# Linux users



## Alyxx_Vampire (Nov 26, 2008)

A thread for those who oppose commercial software and are all for the open system.

What kind of Linux OS do you use and what made you switch?

Personally I use Ubuntu 8.10.


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## Phineas (Nov 26, 2008)

I'm still using Ubuntu 8.04. I tried to upgrade to 8.10, but apparently there's this glitch where if you have a SATA hard drive, an IDE optical drive, and an Intel D975 chipset motherboard, it will not boot.

I guess what mainly attracted me to Linux at the beginning was the do-it-yourself nature of the OS. I take great pleasure in spending hours getting sound libraries working.


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## lilEmber (Nov 26, 2008)

Ubuntu 8.10 but I use windows for gaming still.


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## Hackfox (Nov 26, 2008)

Linux Is sexy...Simple.


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## net-cat (Nov 27, 2008)

Phineas said:


> I'm still using Ubuntu 8.04. I tried to upgrade to 8.10, but apparently there's this glitch where if you have a SATA hard drive, an IDE optical drive, and an Intel D975 chipset motherboard, it will not boot.


I had the same problem.

You have to add a rootdelay kernel option in /boot/grub/menu.lst .

```
title           Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=d42b9e9b-114e-4378-a0e6-61dffed71b1b ro [b][u]rootdelay=3600[/u][/b]
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic
quiet
```
(3600 is a bit excessive. You can probably get away with 20.)

I went with Linux because the Windows userland pisses me off and I wasn't doing anything in Windows that I couldn't also do in Linux.


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## Runefox (Nov 27, 2008)

I started with Mandrake 7 back in the day, when I was still using Win98 and was young enough to be fumbling around in the dark. I did rather well with it, really, considering I'd never touched it before and had nobody to guide me but my own intuition.

After that, I fired up Gentoo, a Stage 1 install from 2002. That's what really got me, I think. After all the stuff I had to go through (not to mention the waiting) to get it working, I became a true Linux user in every sense of the word. I knew how to compile a kernel, I knew how to compile software and the dependencies for it (though honestly, Emerge does a good enough job there)... And I had a blazing fast system. Gentoo rocked.

But then I had to format it again due to some issue, which I can't recall. I eventually came back with Red Hat 8, I think, which I didn't run for long. Next up was Mandriva 2005, which was the slowest distribution I've ever run. I've always had issues with the Redhat variants due to the nature of the RPM package management system, so I eventually was going for Debian (which I had already installed on my server) - When I noticed Ubuntu. Since it was Debian-based, I was getting a Debian system with sensible defaults for a desktop. Nice. This was version 5.10 "Breezy Badger", and this was the most long-lived out of the Linux installs I've had (save for my laptop). I did everything in Linux, and for the first time, I didn't really miss Windows much except for the games (of which things like America's Army worked in Linux, anyway). It was just overall a nicer desktop experience than Windows 2k or XP could offer at the time, and still today.

Now, I've got Ubuntu 8.10 running on my laptop - It was rather a bad idea to upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10, really. The system as a whole is much more sluggish, and I had fine-tuned the laptop for performance under 8.04, and even though it was old, Compiz ran extremely well, and the system booted in under a minute (and shut down in under five seconds). Since the 8.10 upgrade got botched because someone managed to unplug the AC adapter while I was at work, the system was unusable and I had to reinstall fresh (from a USB key, no less, since my optical was busted), which sucked. I now no longer have a battery life indicator, nor does the shutdown command properly shut the laptop down - This is due to the need to disable ACPI at boot time (it kernel panics if ACPI is enabled), an issue that wasn't present in 8.04.

If I had a choice, I'd install Gentoo on my main desktop, just because it's so damned fast and configurable. It's a waste of time, really, but I'm the type of person who has lots of it to waste on projects like that (and it IS a project). I only wish there were still Stage 1 installs available... Sigh...

But alas, for whatever reason, the Grub boot loader doesn't like it (I could always try LiLo, I know). Something with my BIOS, I think, and I haven't really had the chance to look into it further.


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## Alyxx_Vampire (Nov 27, 2008)

@Phineas: Indeed, Linux is much more satisfying.
@NewfDraggie: Windows will apparently be the preferred system for gaming for years to come.
@Hackfox: Indeed, hehe.


