Converting from Windows to Linux

[WanderingKnight]

Could you guys please stop trolling, and stay factual? k thx.
On a sidenote, I don't like Windows and Linux comparisons, because this is highly dependend on personal preference. While Windows is userfriendlier for most people, it is unsatisfactory for others. E.g. certain things are easier done in Linux, because you don't have to reverse engineer everything if you want to apply advanced changes to OS or certain software, but it has drawbacks too. For people that like ready to use software/OS and accept certain drawbacks, there is Windows. Both OS have their right to exist... and I am sick of reading why In Someones Opinion one su*** more than the other (at least give factual reasons, I can somehow bear it that way, no I don't need repetitve ones...).

The main reason I have for not picking Windows is price -_-;

And that goddamn Microsoft tries at every opportunity to get in the way of my privacy.

[Epyon9283]

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

The main reason I have for not picking Windows is price -_-;

The main reason I don't use Windows when I can help it is that it annoys the hell out of me. The piss-poor job it does in trying to hide the complexities of the OS from me is quite aggravating. Do I really need to be given a stupid little warning if I try to navigate to C:\, C:\Program Files\, or C:\Windows\*\? Why not just hide those folders completely if you don't want me in there? Also, why the hell does the OS hide file name extensions by default? File extensions are the only way the idiotic OS knows the file type yet it hides it?

Then, we have the tragedy which is Windows peer to peer networking. NetBIOS (or NBT) is a terrible, terrible thing which should have never seen the light of day. Here's a fun trick, try naming your computer something with 16 characters. Then try connecting to that computer from another windows computer using the name you gave it.

I won't go into Windows server licensing, exchange, or IIS because I'll probably get an aneurism but hopefully you're getting my point.

[Ledgem]

I'm having a slight problem with GRUB. The initial installation of OpenSUSE seemed to go wonderfully, but when I try to load into anything, I get a GRUB message, followed within milliseconds of "Error 22".

I've looked on the net and the problem seems to be that it can't find something that it's looking for. I think it has to do with how I set up the installation. I'm going to redo the install, but I wanted to post here for time efficiency to ensure that the problem is due to what I thought it was and that I'm doing the right thing to fix it.

I have five hard drives: two IDE drives connected on the same cable, one IDE drive connected to an expansion PCI card, and then two SATA drives. The SATA drive in slot one was the one I chose for Linux. I think that originally, the installer wanted to put a small amount of something on one of the other drives, but I changed the options so that all aspects of Linux would be installed to that single SATA drive.

The corrected fix would be to take some space out of one of the IDE drives and install the bootloader to there... or something along those lines. I'm currently running some of the repair tools to see if it'll catch that and/or anything else.

If this doesn't work, what's the recommended fix? I can't access Windows or Linux if GRUB is acting up. It's a bit of a bad situation... I'm sure it's easily fixable, but I guess I can see why some people might freak out if it doesn't seemingly work on the first shot. (Then again, I'm working with a setup that's a bit more advanced than a newly bought PC.)

I'm still excited about getting Linux running, though!

edit: Well, the good news is that I'm back in Windows and typing this from my desktop, rather than my laptop (from which I made the original post). The bad news is that I didn't make any progress with GRUB; I had to access the Windows Recovery Console and use "fixmbr" to get back to being able to boot Windows.

I redid my installation of SUSE, but it didn't have any impact. It kept all of the installation details to the single hard drive that I'd originally specified - I don't know if it was retaining my settings even for a new installation, or if it was always like that and I just didn't notice it the first time.

The only odd thing I noticed about the GRUB configuration files (accessed through the SUSE repair utility) was that the two HDs it referenced were the HD where Windows resides, and then the swap partition of the Linux HD (hda2,1 - first partition of that drive, right?). Swap partition? Doesn't seem right to me. I think I correctly designated it to look for the second partition (the first being swap, the second being root, the third being everything else) but it didn't make a difference. Setting GRUB to install to the MBR yielded an error, with GRUB saying that it couldn't find the target or something to that extent. It'd successfully install to the root directory, but I'd still get the "Grub stage 1.5 Error 22" screen.

I googled around, but most Error 22 messages with GRUB seem to come from people who deleted their Linux partition - very few (if any) came out of a clean install of Linux.

