Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

So, I have this all in one thing.. no, not a man kini.. it's a Pentium Dual Core 2.2GHx with 4GB Ram and the computer is basically IN the screen like an iMac.. The expansion of this machine is limited.. no raid.. graphics is WYGIWYS.. blah blah..

Anyhow, as much as I do love OS wars, I'm rather going with the Walkers crisps FLAVOURS WAR!!

I am going to install a Linux OS on it and try and convert myself somewhat, please note that the last Linux type OS I used in anger was Slackware in the 90s. After the Microsoft SQL news, I thought I should get on the bandwagon and just see if it could work...

So, outlining what I'd need to do on it..

Email.. Exchange connectivity (will accept IMAP and POP(booo) if some form of OWA not available)
Office app etc productivity etc..
Graphics, maybe Photoshop type, but they have no Photoshop on Linux do they?
Video? Editing like SMOKE? Although, not a must since I have that covered.
A nice IDE for C/C++ ? even C# with that mono thingy.
A nice desktop.

So, what is your favourite Loonix OS (if you have one) and why?

[Additional]
I know this has been done to death, but unlike IRIX stuck in stasis, Linux is an ever changing OS, and yes there are plenty of other sites, but this is really the only forum I go on so I trust your opinions.

Dual core Pentium? How old is that system anyway?

Anyway, used Slackware in the '90's, a brief foray into Redhat on an Alpha, installed openSuSE 9.1 once and since 2005 i only use Ubuntu at work and home, save for the few CentOS machines i see occasionally. It's based on Debian and its huge repository of software with added support for proprietary hardware. Laptops love Ubuntu because of that.

If you like a desktop with openGL compositor, use vanilla Ubuntu. If you're more into a spartan lightweight desktop with XFCE, try Xubuntu. There are some popular flavors of Ubuntu for GNOME lovers, like "Linux Mint".

Email? Thunderbird
Office? LibreOffice
Graphics: Gimp (a la Photoshop), Inkscape (vectors), imageMagick (doing odd stuff), qiv (fast displaying, scaling)
Video? ermmm i used OpenShot for very simple editing, but there are more professional solutions.
IDE? Codeblocks for simple stuff, although a basic editor with support for syntax highlighting like gedit works just fine for me.

And the fun with Linux distro's: U NO LIKE? Nuke it and get something else...

dexter1 wrote: And the fun with Linux distro's: U NO LIKE? Nuke it and get something else...

You do rather seem to have gone along the same path as I, but after slackware all I ever did was 'nuke it and get something else'

So, I'm downloading slackware now, and will see how it goes.

Debian is the Linux that least makes me want to kill myself. Generally installs correctly right off the bat with a minimum amount of bullshit involved. However, like most of the friendlier distros, it inevitably installs hundreds of packages you probably don't need even if you tell it to go for a more minimal install, so expect to either spend some time uninstalling stuff post-installation or have a bunch of useless crap sitting around taking up space. Also, whatever you do, don't install it with a graphical desktop right off the bat, it'll up the useless-crap quotient by at least a factor of four. Add that afterwards. It's a pain in the ass, but less of a pain in the ass than uninstalling tons more stuff you don't need.

A nice desktop would be XFCE (highly configurable, easy to use, and not too heavyweight,) or LXDE (lighter than XFCE and also quite configurable, but last I checked you had to do a lot of manual config-file editing to tweak it from the default settings.) Steer clear of GNOME or KDE; at this point they're basically entire mini-operating systems that install themselves on top of Linux and bring their fourteen billion dependency buddies along for the ride (because when you're choosing a graphical desktop, naturally you want to also install their media-stream framework of choice, right?)

If you're up for it, though, I'd skip the prepackaged desktop environments altogether and experiment with finding a combo of window manager + file manager + etc. that works for you. My current go-to WM is WindowMaker, which is a NeXTSTEP clone that gives you a nice all-in-one solution for window manager + session manager + applications menu + dock (a lot of the other independent WMs only do one or two of those and expect you to use some other utility to handle the rest.) For file managers, PCManFM (LXDE's file manager) or Thunar (XFCE's) are full-featured enough to be useful without getting in your way with duzitall whizbangery the way the GNOME or KDE solutions do, though both of them are still fairly heavyweight (just not as ridiculous as Nautilus or Konqueror.) For a much lighter-weight solution, xfe basically works, although it's a bit on the ugly, clunky side.

Photoshop does not exist on Linux, no. GIMP is the oft-touted Free And Open-Source Alternative, except that its user interface sucks ass. Still, the functionality is there, though if I were you I'd see about using MAME and Photoshop instead.

