So, now what?

flhrci

flhrci

Final Approach
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David
I put openSUSE Linux on a VirtualBox virtual machine on my Windows 7 PC to play with. Now what do I do with it? LOL I am at a loss. Surf the net?

David
 
A year ago I built a new PC (I am using it right now) with Lunix Ubuntu and I am not looking back. I can do everything I use to do on the old MS box and Gates can kiss my a$$. I am not paying him a dime!
Whatever it was you did with MS you can do in Linux for FREE!!
 
Linux is a my default for my parents computers, suse is my favorite flavor right now.
 
I might add that my Stratux running on a Raspberry Pi is using Linux Debian and it is equal to a Stratus at XX$$ the cost.
 
flhrci said:
I put openSUSE Linux on a VirtualBox virtual machine on my Windows 7 PC to play with. Now what do I do with it? LOL I am at a loss. Surf the net?

David
Click to expand...

Find a European company running SuSE in Production, and apply for a job. They’ll be amazed any American ever bothered to load it. ;)

mscard88 said:
Go ****ing fly an airplane. That's what. :D
Click to expand...

That too.

Or if you’re super bored play with their version of kernel hot patching so you can see how to really blow up a running Production box. Hahaha.


And then wonder why they’re fanning a dude with paperwork to cool him off in a server room... since they’re mostly kept in the mid-60F range. :)

Or why they’re supposedly working standing in said server room when all you can hear is fans and AC blowing and you’re not holding any conversations in there, or you’re going to end up as deaf as those of us who remember using a hand mic and speaker in the airplane once upon a time. :) :) :)

SuSE is one of those things, you’d know if you needed it. And most people, even server people, don’t need it. :) :) :)
 
P.S. Placing a large HDTV on a crash cart with a wireless keyboard with no HDMI cable or power cable probably isn’t going to fix the server. Just sayin’. ;)
 
Been running Slackware since my college days.
 
flhrci said:
I put openSUSE Linux on a VirtualBox virtual machine on my Windows 7 PC to play with. Now what do I do with it? LOL I am at a loss. Surf the net?

David
Click to expand...
Go out to the Linux community and say that you're a Windows user and need help.

POA will seem like a kindergarten in an Amish community compared to the vitriol and lack of help you get here.
 
flhrci said:
Soooo, @denverpilot , I get the feeling you don't like Suse. :)
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LOL... actually I don’t mind it, it was more a joke a about them trying to gain traction in the US. I don’t know any Linux shops that aren’t using an Ubuntu or Redhat derivative on servers.

Jeffythequick said:
Go out to the Linux community and say that you're a Windows user and need help.

POA will seem like a kindergarten in an Amish community compared to the vitriol and lack of help you get here.
Click to expand...

The Ubuntu community is probably the best about this since the distro was created originally with a millionaire’s magic money to be a desktop OS for “the world”.

They have a pretty website with instructions.

But most other distros and online forums react better to specific problems than “tell me what to do with my computer”.

In some places there are active user groups and they have meetings and stuff.

But for the most part, it’s load it and start messing with it. And Linux users are way nicer than BSD users. Haha.
 
I haven't tried SuSE in years, but I don't remember it being horrid. I eventually standardized on CentOS for public servers and my testing server because it does the job and is well-supported, but I also like Debian a lot and use it in-office. I'd have no hesitation to use it for public servers if I weren't already plugged in to CentOS.

For the desktop, I think either Debian or Mint (which is Debian-based) come closest to being a good desktop Linux. Linux really wasn't designed for the desktop and that's not where it shines; but back when Windows was crap, I did manage to run my office on Linux for several years, for everything except Adobe stuff that I could never get to run well under WiNE.

My all-time favorite desktop Linux was Xandros. One of my clients was an investor in the company and he gave me a free "Professional" copy to try out and review. I loved it. Xandros got started when they bought Corel Linux, and built upon it, particularly with regard to WiNE. In addition to running native Debian software and having a very professional UI, Xandros was able to run almost all my Adobe software. I think Fireworks was the only one that didn't work acceptably. But alas, Xandros is no more.

Rich
 
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Xandros was interesting.

I remember when I used to check distrowatch all the time for new and interesting things.

Now it’s mostly just respins of the major survivors from the late 90s.

https://distrowatch.com/
 
Anyone else remember trolling freshmeat.net back when that wouldn’t have been a scary thing to type into a browser? Looking for interesting new things to compile?

Dead now of course.
 
Mainly for the purpose of passing time in the winter, I've been playing with Linux distros lately using an HP Envy 17 laptop with the Intel i5-4200M and integrated graphics. It used to be my daily driver, but now it's more of a test bed. The only mission-critical use it gets is for RDP and mail when I'm traveling. Everything else workstation-wise I do with Win10.

I've tried almost a dozen distros over the past week or so. Most of them held no surprises. Pure Debian is still rock-solid but needs non-free repos for maximum usability; Mint is still stable and eminently usable, and is still the distro I'd recommend for mature people who are new to Linux; Ubuntu is still bloated with useless crap that most adult users won't need, but otherwise is fine; Elementary OS is still buggy; CentOS is still a great server OS, but is unexciting on the desktop; and Arch is still a great distro for Linux experts, those who want to become Linux experts, and new users with a masochistic streak.

The two that surprised me a bit were Intel Clear Linux and Fedora 29.

Intel Clear Linux is a containerized, stateless Linux designed specifically for Intel-based machines. It requires a vaguely-recent Intel CPU (and GPU if the GUI is going to be used). My laptop's i5-4200m passed both tests, so I decided to give it a whirl.

