The *nux Help Thread

[Spectere]

SeaMonkey is essentially a resurrection of the old Mozilla application suite (though much much faster).  It's a pretty decent product, really.

[Zakamiro]

yeah, I'd dare say that it's faster than Firefox. Or maybe it's because it doesnt have a wireless connection. (I doubt that makes that much of a difference)

[Spectere]

I haven't used it much myself but from what I've seen on my dad's computer it was pretty darn quick.

And let's not forget: you can make web pages and check your eeeee-mails with SeaMonkey.  Oh, the wonders of the nets!

[Bobbias]

So, I think fixmbr broke my partitions... I've formatted (I gave up on linux for now), but last time I booted up, it said ntldr was missing, so I had to install windows again just to boot up. How the hell can I install ntldr?

[Spectere]

fixmbr doesn't touch the partition table, only the master boot record.  Same with GRUB.

ntldr is the Windows bootloader.  It should be in the root of the system drive.  If it's missing, dump this in there: http://www.spectere.net/ntldr.zip.

[Bobbias]

Apparently, after unzipping it, I already had a copy, which was slightly smaller, as well. (228k as opposed to yours at 244k) I just hope this works, because installing windows every time you boot is a retardedly painful process.

[Spectere]

Mine's from XP Pro SP2 so it might be a bit different than yours if your installation CD has SPNothing or SP1.

I can't see any reason why it shouldn't work, I'm pretty sure XP's ntldr can still boot Windows 2000, so...

[Bobbias]

SP1, and yeah, it worked. Actually, I ran fixmbr again, and it worked after that.

[Malwyn]

For livecds, I'd very much recommend Wolvix or DSL-N. Mostly Wolvix these days. It's full of stuff, and most importantly, ltris and crack-attack for when you're gparted-iting. <3

As for modifying X, for stuff like adding resolutions it can be easier using the distro's native configuration tools. For debian, "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg", and for a bunch of others there's xorgcfg and xorgconfig. I think Ubuntu's got itself a nice GTK app for it as well.

As for desktop environments, I'd recommend GNOME first- coming from Windows, a user might be used to fugly desktops and shitty theme management, but getting into GNOME first can do wonders. It's very intuitive, very easy to use and very pretty. You can even move those panels around by just clicking and dragging. When you start realising how much GNOME holds back by refusing to do some very basic things, it might be time to move on to KDE. At this point, KDE4 might be out and it'll be the faptastic magnum opus for linux this year. <3

Also why the FreeBSD love? It's a neato OS I'm sure, but linux is the horse to bet on. Most hardware manufacturers have just started acknowledging linux's existence- FreeBSD support would likely get a lot of blank stares. D:

[Bobbias]

I started in KDE, and I love it. I really just need to learn to work in linux better, but I don't really feel like running explicitly from a live CD, and I don't want to go through having to ultimately format my C: drive again.

[Spectere]

As for modifying X, for stuff like adding resolutions it can be easier using the distro's native configuration tools.

BLASPHEMER.

Also why the FreeBSD love? It's a neato OS I'm sure, but linux is the horse to bet on. Most hardware manufacturers have just started acknowledging linux's existence- FreeBSD support would likely get a lot of blank stares. D:

Indeed.  nVidia's drivers are quite good for it, at least.  It's also nice that I can use basically the same xorg.conf between Linux and FreeBSD (with a few small changes, like /dev/input/mice -> /dev/sysmouse).

Other than that, FreeBSD isn't really mature enough for me to want to use as a daily home OS just now.  Projects like Gentoo/FreeBSD are really helping things along, but Linux generally has better hardware and software support across the board.

[Malwyn]

Indeed.  nVidia's drivers are quite good for it, at least.  It's also nice that I can use basically the same xorg.conf between Linux and FreeBSD (with a few small changes, like /dev/input/mice -> /dev/sysmouse).

This is why I like nVidia. They find a platform where people might use nvidia GPUs, and they port for it. Very professional and demonstrates a vigilant programming crew. Optimising for say, Windows, gives the impression that the developers aren't... quite as competent as they should be. ATi's drivers are so abominable that they'd probably be less viciously hated if they'd just not released one for anything but windows. (I figure Apple's been using ATi stuff for so long that they've probably got ATi-specific code worked into the OS by now)

The BSDs to me seem like they'd be better off in very specific, and usually headless setups. Linux may make awesome servers, but at the moment I think it's squaring in on user-interface setups. Desktops, workstations, portable devices, DVRs and the like. Sort of the reverse of windows server vs windows home, I guess. Maybe. It's 3am.

[Bobbias]

Well, one of the biggest things about linux is that it can be hand tailored to work on nearly any architecture, and hardware setup, and made to specifically work well on it. You can optimize any linux install for your hardware setup and whatever particular task you're doing, as opposed to how hard it would be to strip down windows XP for a specific purpose.

[Spectere]

ATi's drivers are so abominable that they'd probably be less viciously hated if they'd just not released one for anything but windows.

At this point, it feels to me like the ATI drivers for Linux are now more stable than the ones for Windows, actually.  It's very odd. D:

The BSDs to me seem like they'd be better off in very specific, and usually headless setups. Linux may make awesome servers, but at the moment I think it's squaring in on user-interface setups.

Linux is picking up in the server market, though.  A lot of very very large businesses use it as well as many hosting companies (spectere.net is hosted on a Linux-powered server at the moment).  FreeBSD in particular has quite a bit of market share, though.  I believe Yahoo! runs on FreeBSD servers, for one (and the old spectere.net server ran FreeBSD).

Also, let's not forget about Linux's dominance in the supercomputer market, thanks to its incredibly portability and scalability.

Well, one of the biggest things about linux is that it can be hand tailored to work on nearly any architecture, and hardware setup, and made to specifically work well on it.

NetBSD is the same way (until Linux caught up sometime in the 21st century it supported more architectures than any other OS), yet not a whole lot of people (relatively speaking) use that.

Linux, since the late 90s, has had a lot more hype and momentum than the BSDs did in their prime.  That's one major reason why they're overtaking everything else.  If I had to wager a guess as to which BSD is the most popular on the home user end, I'd have to say Darwin, the underlying system of Mac OS X.  Which, you mustn't forget, runs on PPC, x86 and...ARM.  Every overpriced iPhone is running BSD under the hood.

[Bobbias]

Yeah, linux always seemed to get more publicity than the BSDs did. I always heard mention of BSD, but rarely heard much more than mention, while linux has it's fanboys and such.