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I've given Linux a shot on more than one occasion but honestly I was shocked by the amount of applications available and especially their quality. It just didn't cut it for me. The OS itself is pretty nice tho.

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I've given Linux a shot on more than one occasion but honestly I was shocked by the amount of applications available and especially their quality. It just didn't cut it for me. The OS itself is pretty nice tho.

The source code for many Open Source projects is being (or has been) audited by Coverity, under a contract from the US Dept. of Homeland Security, and has been found to be quite good, actually. And the identified defects have been reported back to those teams for repair, which should yield code that is an order of magnitude higher in quality.

Perhaps your complaints about "quality" means you didn't like the colors or layouts of menus? Or usability?

You said the OS itself was nice. Surely you didn't mean the Linux kernel and GNU OS. You used KDE or Gnome, and found them to be OK, I assume. What did you find to be lacking, in your opinion? Also, not sure if you took the amount of apps available as a good or bad thing. You said "shocked", but that could be either good or bad.

The amount of apps (several choices of text editors, for example) that overwhelmed me when I first tried Linux. But then I realized you don't have to use them all! Pick one, and see if it works for you and disregard the others (or don't install them, or remove them if already installed). That, and some of the app names needed getting used to: "GIMP" and so forth.

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Mark knows what he's talking about. And I can see a reply complaining that you dont want to have to uninstall something that you're not going to use but that's the beauty of choice, you get to pick what you want and what works best for you. Then you can remove anything un needed. I personally would rather that then have to download and install something only to find out I dont like it 100x over. It's a lot more convient to have it all preinstalled for you to test and then remove as you feel necessary

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I am thinking of giving *Nix a total shot for the school year. (Though I will prolly end up at "best" with Win xp having 30 GB partition for Games/Photoshop)

All I need is a guide how to get (will do this first in Early October)

:FTP client working with SSL/TLS

:Loop-AES setup to encrypt HDD

:Some nice Widgets program (Opera???)

:Get external HDDs to work (my 2 USB2 HDDs did not work even after a lot of testing)

I can't wait to test out XGL. This will be a simple box with 3GHz HT P4, 1 Gig DDr400, Audigy 2 ZS Pro....I just have to decide in what card I will put in it (Its agp, my old card died)....

When I get a new PC it will prolly have X Fi so will end up with Windows route and use my *nix box as a media PC if it gets "allowed" to play HD-DVDs/Blu-Ray

Any comments?

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The implication being that "Linux" cannot play MP3s out of the box...

Perhaps you never heard of Linspire or SUSE? You pay for these distros, but that is for the licensing fees for media codecs and such. Maybe you should find a different reason to say you don't like Linux.

I, myself, might counter that Microsoft doesn't offer an OS that has an office suite, photo editor, ftp server, and full-featured CD/DVD burner out of the box.

What is included by default isn't terribly important. It is what can be done that matters to me.

Running Firefox, GIMP, Apache, etc. can be done on both platforms. With that set of apps, I find that Linux just works better for me.

I'm in Ubuntu 6.06 now, what packages do I select in Synaptic to get mp3s working?

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Make sure you open all the repositories in synaptic, the help sites for Ubuntu are pretty damn good, heres one about getting w32codecs, use these 2 links and you should easily get mp3 playability and video playback:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Restricte...7e94a2fcb382e0c

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Restricte...774003fde7daed5

If you can't be bothered reading that, yet I suggest you do, just do the following (after applying all repositories)

sudo apt-get update
wget -c http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/w/w32codecs/w32codecs_20060611-0.0_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i w32codecs_20060611-0.0_i386.deb

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-pitfdll gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse  gxine libxine-main1 libxine-extracodecs

For nvidia drivers - taken from Fozziebs guide to Ubuntu located @ http://www.fozzieb.co.uk/ubuntu/ubuntu.html

In Terminal do the following

sudo apt-get install nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-glx

Then sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Find the "Module" section and add Load "glx" if it is not there

Add a # before Load "Glcore"

Add a # before Load "dri"

Find "Device" section change nv to nvidia

Add line Option "RenderAccell" "true"

Save file and exit Gedit.

And you're sorted! If you want a good video or music player:

sudo apt-get install vlc banshee

Hope this helps.

Edited by Phixion
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Thanks a bunch =D

Any guide for fonts? The Firefox fonts look a little messed up.

Let me say that I am impressed with the steps you are taking to try Linux. Sounds like you need your typical Windows fonts (often called "core" fonts). Not sure what Ubuntu calls them, sorry.

Do you plan on trying to get Photoshop running under Linux? Not sure how well this will work for you, but Codeweavers' Crossover Office has a full-featured trial. It is a commercial variation of the Open Source wine project.

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I'm looking into Gimp. Everyone says it's real good.

I just installed the Ati drivers and I must say Firefox is running pretty sweet. I'm going to get mp3s working now.

Everything is going real smooth so far, thanks =D

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Gimp is very different (UI-wise) from Photoshop, from what I hear. I never used Photoshop, but I am comfortable with GIMP. I think that your evaluation will show that you prefer Photoshop (which is a well-developend professional-grade product).

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Gimp is very different (UI-wise) from Photoshop, from what I hear. I never used Photoshop, but I am comfortable with GIMP. I think that your evaluation will show that you prefer Photoshop (which is a well-developend professional-grade product).
There is gimpshop which is supposed to make the gimp menus appear in the same layout and stuff as photoshop but I just use the gimp as it is. I've never been good with graphics anyway so I learn graphics as I learn the gimp.

Edit:

E: Couldn't find package gstreamer0.10-pitfdll

That doesn't seem to be in the repos.

Try opening a terminal and using this command.

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/contrib/g/gstreamer0.10-pitfdll/gstreamer0.10-pitfdll_0.9.1.1+cvs20060515-1_i386.deb

That will save it to your current directory where you ran it (probably your home directory). Then just do

sudo dpkg -i gstreamer0.10-pitfdll_0.9.1.1+cvs20060515-1_i386.deb

Edited by Kreuger
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Let me say that I am impressed with the steps you are taking to try Linux. Sounds like you need your typical Windows fonts (often called "core" fonts). Not sure what Ubuntu calls them, sorry.

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

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