No harm done, but I'm a bit disappointed. Then again, trying to get multiple operating systems to play nicely with each other is rarely something that just clicks, I suppose - it's not the fault of Linux. If anyone has any ideas, I'm open - unfortunately, my free time for this break is up, so I may be slow about trying suggestions and/or providing more information. Thanks in advance, though.

[felix]

Always clicked for me (with the installs)
Even with multiple Windowses (including Vista) & Linux Distros.

Ok I know thers are lil' problems you could have with Vista & Linux side by side
but if you document yourself properly there shouldn't be a problem.

• Are you perhaps trying some kind of unstable beta release or something?! (as in openSUSE 10.3 Alpha1)

---------------------------------
@ Epyon

Those are just minor annoyances, if that.
It's not like it's sooo~ hard to change a few settings.
*Cats wonders what supper perfect-out-of-the-box distro Epyon uses.*

As far as home-use goes Windows is oriented as a family operating system (unlike linux) so all those settings you mentioned make absolutely perfect sense.

Are you under the impression that Windows users use it as is out of the box? like is generally the case for linux. (since there's not really much of a choice sometimes) I think every windows user customizes more or less. If it's just simple things like organizing they're hard drives, icons or just changing basic stuff, or meddling with more adv. techy stuff. Where as with linux everything is more or less communist-fashioned, mostly you get what you see and customizing doesn't exist. Yes you can do it but it's way too laborious and boring, you might be required (even for the user-friendly-distros) to search the net for pages of documentation just to change the damn resolution.

Post Scriptum
BTW, you are wrong, it hides file extensions of known file types,
that really don't need to be displayed, since they will have a very
suggestive icon anyway.

[Jinto]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

I'm having a slight problem with GRUB. The initial installation of OpenSUSE seemed to go wonderfully, but when I try to load into anything, I get a GRUB message, followed within milliseconds of "Error 22".

I've looked on the net and the problem seems to be that it can't find something that it's looking for. I think it has to do with how I set up the installation. I'm going to redo the install, but I wanted to post here for time efficiency to ensure that the problem is due to what I thought it was and that I'm doing the right thing to fix it.

I have five hard drives: two IDE drives connected on the same cable, one IDE drive connected to an expansion PCI card, and then two SATA drives. The SATA drive in slot one was the one I chose for Linux. I think that originally, the installer wanted to put a small amount of something on one of the other drives, but I changed the options so that all aspects of Linux would be installed to that single SATA drive.

The corrected fix would be to take some space out of one of the IDE drives and install the bootloader to there... or something along those lines. I'm currently running some of the repair tools to see if it'll catch that and/or anything else.

If this doesn't work, what's the recommended fix? I can't access Windows or Linux if GRUB is acting up. It's a bit of a bad situation... I'm sure it's easily fixable, but I guess I can see why some people might freak out if it doesn't seemingly work on the first shot. (Then again, I'm working with a setup that's a bit more advanced than a newly bought PC.)

I'm still excited about getting Linux running, though!

edit: Well, the good news is that I'm back in Windows and typing this from my desktop, rather than my laptop (from which I made the original post). The bad news is that I didn't make any progress with GRUB; I had to access the Windows Recovery Console and use "fixmbr" to get back to being able to boot Windows.

I redid my installation of SUSE, but it didn't have any impact. It kept all of the installation details to the single hard drive that I'd originally specified - I don't know if it was retaining my settings even for a new installation, or if it was always like that and I just didn't notice it the first time.

The only odd thing I noticed about the GRUB configuration files (accessed through the SUSE repair utility) was that the two HDs it referenced were the HD where Windows resides, and then the swap partition of the Linux HD (hda2,1 - first partition of that drive, right?). Swap partition? Doesn't seem right to me. I think I correctly designated it to look for the second partition (the first being swap, the second being root, the third being everything else) but it didn't make a difference. Setting GRUB to install to the MBR yielded an error, with GRUB saying that it couldn't find the target or something to that extent. It'd successfully install to the root directory, but I'd still get the "Grub stage 1.5 Error 22" screen.

I googled around, but most Error 22 messages with GRUB seem to come from people who deleted their Linux partition - very few (if any) came out of a clean install of Linux.

