Ubuntu or other Linux OS

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 17:16

Hairybudda said:
Yeah you kinda missed how it works, you run the application in windows and it builds a live environment on your usb stick to boot into, reboot, choose to boot from usb and you've got a pendrive environment, it should be pretty easy to make them persistant too.

so that means i can install software on it, unlike the livecd versions?

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 17:18

Huw said:
Oh yeah, I was going to talk a little about hardware. Motherboards, CPUs, etc - all your standard internal components - are absolutely fine as long as you don't use anything too exotic. Stick to known brands and widely-used stuff and I can all but guarantee you'll never have compatibility issues. Monitors are plug and play, as are keyboards, mice etc. Never heard of a hard drive that wasn't supported either.

i was looking at something like the Zotac NM10-B-E Intel Atom D510 1.66 GHz Processor HDMI VGA Out 6 Channel Audio Mini-ITX Motherboard for a HTPC and possible an Office/Internet PC if it was man enough. never used an atom so not sure how much power they actually kick out.

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 17:30

Hairybudda said:
Planning on building a media center box myself, atom is fine so long as you have ION graphics on there so you can use hardware VDPAU (offloads a lot of video processing stuff to the GPU so the CPU doesn't need to do much at all). Cheap atom + ion setup with http://www.yavdr.org/ is what I'm going for.

ooo thanks for that

the mobo i mentioned doesnt say anything about ION

did find this though for not much more Asus AT3IONT-I Intel Atom 330 ION onboard graphics 6 channel audio mITX Motherboard. ram, smart looking case, dvdrw and hdd and good to go?

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 17:59

whats people opinions of Mandriva Linux. reason i ask is on the main page it says it has the best hardware support and is easy to use. but the free version looks to me like it doesnt have any drivers.

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 18:20

Huw said:
I've never used Mandriva myself. It used to be a very popular distro, in fact at some time I think it was probably the most popular, at least on the desktop. However it has suffered over the past five or so years. I have always heard good things about it though.

I would take the claim of best hardware support with a pinch of salt. Most distros are equal in this. As for the difference in versions, the free one is 100% Free software, while the other versions have proprietary software and drivers built in. I doubt you can get Mandriva-developed proprietary stuff anywhere for free (legally) but I would bet that third-party drivers and such are available. With distros like Mandriva, if you pay money you're generally paying for little more than convenience.

Give the free version a try by all means, but unless you're running a data centre I see no reason to ever pay a penny for Linux.

so ubuntu or mint seem the most practical ones for desktop and yadvr for htpc?

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 18:32

running ubuntu right now, and its pretty damn sweet. installed that cheese web cam booth and suprise suprise, my web cam works. no drivers to download or anything

obviously its not windows, thats going to be the hardest thing to get through to people, everything is different, but thats not always a bad thing. the amount of customers at work (and even my manager) that threw a tantrum when they upgraded from windows xp to windows 7 because it looked different (my manager went back to xp because he couldnt work 7 out). so for a new pc, i cant see a new OS being a bad thing, and if they are just upgrading their pc, then no reason i cant use their windows license anyway if they prefer windows.

but yeh, is exciting, love playing with things, and if mint is better then i cant wait.

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 19:51

have tried to install live messenger and IE8 with wine and both unsuccessful. why?

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 20:01

yeh, its just IE and Live messenger were the only windows programs i could think of

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 20:08

Hairybudda said:
Mount your windows partition and try fire up a game under wine and see how it goes, that'll be more of a learning experience

ummm................ i dont follow

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 20:16

yeh i can get to the files, but it says its not marked as an executionable. when i tick the box to make it executionable it just unticks itself straight away

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 20:21

yeh wine is installed, if i right click it gives me the option to run via wine, but it just says its not an executionable.

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 20:28

Hairybudda said:
If I remember right a windows app will look like a grey diamond shape, make sure the application you're opening has a .exe extension (not dll or anything), make sure you're not trying to open a 64bit windows app in a 32bit linux environment (if you open a terminal and type uname -a and press return you should have an x86_64 line there somewhere if you're on 64bit linux).

yeh grey diamond with cogs on it. deffinatly an exe, tried several different ones. all 32bit apps and all do the same

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 20:49

Hairybudda said:
If you were comfortable with the terminal I'd ask you to run wine from there and post the output here, I know you're new to linux so that's a bit much to ask, dunno how else to handle this (especially considering im getting progressively more drunk as the night goes on hah)

Does the 'explorer' have an option to 'open a terminal here'?

not that i can see. could it be that my pendrive is pretty much full? or are there user privillages i might not have to enable file permission changes?

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 20:55

installed winetricks instead and its getting further, but still nothing open

but think everything uses DirectX so thats probably the problem.

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 21:04

Huw said:
I think this step would work if you were running the file manager as root. Which file manager are you using? Nautilus? It will say in the help -> about menu.

Nautilus 2.32.2.1.

the winetricks is starting to launch things, but so far nothing has loaded. get errors for most things, other just do nothing.

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 21:21

only had a small usb pendrive. so thought i would try and install it on a 37GB external drive (partitioned so its fat32) but i cant get the program to see the drive to install Linux onto it

is there any way in making windows think an external hard drive is a usb drive?

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 21:54

via usb, but its not being seen by the program

paradisiac · 13 May 2011 at 22:32

gave mint a go, dont like it as much as ubuntu, seemed very dated.

paradisiac · 14 May 2011 at 06:50

Superewza said:
Dated? Is this like the person who was on the Mint forum recently saying they thought it was rubbish because the default theme was only one colour? When really it's brushed metal, and a lot of people find glossy stuff distracting.

But i wonder if it's something to do with settings, if you're only seeing it as one colour... is it 16 bit?

nah not been on the forums. i just felt that the software manager and overall layout seemed a tad simple compaird to ubuntu. im not saying its a bad thing, its just i personally prefered the look of ubuntu. mint seemed to me to be too much of a windows wannabe rather than a slick OS like ubuntu. there might be themes that make it feel better, but overall ther software manager was missing a lot of items that the ubuntu one had.
like i have said from the begining, i have never used Linux so its all new to me. maybe with time and some playing around mint is the better OS, but on my first opinion i liked ubuntu more. it was nothing negative or derogitory towards mint, just a comment.

paradisiac · 14 May 2011 at 11:12

Oxy said:
People do realise they can install any themes, icons, fonts, logins etc etc etc as they want?

i understand that, just trying that now. but finding it hard to find anywhere that actually works to download them from