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## Pi (Nov 27, 2008)

NetBSD-CURRENT.


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## Xenofur (Nov 27, 2008)

I am offended by your title choice, as I am a *nix user and do not attempt to oppose commercial operating systems at all and instead am constantly trying to merge the two to get the best of two worlds.


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## ale (Nov 27, 2008)

I use Puppy Linux because it was the first Linux I tried and the only one my mom has not broken as of yet.  She's bad with computers so she runs live off of our 8 year old computer. DSL she found too difficult.


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## Alyxx_Vampire (Nov 27, 2008)

Xenofur said:


> I am offended by your title choice, as I am a *nix user and do not attempt to oppose commercial operating systems at all and instead am constantly trying to merge the two to get the best of two worlds.



Title choice? Darling, I didn't put it in the title and it was meant more jokingly than seriously. I am too using both Windows and Linux, not to mention I think Wine offers a solution to run Windows programs inside Linux.


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## Vesuro (Nov 27, 2008)

I'm running Linux Mint 6 RC1, it's based on Intrepid but seems a lot less bloated.


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## Alyxx_Vampire (Nov 27, 2008)

Vesuro said:


> I'm running Linux Mint 6 RC1, it's based on Intrepid but seems a lot less bloated.


I've heard about it yes.


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## net-cat (Nov 27, 2008)

I'm an equal opportunity OS hater.

Ubuntu Intrepid x86_64
FreeBSD/i386 built from RELENG_7
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, SP3
Mac OS X Tiger


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## Archibald Ironfist (Nov 27, 2008)

I don't.  I think Linux falls deeply short of my wants and desires.

I use MineutteOS for my 'look at me, i'm dainty' system.  Mmm, harddrive-free servers.


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## Alyxx_Vampire (Nov 27, 2008)

Archibald Ironfist said:


> I don't.  I think Linux falls deeply short of my wants and desires.
> 
> I use MineutteOS for my 'look at me, i'm dainty' system.  Mmm, harddrive-free servers.


Isn't it spelled Menuet?


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## Archibald Ironfist (Nov 27, 2008)

Possibly.  I suck at spelling.

What?  Me fail anglish?  That unpossible!


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## yak (Nov 27, 2008)

I always chuckle when I read the name of that Menuet OS... "Menuet" is pronounced the same was as "blowjob" in Russian.

Having said that, I currently don't use a linux distro for my desktop needs, but was previously using Gentoo.


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## Alyxx_Vampire (Nov 27, 2008)

yak said:


> I always chuckle when I read the name of that Menuet OS... "Menuet" is pronounced the same was as "blowjob" in Russian.
> 
> Having said that, I currently don't use a linux distro for my desktop needs, but was previously using Gentoo.


The more you hear, the more you learn *giggles*

I have a floppy with Kolibri OS actually but never got around to try it.


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## indrora (Nov 28, 2008)

Been using Debian (the only REAL distro of linux) on all my Servers for some time now. I run Dnsmasq and a DHCP server on Foxibox, along with linux on my routers, and linux on my school machine.


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## CyberFoxx (Nov 28, 2008)

Gentoo on my x86_64 desktop, PII gateway and PIII fileserver. Ubuntu 8.10 on my PPC eMac desktop. (I do dual-boot with XP Pro on my x86 desktop though, been thinking about getting XP64.)

First distrib I tried was way back when on my 386 and it was Debian. But since this was during the whole "Every release of Debian is insanely broken" phase, I didn't get far with it. Fast forward several years to when I had a K6-2 375 (Really a 450Mhz, but motherboard only did 375Mhz) and I finally decided to get back into Linux and dual-booted with 2K and Slackware. I stayed with Slack for a good while. After reading some good things about Gentoo, I finally took the plunge and been with it since.

I did dabble with Red Hat for a bit, but a lot about it confused me or made me ask "Just why the frag did they do it this roundabout way?!?!" And I think I tried Mandrake once... Not sure... Might've been in a virtual machine... Must've not been that memorable of an experience.

I still have fond memories of Slack though, and I sometimes wish I didn't switch from it, but I've grown to like Gentoo just as much.


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## indrora (Nov 28, 2008)

@CyberFoxx:
When did you use Debian? if it was before Woody, yes it had problems. Woody was the one that made life simple. Potato and Slink sucked, and Etch is getting up there.