No harm done, but I'm a bit disappointed. Then again, trying to get multiple operating systems to play nicely with each other is rarely something that just clicks, I suppose - it's not the fault of Linux. If anyone has any ideas, I'm open - unfortunately, my free time for this break is up, so I may be slow about trying suggestions and/or providing more information. Thanks in advance, though.

That is what I told in the posts before, if you'ld delete ntldr, you'ld still be able to use the rudimentary bootloader, while deleting non-mbr parts of GRUB makes the bootload process fail completely.

Your problem is, that GRUBs mbr-part is correctly installed, but the chained non-mbr part is wrongly addressed. I hope you can boot with a Linux LiveCD, so we achieve a little more information on the matter:

First I am interested in GRUB's awareness of the system when it is booted up. Therefore you have to go in the folder where grub is installed (usually /boot/grub or something similar). There you type the command "grub", which brings you to the grub command line, then type "find /vmlinuz". The output should be something like "(hdX,Y)".

Now examining the error 22... (you need to reinstall your GRUB when you made fixmbr, because fixmbr overwrites the GRUB mbr-part with the mbr-part of the Windows bootloader)
Usually GRUB has a little countdown, press ESC in the countdown.
You are in GRUB menu now, press "c" and you will get into the GRUB command line
There type exactly "find /vmlinuz" (nothing more & nothing less).
The more correct term for the mbr-part would be stage1. I suppose your GRUBs stage2 is not linked correctly.

Again it should provide an output like "(hdX,Y)". If there is something else, I'ld like to know too. Now what really is interesting, is if the two outputs are different (that means when you install your GRUB, it thinks of the hard disk setup differently, then it is actually when it is booting up...)

But that is hard to explain...

that is my GRUB's menu.lst (to illustrate something)

default 0
timeout 3
splashimage=(hd1,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux
root (hd1,1)
kernel (hd1,1)/kernel-genkernel-x86-2.6.18-gentoo-r4 root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc ramdisk=8192 real_root=/dev/hdb5 udev
initrd (hd1,1)/initramfs-genkernel-x86-2.6.18-gentoo-r4
vga=0x318 video=vesafb:mtrr,ywrap,1024x768@100

title=Windows Bootloader
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

You can see by looking on the root part, that I have my non-mbr GRUB parts stored on the second physical drive's second partition (location of the kernel image).

btw. in my case the command would not be "find /vmlinuz" but "find /kernel-genkernel-x86-2.6.18-gentoo-r4", because I use a not so preconfigured distro. On the SUSE distro the kernel image should be named "vmlinuz" (thats just so you know, what you are actually doing there, and what "vmlinuz" means)

Now I am going to explain the thing about stage1 and stage2 a little more detailed:

localhost grub # ls
e2fs_stage1_5  grub.conf.sample  reiserfs_stage1_5  ufs2_stage1_5
fat_stage1_5   iso9660_stage1_5  splash.xpm.gz      vstafs_stage1_5
ffs_stage1_5   jfs_stage1_5      stage1             xfs_stage1_5
grub.conf      menu.lst          stage2
grub.conf.old  minix_stage1_5    stage2_eltorito

that is a directory view of the hdb2 device (Linux boot partition). There exists a folder /grub containing stage1, stage2 and several stage1_5 files. It is important for GRUB, to know, where the stage2 or stage1_5 respectively (for use of special filesystems) is to be found, when stage1 starts. This information is stored in a stage1 jump line. You maybe noticed the different use of hdX,Y in GRUB and Linux. What is called hd1,1 in GRUB is called hdb2 in Linux. That is because GRUB counts devices in the order the BIOS detected them, hd0,0 being the primary, the boot device (which is the location of GRUB's stage1). Now hd1,1 in my case is the location of stage2 (hd1 = second drive, hd1,1 = second drive's second partition). If your stage1 is linked incorrectly to stage2, your GRUB will fail to load stage2 (afaik error 22 indicates such a situation). Stage1_5 is pre stage2, like a filesystem driver... In your case "Grub stage 1.5 Error 22" means, you have basically stage1 linked to a certain stage1.5 and that is linked to stage2. In your case however, the link from stage1 is not correct.

And thatswhy I'ld like you to do, what I said at the beginning. I suppose there is some trouble with a RAID here.

Btw. hd2,1 would be the third drive's 2nd partition. And hda2,1 is uhm an incorrect term ^^' ( a mixture of the Linux type expression (hdXY) and GRUB type expression (hdX,Y) - your wrong version being (hdXY,Z))

[Syaoran]

How did Gentoo evolve lately?

