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.
Ubuntu or other Linux OS
- Thread starter paradisiac
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what about touchscreen monitors?
hardware i want to try to keep as low a price as possible, as i want to try and do some budget pcs so i can have quick sales. make like £10 on each and just bulk sell.
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If you know the model you can generally google beforehand and get a rough idea whether its supported, and even if its not there's someone out there willing to write a driver for it (it just takes time), xorg handles touch events fine though.
from the site this looks like it makes a live cd on the pendrive that runs in windows
i will have a proper read though, probably my skim reading missing something.
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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?
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.
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Yup sure can, all changes persist between sessions. Oh, and performance from a hard disc is a lot better thn a live dvd or usb stick.
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?
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Ubuntu are seriously going after the embedded and touchscreen market - their latest release switched from the Gnome desktop to their own Unity which is designed with touchscreen in mind. So the *buntus, at least, should support a great deal of touchscreen devices. This may or may not mean other distros will too. Unfortunately I can't help you here, I don't have any experience.
Some useful Linux links:
Distrowatch - keeps track of pretty much every distro out there and has a weekly roundup of distro news. Great site.
Linux Questions - the biggest distro-agnostic community site/forum I know of.
Rute - A seminal Linux manual/tutorial. Not read it for years so I don't know whether it's out of date but it will be a good primer.
The Linux Documentation Project - does what it says on the tin.
UK Linux User Groups - depending on location this could be the best link you'll ever get for Linux. I've been in two LUGs and sadly both were pretty stagnant. However some LUGs are reportedly extremely active and hold regular meetings, installfests etc. At meetings you're usually able to take any hardware and get help with getting it working with Linux. Almost all LUGs have their own mailling list, IRC channel etc.
Distrowatch - keeps track of pretty much every distro out there and has a weekly roundup of distro news. Great site.
Linux Questions - the biggest distro-agnostic community site/forum I know of.
Rute - A seminal Linux manual/tutorial. Not read it for years so I don't know whether it's out of date but it will be a good primer.
The Linux Documentation Project - does what it says on the tin.
UK Linux User Groups - depending on location this could be the best link you'll ever get for Linux. I've been in two LUGs and sadly both were pretty stagnant. However some LUGs are reportedly extremely active and hold regular meetings, installfests etc. At meetings you're usually able to take any hardware and get help with getting it working with Linux. Almost all LUGs have their own mailling list, IRC channel etc.
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.
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Mandriva will be fine, I started out on mandrake back in the day (what mandriva evolved from I guess), drivers really are not an inssue when it comes to linux, if your distro doesn't have packages you can compile your own and manually install (which is fairly easy when you've did it a few times).
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.
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?
Purely for ease of use and considering you're new to Linux, yeah, I'd recommend Linux Mint first or Ubuntu second. The reason I say Mint first is that Ubuntu - while historically a superb choice for beginners - is entering something of a transition period. Their new Unity desktop is reportedly not quite there yet. Try it out by all means though!
I haven't actually used an HTPC distro so I can't make any recommendations there other than Mythbuntu because it's the one I've heard most about. Hairybudda clearly knows what he's talking about though so definitely check out yadvr!
It's exciting isn't it?
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.
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.
have tried to install live messenger and IE8 with wine and both unsuccessful. why?
yeh, its just IE and Live messenger were the only windows programs i could think of 