It took three tries to install. The text-based installer is very poorly-documented. For example, it offers a telemetry option without mentioning that the install itself will fail if telemetry is selected and the machine doesn't have an Internet connection during installation. It also lacks the ability to use WiFi during installation (no way to authenticate the connection), so I had to dig out a long Cat5 cable from the junk in the basement.

The installation also installs only the core system by default. Everything else has to be installed as "bundles," of which there are many to choose. They were painless enough to install using the "swupd" command (yum and dnf will also work, I'm told, but swupd has to be used for the bundles).

Once it was finally installed, it worked flawlessly. It would be a good distro for those who want a rather tightly-controlled, stable, efficient Linux which you really have to go out of your way to hose. The update process is also more efficient than package-based systems. Only the changed files are updated, so the system is kept up-to-date with minimal fuss.

The only downside is that the available supported applications are still a bit thin if you want to retain the stateless system. You can, of course, install software outside the official bundles; but that would chip away at the system's advantages.

Fedora 29 (Workstation) surprised me a bit. I always considered it one of the better attempts at a desktop Linux, but 29 is about as simple an installation and delivered as workable a default result as I've experienced from any Linux distro in a long time.

I chose the default version, which comes packaged with Gnome (there are other spins for KDE, Cinnamon, etc). Even given Fedora's stodgy insistence on using nothing but FOSS, it still resulted in an eminently-usable system that any idiot could install with nary a venture into the terminal. It's also one of the few Linuxes that recognizes and knows how to use the laptop's fingerprint scanner.

I don't know if it would offer the option to install proprietary nVidia drivers because this machine has integrated Intel graphics, and Intel does publish the source code for most of its drivers. Fedora, like Debian, insists on FOSS pretty vigorously. But on an Intel platform, the default installation was simple, fast, and eminently usable for most people. I'd place it a close second to Linux Mint for new users who simply want a stable, trouble-free workstation and don't want to have to learn how to work in the terminal.

In fact, the only reason Fedora 29 would be second is that I don't recall any GUI-based way to enable the non-free repos, which Mint does have. Enabling, for example, RPMFusion does require a foray into the terminal as root; so for a new user who has no idea what to do in there, Mint might be a better choice. Mint (and Ubuntu) aren't so OCD about FOSS.

I wound up reinstalling Fedora 29 after testing some other distros and think I'll keep it for a while. I'm using it now, in fact. I'd rate it as an excellent desktop Linux distro for someone who has enough knowledge of Linux terminal operations to do what can't be done from the GUI, or for those who only need what's provided as FOSS and don't need the non-free stuff anyway. I still think Mint has the edge for those who never want to use the terminal at all, though.

Rich
 
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Jeffythequick said:
Go out to the Linux community and say that you're a Windows user and need help.

POA will seem like a kindergarten in an Amish community compared to the vitriol and lack of help you get here.
Click to expand...
That is unfortunately true. I've done Linux from time to time, even on my main machine for a while but found very little help. I have an older laptop running Mint now. It is primarily a music center. Trying to include it on my home network is a bear and help from the community has been virtually nonexistent. It's kind of like an exclusive club. Member geeks only.

I have an old desktop which acts mainly as a file server. Probably a great candidate for a Linux distro but not worth the hassle and extended downtime so it's running full blown Windows 10.
 
midlifeflyer said:
That is unfortunately true. I've done Linux from time to time, even on my main machine for a while but found very little help. I have an older laptop running Mint now. It is primarily a music center. Trying to include it on my home network is a bear and help from the community has been virtually nonexistent. It's kind of like an exclusive club. Member geeks only.

I have an old desktop which acts mainly as a file server. Probably a great candidate for a Linux distro but not worth the hassle and extended downtime so it's running full blown Windows 10.
Click to expand...

The prevalence of arrogance and condescension among hardcore Linux users is rivaled only by that of doctors, lawyers, and pilots. Ubuntu nerds tend to be slightly kinder to newbies because there are so many newbies (and some of the gurus are themselves converts); but overall, it's not a warm, cuddly community.

For my part, I was a hardcore Linux user in the late 20th Century through 2002. Back then, Win9x was so unstable as to be practically unusable, and WinNT/2K lacked all but the most rudimentary multimedia capabilities. XP brought it all together quite nicely in 2002, at which time I reintroduced Windows back into my office. But I've always had a few Linux machines running, usually for specific tasks that require high uptime and minimal fuss.

I also prefer Linux for my traveling machine. One of the reasons is that it delivers a much better RDP experience using Remmina than I've ever experienced using the native Windows RD client. On a good connection, there's almost no lag, even at the highest quality settings. But if I have to, I can also do pretty much anything locally on Linux that I can do on Windows, albeit not quite the same way in most cases.

As for the networking, just in case Samba weren't quirky enough already, Win10 now (rightly) disables SMB1 by default. That means, among other things, that some terminal tools like smbtree don't work because they use SMB1; so GUI tools based on those tools don't work, either. It also means that a Samba implementation that specifies "NT1" as the protocol in the smb.conf file won't work because NT1 is just Microsoft's name for SMB1.

Samba itself can work with SMB2 or SMB3, however, as can Win10. But getting it to work in a GUI-browsable way can be a bear, especially on older distros. The easiest workaround if you want GUI browsing of Win10 shares from Linux (or vice-versa) is to just map the shares. There's no significant difference in the end result, and it's a lot easier to set up.

Rich
 
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I just discovered something else nice about Fedora 29.

I had to sudo to download and install Samba so I could map to a drive on another computer. Rather than asking me for my password, it instructed me to swipe the fingerprint reader. So apparently it applies the password to all tasks that require it, not just logging in.

That's a huge plus and something I've never seen before on any OS. I'm reluctant to use NOPASSWD IN /etc/sudoers, especially on a portable machine, for obvious security reasons. This eliminates the need, or even the temptation, to do that.

Rich
 
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