I haven't used that distro for months now after two hard disks died and both were running Gentoo...

It's probably just a coincidence, but I just can't ignore the fact they were both running Gentoo... And one being the backup system got me completely scared of using that distro again. I should blame Maxtor for it I guess... it's just ... guess you understand it.

*sigh* looks at 4 unused 250GB SATA HDs supposed to run in RAID5.
So that makes me running Windows XP on a 40GB HD in the meantime and Ubuntu on the other.

[Loniat]

Ledgem, this is a confusion that grub & the bios do with the mix of SATA and PATA in your system.

You can edit grub before booting with 'e' and then playing with the boot partitions [ for instance (hd1,1) or (hd2,1) or wherever you have it installed). Boot after that pressing 'b'. Be aware that every kernel upgrade will mess with the bootloader again...

[Ledgem]

Jinto Lin that's a really long and detailed post - thanks for taking the time to write it. I'll post back with results of what I find in a few days (won't be able to get to it for a while).

Is what Loniat said correct, though - that I'll have to redo this entire process whenever there's a kernel upgrade? Given the errors I'm receiving I can't even hit 'e' or anything because the

Grub stage 1.5
Error 22

message appears all at once.

Even though GRUB is a default, SUSE allows me to install LILO instead; would that possibly be a better system to use?

Cats: This is OpenSUSE 10.2 stable. The only potential issue would be that it's the 64-bit version. I'm running a Sempron that was marketed as being only 32-bit, but CPU-z revealed that it has support for the x86-64 extension. Even if there were an issue with the operating system, GRUB is just a bootloader, and so I don't believe that the operating system itself has any major impact on GRUB's performance (with the exception being which version/configuration of GRUB is bundled with the OS). The issue isn't having multiple Windows and Linux installs, I'd think it's having too many hard drives connected through too many different means (SATA, PATA, and then expansion card PATA).

[Jinto]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

Jinto Lin that's a really long and detailed post - thanks for taking the time to write it. I'll post back with results of what I find in a few days (won't be able to get to it for a while).

Is what Loniat said correct, though - that I'll have to redo this entire process whenever there's a kernel upgrade? Given the errors I'm receiving I can't even hit 'e' or anything because the

message appears all at once.

Okay, then what I said, doesn't work either. I suppose one needs stage two to use the grub command line (though it doesn't chain in your case...). Nah it cannot hurt if you do the "find /vmlinuz" from the grub command line accessed by the LiveCD. The information retrieved, may help to install GRUB manually.

Btw. you don't need to reconfigure GRUB everytime you do a kernel update, you just change the kernel image. You could even do this manually if you like. Lets say you have the kernel sources in "/usr/src/linux" (or this folder is symlinked to your newest kernel sources). Then you would perform "make menuconfig" which gives you a menu to choose the kernel components from, which you want to have included in your kernel. Then you'ld perform "make && make modules_install". After that you'ld copy the kernel image from "/usr/src/linux/arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage" (you said you use x86_64 right?) to the grub directory and replace the vmlinuz with it. For normal distro's that should do the trick. (though that is the Gentoo way... I am not sure this is applicable for SUSE)

Originally Posted by Ledgem

Even though GRUB is a default, SUSE allows me to install LILO instead; would that possibly be a better system to use?

If it works, you'ld consider it better right? me too

Originally Posted by Ledgem

Cats: This is OpenSUSE 10.2 stable. The only potential issue would be that it's the 64-bit version. I'm running a Sempron that was marketed as being only 32-bit, but CPU-z revealed that it has support for the x86-64 extension. Even if there were an issue with the operating system, GRUB is just a bootloader, and so I don't believe that the operating system itself has any major impact on GRUB's performance (with the exception being which version/configuration of GRUB is bundled with the OS). The issue isn't having multiple Windows and Linux installs, I'd think it's having too many hard drives connected through too many different means (SATA, PATA, and then expansion card PATA).

Or problem of the BIOS not counting certain RAID devices at boot up. GRUB relies on BIOS information. Harddrives that are initiated by a secondary (RAID related) BIOS are usually not known to GRUB at the moment the system boots up. In such a case, it is wise, to store all GRUB components on a PATA drive (since these devices are usually correctly recognised by the primary BIOS).

