Journal Timex's Journal: Social experimenting 9
No, it's not that grandiose a scheme.
The experiment is to see just how well my kids adjust to a Linux box.
I was given a retired PC by a previous employer[1], which had a site license of WinXP Pro on it. The system had become horribly infected despite the fact that I had current antivirus in place, and I felt the best (read "easiest") solution was to wipe it clean and reinstall the OS.
The problem is that I didn't have the disk to do the install, and I can't find XP disks in local stores any more.
Easy solution: I've wiped the disk and installed Fedora 12.
I'm going to wing it and see what needs doing as I go. Among things to play with are Wine and Samba. Most of the games the kids play are (notoriously) Windows-only, and I have a pinter shared from my laptop (running Vista) that I would like to use from the Linux box.
It's been a while since I've configured Samba, but it shouldn't be difficult. Getting wine to do what I want should be interesting. I should be able to get most things running, but to what degree the kids find acceptable remains to be seen.
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[1] The system was inherited by said employer through an aquisition and was deemed to be not worth keeping, so IT Management gave it to the first to speak for it.
Ubuntu (Score:1)
I've been putting Gentoo on systems for years. But I finally wanted a machine to "just work" and found Ubuntu, actually Xubuntu because Gnome desktop sucks donkey nuts, fits the bill. Gentoo is far more customizable, but Ubuntu configures the hardware easily enough. As far as making life pretty comfortable for folks I think Ubuntu is one of the better distributions and would recommend it to anyone looking to take family members to Linux, especially if you stay in the Ubuntu package management.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a lot I like about Ubuntu and I recommend it to a lot of people, though for myself I run Fedora. This is because I like having the latest and I am very partial to KDE and Ubuntu isn't as up to date w/KDE.
Fedora 12 (Score:2)
I tried loading up Fedora 12 earlier this week on my system. After about 90 minutes I had a box that was unbootable. I loaded up CentOS 5.4 and it loaded without a hitch. No idea why Fedora had so much trouble...
Thinking about trying Mandriva next.
Re: (Score:2)
That's interesting. I'm runing F12 on two different systems right now and the only issues I had were with one video card. But it wasn't unbootable, just less than optimal. I fixed it by swapping out the card.
But then again, Fedora can be very spotty due to the fact that they are pushing to have the latest of everything. It certainly isn't the best choice if stability is your top priority.
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I need RHEL compatibility without the support or maintenance, which is why I have been using CentOS. The only issue I have there is that the native kernel doesn't recognize my wireless and when I build a new kernel it doesn't like my hard drive. :-/
We have been fiddling with Fedora 12 here in the lab a little bit too and have found that it does not reliably install as we would expect. Perhaps there's something not quite right in the installer this go-round...
Re: (Score:2)
That's too bad. I'm glad things went well for me because I'd hate to switch distros right now. I'm really used to Fedora. The only other one I've used much lately is Ubuntu, but that's mostly because other people use it a lot and they come to me for help.
Re: (Score:1)
I've played with CentOS, Mandriva, SuSE, and Ubuntu, but I keep going back to Fedora. I like the way they have everything set up, easy to find. :)
There's nothing wrong with knowing how other distros work... You never really know when you'll be called on to manage one. In my case, I had to hack into a Debian box to move an internal site off, so it could be put in a place where it would be easier to manage. (The Debian box was the only one of its kind in the company, and the hardware was failing. Moving
Re: (Score:2)
The install (Score:1)
I booted off the LiveCD for Fedora 12 and puttered about with it for a little while. It seemed to deal nicely with all the hardware on the system, so I installed it from the "Install on HD" icon on the desktop. Total time to complete: less than an hour, and that includes the fact that I was off on another system troubleshooting a game install.
Fedora is a favorite of mine. Although I was first introduced to Linux (kernel 0.99pl10) on Slackware, I've been using Red Hat in one form or another since I stumbl