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Post by grmcdorman on Aug 15, 2007 11:12:10 GMT -4
I have two computers at work: an ageing Solaris (Unix) system, and a recent Windows XP Pro. At home, we have a number of computers; all save one are dual boot Linux (Gentoo) and Windows XP Home. We only use the latter to play games, though; my wife, in particular, has not used Windows at all until recently, when she decided she needs to learn MS Office.
The one computer that is not dual boot is a Linux-only machine; it functions as a file/print server and Internet gateway.
Gentoo is a very hands-on version of Linux, by the way; if you want to learn a lot about how Linux works it's good. The people Gentoo forums (forums.gentoo.org) are also very helpful.
Ubuntu is the opposite; it's generally pretty simple to use.
For both, you can download a CD image which, when burned to a CD, will allow you to try out Linux without changing anything on your hard drive.
For VMWare (www.vmware.com), there are, in fact, two virtualization products: VMWare Player and VMWare Server. Use the Player if you only want to use existing virtual machines (there's quite a few you can download, including several Linux distributions). VMWare Server allows you more control over the virtual machines, and lets you create new ones.
There's also a free product call VMWare Converter (or P2V) which will allow you to make a virtual machine copy of an existing physical machine. Very useful, especially in test labs.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 15, 2007 11:59:50 GMT -4
I've been playing with Linux (Fedora Core 7) for a few days now. It's not as bad as I remembered, but I still had to fight to get my wireless network card to work. I don't blame Linux for that, it would be great if Linksys made Linux drivers. To get my network card to work in Linux I have to use a driver "bridge" called Driverloader, which allows Linux to use a Windows driver. One thing I don't understand though is why when I update Fedora it "breaks" the network driver (or Driverloader). Every time I update Fedora I have to boot up Windows XP, find the updated version of Driverloader for the new Fedora build, reboot into Linux and then reinstall the driver. There is a new network driver for every update of Linux... why? When I update Windows I don't have to also update every driver, they continue to work. That's the kind of thing that makes me wonder why I (or anyone else) should switch to Linux. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't my network card... but if I can't connect to the net in order to find the new drivers... it's a pain in the butt.
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Post by Ginnie on Aug 15, 2007 18:48:03 GMT -4
I hear ya. I don't have that problem because my network card isn't wireless or I'm just lucky. Yeah, problems like that could definitely drive someone away from Linux. Sometimes when I just keep trying different Linux systems until one works with everything. For example, I have a 19" LCD widescreen monitor and a lot of linux's (?) couldn't give me a proper resolution. I tried about four different linux's until I found one that worked off the bat. I once tried one variety of Linux that booted off a CD and everything worked, but when I installed it I could no longer connect to the net. There's a line in your startup sequence (if you change it to text mode startup) that has eth0 in it. If it says 'yes' then you should be able to connect. If it says 'no', then you can't. At least not until you figure out why and fix it. I can understand anyone not wanting to use Linux for these reasons. Personally, when everything works I prefer it over Windows (since I don't play games on the computer).
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furi
Mars
The Secret is to keep banging those rocks together.
Posts: 260
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Post by furi on Aug 16, 2007 11:37:18 GMT -4
I use WinXp at home, I like my games ;D, and at work what ever OS they happen to have or require support for, I contract, and do tech support (ideally) have had to work with Novell(Yay) AIX(oooh) Linux(meh) Windies(meh) Macs (pfft) Amiga (Big Yay!) OS/2 (yay at the time) and a few bespoke OS's (mostly Unix with Aliased command sets)
my favorite was a sort of network of C64s and Amigas, that was just Hoopy! I wanted to bring in my old Vic20 in (I still had it at the time) and see if I could really cut their software down to run on an unexpanded Vic (Getting nostalgic, will have to fire up VicE when I get home and get a 6502 Asm fix or I might just go to the pub and play crib)
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Post by grmcdorman on Aug 16, 2007 19:56:25 GMT -4
I've been playing with Linux (Fedora Core 7) for a few days now. It's not as bad as I remembered, but I still had to fight to get my wireless network card to work. I don't blame Linux for that, it would be great if Linksys made Linux drivers. To get my network card to work in Linux I have to use a driver "bridge" called Driverloader, which allows Linux to use a Windows driver. One thing I don't understand though is why when I update Fedora it "breaks" the network driver (or Driverloader). Every time I update Fedora I have to boot up Windows XP, find the updated version of Driverloader for the new Fedora build, reboot into Linux and then reinstall the driver. There is a new network driver for every update of Linux... why? When I update Windows I don't have to also update every driver, they continue to work. That's the kind of thing that makes me wonder why I (or anyone else) should switch to Linux. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't my network card... but if I can't connect to the net in order to find the new drivers... it's a pain in the butt. I can't speak for Driverloader, but there's an open-source type solution called 'ndiswrapper' that wraps the Windows drivers for Linux. It works amazingly well. Again, though, I can't say how one would set this up in Red Hat, as I use Gentoo (and there's a native Linux driver for my wireless, to boot). ETA: ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 16, 2007 20:52:11 GMT -4
I checked out ndiswrapper the first time I used Fedora a couple of years ago and at the time it didn't support my card. If it does support it now I might switch to it because Driverloader requires a license ($$$) and therefore isn't distributed in the automatic updater like ndiswrapper is. I'm assuming that being included in the automatic updates would make my life a whole lot easier.
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Post by grmcdorman on Aug 17, 2007 14:58:48 GMT -4
Take a look at the ndiswrapper web site, 'list of cards known to work'.
Note that the omission of a card from the list does not mean it won't work. You need to try it to see what happens.
You could also check out the ndiswrapper forum, of course.
What specific type of card do you have? (You can get the actual chipset from doing sudo lspci -v.)
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