Originally Posted by Syaoran

How did Gentoo evolve lately?

I haven't used that distro for months now after two hard disks died and both were running Gentoo...

Well lets say, I am not going to do update world anytime soon
They've changed so many things, that I'ld surely had to recompile all my system. The thing with the ebuild dependencies is just crazy. In the university on my workstation there I used to install ubuntu. Maybe you can imagine how strange that is for Gentoo user, if software installs so fast (because precompiled). You think you can safely go to lunch for 4 hours, while kubuntu installs... a wait thats not emerge... it is apt-get... there are no 4 hours "happy" compile-time.

I am running Gentoo for 2 years now. Had no problems with drives so far. Well I had a problem with a Maxtor 60Gbyte drive dying in windows. But that is unrelated to Linux. I chose to get rid of all my old drives at this point, and used only new Samsung SPs instead.

Btw. do you remember what I said about the glx thingy and my OS acting up with transparent Windows? I know why (now). After installing the last kernel update, my nvidia glx support did not work anymore. I just did not know, since I was thinking there is nothing changed since the last update (though I always have to recompile the graphics driver when I recompiled the kernel... but I did not thought glx would just disappear like this). Well, not too frustrating, since the semi-transparent windows was just some toy after all (not very userfriendly).


Well lets just say, I can understand for different reasons, why you and other people avoid Gentoo.

Originally Posted by Syaoran

It's probably just a coincidence, but I just can't ignore the fact they were both running Gentoo... And one being the backup system got me completely scared of using that distro again. I should blame Maxtor for it I guess... it's just ... guess you understand it.

Heh, yes.

Originally Posted by Syaoran

*sigh* looks at 4 unused 250GB SATA HDs supposed to run in RAID5.
So that makes me running Windows XP on a 40GB HD in the meantime and Ubuntu on the other.

Software or hardware RAID5? I think I'ld have a difficult time to teach my Gentoo hardware RAID5

[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by Jinto Lin

Btw. you don't need to reconfigure GRUB everytime you do a kernel update, you just change the kernel image. You could even do this manually if you like. Lets say you have the kernel sources in "/usr/src/linux" (or this folder is symlinked to your newest kernel sources). Then you would perform "make menuconfig" which gives you a menu to choose the kernel components from, which you want to have included in your kernel. Then you'ld perform "make && make modules_install". After that you'ld copy the kernel image from "/usr/src/linux/arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage" (you said you use x86_64 right?) to the grub directory and replace the vmlinuz with it. For normal distro's that should do the trick. (though that is the Gentoo way... I am not sure this is applicable for SUSE)

Bit too advanced for me at this point ^^;

Or problem of the BIOS not counting certain RAID devices at boot up. GRUB relies on BIOS information. Harddrives that are initiated by a secondary (RAID related) BIOS are usually not known to GRUB at the moment the system boots up. In such a case, it is wise, to store all GRUB components on a PATA drive (since these devices are usually correctly recognised by the primary BIOS).

Upon initial boot, the BIOS posts the PATA drives (including CD/DVD devices), and the SATA devices. They're all posted at once, but the SATA drives are separated with a blank line from the others. Immediately after, I get a PROMISE-extended-BIOS screen, which is for my expansion card. It basically doubles my BIOS boot time, and then posts what's connected (in this case, an old 45 GB PATA). I know that the SATA drives are seen by GRUB and the Linux installer, so I'm not sure where the problem arises.

I did some reading on GRUB (as well as LILO vs. GRUB) and GRUB does sound like the better system to use, despite being alpha software. Additionally, GRUB2 is in the works, and they're designing it to get rid of Stage 1.5 entirely. The GRUB2 project, which is a complete rewrite of GRUB, claimed to have all features stabilized by November 2006, but they still claim that they make incompatible changes from time to time. I guess that it's not worth testing at this point (especially since I'm not an advanced user for this sort of stuff) but it should be a good update.

My father recommended that I disconnect all HDs except the one I'm installing to, and then reconnect them once everything's done, but that'd cause GRUB to mess up as well, wouldn't it? Since GRUB goes based off of the load order in the BIOS, a single HD would be HD0, and when everything is reconnected then the numbering would be thrown off. Do you need to reconfigure GRUB whenever you add in a new HD as well?