@Pi if you dane to anser:
Didnt you find a bug in NetBSD that gave you a nice big backdoor?


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## Phineas (Nov 28, 2008)

net-cat said:


> I had the same problem.
> 
> You have to add a rootdelay kernel option in /boot/grub/menu.lst .
> 
> ...



Yeah, I've tried that, and it didn't seem to help. The only way I can get it to boot is if I add "all_generic_ide floppy=off irqpoll" to the end of the kernel command, and that's hit or miss too. I suppose the whole problem could be solved if I just got a damn DVD drive from less than five years ago.


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## CyberFoxx (Nov 28, 2008)

indrora said:


> @CyberFoxx:
> When did you use Debian? if it was before Woody, yes it had problems. Woody was the one that made life simple. Potato and Slink sucked, and Etch is getting up there.



This was a very long time ago, during the late 90s, before they started using the weird naming thing.


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## indrora (Nov 28, 2008)

its not a wierd naming thing, its the characters from Toy Story!


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## Irreverent (Dec 1, 2008)

A bit of Ubuntu 8.1, some SUSE.  All of the upstairs home machines run WinXP/Vista, simplifies marital relations and tech support for the kit's games.

Recently, I've been mucking around with Xubuntu....and I'm impressed.  Small, crisp, light, actually usable off the CD.


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## conicer (Dec 1, 2008)

Using Ubuntu 8.10 here.  It's one of the nicer distros, though now and again I catch an itch to switch to Gentoo.


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## Eevee (Dec 1, 2008)

Ubuntu; I paid my Gentoo stage1 tax years ago and apt is my favorite package manager.  Windows is featureless and it's hard to do what I want.  Still 7.04 on my desktop since I just got back from a month away from home, but my macbook ran Intrepid that whole time.

I think this apartment now has five Ubuntu installations, one OS X, and one WinXP.



Vesuro said:


> I'm running Linux Mint 6 RC1, it's based on Intrepid but seems a lot less bloated.


Bloated?  It's not exactly hard to remove whatever you don't want from Ubuntu.



Irreverent said:


> Recently, I've been mucking around with Xubuntu....and I'm impressed.  Small, crisp, light, actually usable off the CD.


Puppy is supposed to be a lot lighter than Xubuntu, although I can't personally vouch for either.


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## WarMocK (Dec 1, 2008)

Eevee said:


> Ubuntu; I paid my Gentoo stage1 tax years ago and apt is my favorite package manager.  Windows is featureless and it's hard to do what I want.  Still 7.04 on my desktop since I just got back from a month away from home, but my macbook ran Intrepid that whole time.
> 
> I think this apartment now has five Ubuntu installations, one OS X, and one WinXP.
> 
> ...


Gentoo stage 1 installation .... omg .... that was a PITA 

Now I got Slackware and a heavily modified NOP (Nearly Office Puppy, a puppy linux derivate featuring xfce instead of JWM) combined with Slackware and a bit of Fedora (working on that part atm).


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## Runefox (Dec 1, 2008)

I cannot think of a single reason to install anything to do with Fedora onto my computer. XD That said, maybe I'll get Gentoo working tonight.


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## Lowblock (Dec 2, 2008)

Ubuntu 8.04 ATM

I need an update...


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## Runefox (Dec 3, 2008)

To the uninitiated: Gentoo is linux distribution based upon the idea that most everything should be compiled from source, using the settings you specify, such that everything is optimized for your system specifically. Kinda like fitting your computer for a suit. Or souping up a ricer. It's console-intensive, and is not for the faint of heart. Still, this is child's play compared to the "Stage 1" install that they used to offer, which is more akin to a "build your own damned car" situation.

After 24 hours of Gentoo x86-64, I've got an xfce desktop, Firefox 3, and maybe KDE (I haven't tested it, but it emerged OK). I've got a few media players, too, and half of a Gnome install. *Miraculously*, my video card works (after recompiling my kernel two or three times and re-emerging Xorg and a few other packages), and *even more miraculously*, my sound card, an Auzentech X-Fi Prelude, works (along with Flash).