If the SQL Server announcement is driving your interest, it's worth noting that MS ran the SQL Server demo on a system running Ubuntu 15.10.

FWIW, I still like to install NEdit when I'm in a Linux environment.

uunix wrote: after slackware

I am going to do something similar with a laptop I have recently bought. Linux takes the second slice (40Gbyte free), and there I have emerged gentoo/x86-32bit in 3 days (from stage1 to stage4 ), I still have to emerge something, say as miscellanea, the problem with gentoo: you have to spend a bit of your time choosing what (including flags, masks, etc) pleases to your profile, and then you have to emerge things, which takes machine time, sometimes you have solve problems with the portage

let me know if you need some recipe in order to cook your " stage4 "

I've always meant to give Mint a try at some point. It does have a reputation for being one of the cleaner, slicker and easier to use Linux flavours out there. But, it's also been quite some time since I've last played with a flavour of Linux. Let us know how you get on!

Of course, trying a couple of Live environments might be a good way of testing a few different distros out to see which one you like the look of best.

Any how... I'm off on my stag doo in 54 mins.. If I don't see you again, I love you all...

uunix wrote: Any how... I'm off on my stag doo in 54 mins.. If I don't see you again, I love you all...

Who's getting married, anyone you know? Uh, it's not you is it? What ever happened to not making the same mistake twice?

For a Linux-based C/C++ IDE you probably want to use Eclipse CDT, link:

https://eclipse.org/cdt/

vishnu wrote:

uunix wrote: Any how... I'm off on my stag doo in 54 mins.. If I don't see you again, I love you all...

Who's getting married, anyone you know? Uh, it's not you is it? What ever happened to not making the same mistake twice?

It's ok.. I'm not marrying my first wife..

vishnu wrote: For a Linux-based C/C++ IDE you probably want to use Eclipse CDT, link:

https://eclipse.org/cdt/

Yes, I have this on my AIX box.

progress ?

ironically I have to download a stage3-i686 , in order to emerge a stage4 for CoNix (cooperative unix, it runs on Windows Xp), I need to support a customer, he doesn't want to buy products by Mentor, thus I will emerge a customized stage4 in order to support a few HDL tools, all of this with the purpose of integrating windows and linux in the most useful and comfortable way.

might be good for you, too ? do you want to give gentoo a try ?

Progress was ..... ZERO.. I downloaded SLACKWARE, ran out of DVDs, made a bootable USB drive and the machine didn't like it.. and my desktop space (the table I use for non static stuff) has become full of another project (which should be replaced today) and a load of Wedding stuff.

uunix wrote: ...made a bootable USB drive and the machine didn't like it...

Huh! That's weird. Did you do it like this:

ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/isolinux/README.TXT

Which brings to mind the question, did you download 14.1 or the the release candidate 1 of 14.2 (aka "slackware-current")?

vishnu wrote:

uunix wrote: ...made a bootable USB drive and the machine didn't like it...

Huh! That's weird. Did you do it like this:

ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/isolinux/README.TXT

Which brings to mind the question, did you download 14.1 or the the release candidate 1 of 14.2 (aka "slackware-current")?

I used isoToUSB on a windows machine to create the 14.1 version. The readme is instructions for creating from a Linux box.

Anyhow, I will re-visit after (my table is cleared || I have new wife).

Uh, congrats on the upcoming nuptials? Personally, I'd be more excited about running the soon-to-be-released Slackware 14.2, but, then again, the view from down here in my parent's basement is... so great...

uunix wrote: I used isoToUSB on a windows machine to create the 14.1 version.

I prefer unetbootin , which only failed once for Ubuntu 15.10, but that was actually canonical's fault. Give that a spin if you're getting nowhere.

My Windows tool of choice for popping ISOs onto bootable flash drives is Rufus . Never had an issue yet with it.

two days gone in the attempt of installing the CoNix 's TAP over the XP lan, which has a secret: ICMP is not supported, and nobody tells you this (uuu-UAI?!?), so ... if you try to understand if the engine is working, the ping is deceiving, since not supported

I feel like a monkey, coloring points, but hey? progress, now CoNix has its TAP on XP
(and I can also attach the first physical uart)

I'm downloading UbuntuBSD, it's in BETA 2 and looks interesting.

this thread literally made me sick, thinking of all the unusable gaudy linux distributions.

I've always liked slackware, however, I can never get it to install on flash media ( which was only recently supported ), and all of my dvd drives are dead.

recently, I've been using lubuntu, which is nice if you decorate it properly.

it's kind-of nice not having to manually extract tarballs and compile 20 different dependencies just to get glut to work