[Vexx]

That's too bad because that was my next recommendation: simplify your system to just the drive you're going to use for root. Install... then add the other drives later. My anecdotal experience is that BIOS doesn't renumber a drive after it assigns it... once it calls it HD0 it stays (though I don't think that is a locked situation). I have run into mobos that were preferentially in busses (ooooh, I see IDE, it goes first!!! baka mobo) though...

I've never needed to mess with GRUB when adding drives unless I was adding new drives that I might boot from.

[Ledgem]

Well, it's worth a try. I'm not sure how the BIOS handles drive numbering, to be honest; I figured it'd assign based on what port the drive is connected to.

I'm really just curious as to why GRUB is messing up. If the drives aren't changing their numbering, then theoretically Stage 1.5 should link to Stage 2 without an issue. That would suggest that either the program can't set up GRUB correctly, or that there's an issue with having GRUB's files on a SATA drive for my system.

[Loniat]

The problem with grub in this case is that, when you use the automatic update in these distributions, it will be rewritten thus messing it up again. If you compile the Kernel 'manually' you probably don't need to worry about it since you would know what to change in the system and in grub.

[Jinto]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

Well, it's worth a try. I'm not sure how the BIOS handles drive numbering, to be honest; I figured it'd assign based on what port the drive is connected to.

I'm really just curious as to why GRUB is messing up. If the drives aren't changing their numbering, then theoretically Stage 1.5 should link to Stage 2 without an issue. That would suggest that either the program can't set up GRUB correctly, or that there's an issue with having GRUB's files on a SATA drive for my system.

Well, reconsider the (only) one hdd install approach (not so absolute). When you install GRUB, and only one harddrive is present, you can be sure, that this drive is primary and all the GRUB stuff goes on the same drive. This will be particularily useful, if you install GRUB on the later primary device (I mean you can choose in the BIOS which device to boot first, and that device automatically becomes hd0,0). Why can many people add drives without altering boot order to an extent, that nothing works anymore?
If you'ld install a drive that is counted by the BIOS before your old primary device, than boot up would show a problem (like cannot boot device please change disk - or something like that). Oftentimes such drives are counted after counting the old devices (most BIOS detect the stuff basically in a fixed order... e.g. 1st PATA devices beginning with Master at IDE0 and ending with Slave at IDE1, 2nd SATA devices...), but adding stuff is oftentime just conincidental not affecting the current system setup.

Though you said you use a 3rd party PATA device. Maybe it is a good idea, to plug out at least the drive, that is on that 3rd party PATA device, while setting up GRUB. Once GRUB is installed, it should be safe to replug it. (Afaik... which means, it is just what I think is probably the reason, it is worth a try).

If you unplug too many drives from your intended system setup, it will with a high chance fail, once you replug the drives.

[tritoch]

Is Ubuntu or Xubuntu any good? I've been a Windows user since I was in 3rd grade [in 2nd grade, I had DOS and had to locate files around just to play doom]

And for the debate between Windows vs Linux, I only date Windows cause of her lovely sister DirectX.

I'm just looking for something to dip my head into and was wondering if it was a stable build.

Also I am planning on using both Windows and Linux together and I am no smart dude, how do I switch between them later when I have Linux installed?

[edit: I just tried the Ubuntu cd. GUI is a cross between a mac and xp. Felt like Windows NT all over again too.

Finding the drivers for all my peripherals will be a pain though. My wireless card doesn't have linux drivers and my uhh "olde" 21 crt mitsubishi diamond pro doesn't even have a driver anymore [pay to download sucks. I got it off free from some Russian site before but I dunno if it supports linux >,>]

Hopefully you guys can answer me about running 2 OS' in a single computer question]

[Syaoran]

Originally Posted by Jinto Lin

I am running Gentoo for 2 years now. Had no problems with drives so far. Well I had a problem with a Maxtor 60Gbyte drive dying in windows. But that is unrelated to Linux. I chose to get rid of all my old drives at this point, and used only new Samsung SPs instead.