... It's *FAST*. With four or five simultaneous compiles going, the desktop is still responsive, with a console window opening instantaneously, and Mousepad opening just as quickly (Firefox takes but a second). But I have to say, Portage is still extremely buggy, and trying to go from a 2008.0 disc to the current software level is like pulling teeth. The slowness of compilation isn't even so bad, but when you've got multiple compile steps failing along the way, you're looking at major issues and troubleshooting, most of which, for me, involved outdated initial packages. I've fixed most of that, but the dependency checking is by far the closest to RPM I've seen in a long time, and I distinctly remember having better success with the 2004 version.

Still, this is a fun project, and dual-booting between it and Vista is a breeze.


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## Pi (Dec 3, 2008)

Runefox said:


> To the uninitiated: Gentoo is linux distribution based upon the idea that most everything should be compiled from source, using the settings you specify, such that everything is optimized for your system specifically. Kinda like fitting your computer for a suit. Or souping up a ricer.



I have yet to see any scientific evidence that Gentoo's optimizations are anything more than dickflapping snake oil. Everyone just tells me it "feels faster", which doesn't mean anything.

Granted, I do like the idea of USE flags, but if you're gonna use a Ports tree, you might as well use Free/Net/OpenBSD


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## CyberFoxx (Dec 3, 2008)

Pi said:


> Granted, I do like the idea of USE flags, but if you're gonna use a Ports tree, you might as well use Free/Net/OpenBSD



I never understood the reasoning behind that statement. It's just like "Well, if you are going to use an x86 box, you might as well use Windows!"


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## Eevee (Dec 3, 2008)

Pi said:


> Everyone just tells me it "feels faster", which doesn't mean anything.


Odd, I hear this about Vista all the time!



Pi said:


> Granted, I do like the idea of USE flags, but if you're gonna use a Ports tree, you might as well use Free/Net/OpenBSD


My brief foray into FreeBSD ports has left a bad taste in my mouth.  The same taste that I imagine gargling piss would leave.

Portage never did me wrong, but the original is godawful.


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## Runefox (Dec 3, 2008)

Pi said:


> (speaks his mind again)



I don't remember making any claim that Gentoo is faster than anything else in particular; Just mentioning its premise and that its base install is pretty snappy on my hardware, so I'm guessing you're just interjecting your opinion, which is fine. I agree with you on all your points, actually, and Gentoo usually gets a reputation for being particularly fast for no reason (a lot of the Gentoo docs, for example, continuously state that such and such a parameter is dangerous and yields no performance gain, yet performance "enthusiasts" continue to claim faster speeds). I don't really want to get into BSD, though.

I definitely wouldn't recommend Gentoo to someone just learning Linux, but it's a great learning tool for someone who already knows how to use it and wants to become a little more acquainted with the innards of the system as a whole. Personally, I'm doing it mostly because I wanted to run at least some flavour of Linux on my desktop, and Gentoo seemed like the most interesting way to go about it, especially considering my current level of experience (which, while likely far less than yours, is decent) and my past experiences with it.

It isn't as though any other distro couldn't achieve the same thing by compiling from source or from source packages, and while the whole tweak-the-compiler-out thing might not have a huge impact, the compiled-from-source apps will perform faster than a binary, especially if said binary is compiled against a very generic platform (i386, nothing special), and even if the performance gain is in some places negligible in the real world (I can't think of a single instance where code will run more slowly compiled for i686, for example, than i386, except if the binary turns out to be significantly larger. A specially compiled kernel tailored for the system's hardware will typically perform faster than a generic kernel, as well.

Downside of all of this, of course, is that it takes a lot of time to do - Which is precisely why Gentoo isn't for everyone. Gentoo is pretty much a week-long endeavor (or about two days or so if you have all day and burn the candle at both ends) to get to the point where most other distros will get you after an hour or so. The package manager, Portage, is a bit of a pain to use, and isn't nearly as user-friendly (though it tries) as others available. Apt, for example, is a far nicer package management system, and is much, much faster. It's convenient; Portage isn't exactly convenient, and I'm learning very quickly that they made a bit of a mess of it over the past couple years (or maybe I just didn't notice when I first used it back then).


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## rollabottom (Dec 4, 2008)

Currently I have a spare Ubuntu 8.10 box on the side.  I was using Ubuntu exclusively for about 2 years - recently switched to Mac

Why'd I switch?  It was finals week, and my options were study (like i should of) or install Linux and learn how to use it. Guess which I did


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