64 system, it's a pain in the balls to install since you have to hunt down 32-bit libraries and manually install them.

Conky rocks if you're willing to spend a little time writing the config file for your system.

elgordo123 wrote:
If you want to try linux out, I'd recommend starting by using thunderbird for email and firefox for a browser. That way if you do need to switch back and forth it is extremely easy to copy over your email files and browser settings.


Agreed. My system is setup to dual boot. I have my firefox profile entirely on the Windows side and I simply made a symlink to it in my ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles so there is no manual copying. Thunderbird is equally easy, but since I'm using the amd64 kernel, my enigmal plugin needs to be different from the windows side, so there I copied my thunderbird profile from the windows side and made an symlink to just the /Mail dir. This allows me to use Lin64 specific plugins, yet still have the mail synced.

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 10:57 pm 
Offline
Joined: Fri Jan 09, 2004 8:30 pm
Posts: 146
Location: Reno, NV
That was how I got hooked on Linux too. KM and Linux are that good.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Nov 19, 2008 5:19 am 
Offline
Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2005 10:48 am
Posts: 852
Location: London, UK
I had a quick look at installing cairo and I agree - an absolute pain. At least AWN is in the repository.

One of the best little apps I use for firefox is foxmarks - means all my bookmarks follow me everywhere there is firefox. As they've now added secure password sync'ing too, it gets easier and easier to move across machines.

_________________
Version:R8
Intel C2D 7400, Nvidia 5600 via HDMI to Samsung B37B650TW (PAL), Asus P5QL-E mobo, 4Gb PC6400 DDR2 ram, Samsung Spinpoint 500 Gb & 1Tb drive, Nova-HD-S2 (x2)


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Dec 06, 2008 5:16 pm 
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location: /dev/null
Had to boot into windows for some RAW conversion and MAN was it slow and clunky after using Debian/Lenny for a few weeks! Guess you don't know your O/S is broken until you use one that isn't :p

I'd encourage anyone using a Windows desktop as their primary PC to give Debian/Lenny a try. Once you get used to it, I think you'll agree that LINUX is better.

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 4:16 am 
Offline
Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2005 9:18 pm
Posts: 1422
Location: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
I would like to try this and am wondering does anyone have a dual boot guide so that I can give it a go. I am currently using Winblows Vista :P

Thanks

_________________
Girkers


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 5:37 am 
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location: /dev/null
I don't have a specific guide, but installation with an existing OS is pretty easy really. How many hdd's do you have in your system currently? Show me the layout of them/it. Example. two drive:

disk1
c:\ (ntfs) 40 gigs
d:\ (ntfs) 500 gigs

disk2
e:\ (ntfs) 700 gigs

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 6:41 am 
Offline
Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2005 10:48 am
Posts: 852
Location: London, UK
Certainly distro's like Ubuntu you can install via windows (put the CD in while in windows and go from there) leaving you with a dual boot system. This is currently how I'm running on my main desktop machine. Or put the cd in the disk drive and boot off that. Run as live then install. The included disk partitioner is pretty good.
Or do you specifically want a Debian machine?

Oh, Ubuntu is Debian with a bit of a respin. I'm also hering good things about Linux Mint.

My current setup is two disks.
Disk 1 = both operating systems.
Disk 2 = Windows MyDocuments + Linux home

_________________
Version:R8
Intel C2D 7400, Nvidia 5600 via HDMI to Samsung B37B650TW (PAL), Asus P5QL-E mobo, 4Gb PC6400 DDR2 ram, Samsung Spinpoint 500 Gb & 1Tb drive, Nova-HD-S2 (x2)


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 7:53 am 
Offline
Joined: Mon May 02, 2005 9:00 am
Posts: 172
I think wubi is probably the easiest way to try Linux.

http://wubi-installer.org/

It's a Ubuntu installer for windows that installs Ubuntu in a file (bunch of files?) on your existing file system. It adds an entry to the windows boot loader and you can remove it like any other windows application if you don't like it. You can see all your windows files from Linux as well. It's a nice way to try Linux on any windows machine without installing another boot loader and changing your partition table. You can check out the faq too.

http://wubi-installer.org/faq.php


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 7:58 am 
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location: /dev/null
Never heard of that or how it works. The grub installation script on the lenny CD is fine. He'll be able to see all his NTFS/FAT partitions with no problems. The important thing is locating /boot on his first disk if he has two or three in case of disk failure in the future. That's why I asked about his configuration.

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.


Top
 Profile  
 

Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 17 posts ] 
Go to page 1, 2  Next



All times are UTC - 6 hours




Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 12 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Jump to:  
cron
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group

Theme Created By ceyhansuyu