I hope to have better luck with Western Digital They have to be good. The old IBM PC/XT with Intel 8088 & 640KB RAM still boots from its 21MB Western Digital HD ^^

Originally Posted by Jinto Lin

Btw. do you remember what I said about the glx thingy and my OS acting up with transparent Windows? I know why (now). After installing the last kernel update, my nvidia glx support did not work anymore. I just did not know, since I was thinking there is nothing changed since the last update (though I always have to recompile the graphics driver when I recompiled the kernel... but I did not thought glx would just disappear like this). Well, not too frustrating, since the semi-transparent windows was just some toy after all (not very userfriendly).

I remember. I thought everyone recompiled their fglrx/nvidia modules after upgrading something like a kernel or APIs such as cocoa.

Originally Posted by Jinto Lin

Well lets just say, I can understand for different reasons, why you and other people avoid Gentoo.

Actually Gentoo is the only Linux distribution I've ever been satisfied with until my disks died one after the other. I took Ubuntu instead for my laptop because it's fast to install... still I prefer Gentoo were I could do what I wanted how I wanted. I often type pathnames to config files that are located elsewhere in Ubuntu and me having to locate them.

There's still one box that runs Gentoo. It's a P3 500/512MB RAM that acts as webserver (php/jakarta) / database server (postgresql). It's running Gentoo 2004.0. The only updates I do are the ones for these services and sometimes a kernel. Currently it's a 2.4.x one.

Originally Posted by Jinto Lin

Software or hardware RAID5? I think I'ld have a difficult time to teach my Gentoo hardware RAID5

It's supposed to be hardware RAID5 using the 3WARE 9500S-4LP or Adaptec 2410SA(if still manufactured)...
It's just that this project is totally on hold. I can use my money for university now instead of a PCI-X controller... that's like the entrance fee for one year of university O.o

[Js2756]

Originally Posted by Wordplay

Actually, no, it isn't. Or at least not with several programs I tried while using Mandriva. See my previous post.

If we want to argue with anecdotes, here's my experience downloading VLC with Ubuntu.
1) Click on Applications -> Add/Remove...
2) Select VLC Player
3) Hit OK

Just as easy as VLC's Windows install. In fact, it is easier since you don't need to download the executable manually and run the installer manually, the GUI handles that for you. Maybe Mandriva isn't all that user friendly, but the process with Ubuntu was as easy an install as I've seen with any Windows program.

You said:

Originally Posted by Wordplay

Thousand dollar question to all computer illiterate here: do you know how where to get the source-code of a (any) video-player, compile it, and get it to work with sounds, video, and subtitles? Knew you wouldn't.

I just demonstrated that to do so in Linux is just as easy as Windows, because the OS will find the source, and compile it and the program will support sound, video and subtitles. In fact, the OS even tells you that VLC is supported.

I'm not trying to say that Linux is in every way shape or form easier to use than Windows, but the myth that it requires a high level of technical experience and knowledge to do average things is hugely overblown.

@tritoch: You can easily have a computer with both a Windows install and a Linux install. If you already have Windows installed, you will probably have to install Linux on a separate partition, but after I installed Ubuntu, I was able to select which OS to run on bootup after the installation is done (running Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft" and Win2k). I'm not much of a power user myself, so I can understand the hesitancy to make the switch.

[Ending]

I'm not trying to say that Linux is in every way shape or form easier to use than Windows, but the myth that it requires a high level of technical experience and knowledge to do average things is hugely overblown.

Heh, that might had been a nice argument, even if I could forget my own experiences, but it's a pity that your buddies above had already ruined it for good.

[Vexx]

There are some poster-child remarks that demonstrate some distributions of Linux are meant for hobbyists rather than users.... but Windows technical support can be equally arcane: just visit some of the technical support forums for MS Windows administration and you can be swamped with registry manipulation, services issues, domain/activedirectory evil, and DLL corruption swarms. For either Linux or Windows... sometimes its just easier to tell the user to "re-install" or "use better supported hardware" than to lead them into those quagmires -- but especially for business use or criticial systems, that really isn't an option.

The thread is about how to convert, not so much *whether* to convert.. so how about the extremists go away or stop to have some tea, eh?

[Loniat]

Originally Posted by tritoch

Is Ubuntu or Xubuntu any good?

I highly recommend Ubuntu. If you are serious about trying Linux go with it and hang around ubuntuforums.org. I have suggested that to some friends with no Linux knowledge and they are doing fine with it.

You can always move on to other distros if you feel the need. Just don't get caught in linux distro hate or elitism.