Linux thread!

[Baiter]

After Mac and Vista threads, I had to start this.  I know most people have little experience with Linux, but it seems to have finally got over the hump.  It's not quite yet ready for everyone who is faint of heart, but pretty darned close.

• Dell and Lenovo offer PCs and notebooks pre-configured for Ubuntu or SuSE Linux
• The ASUS Eee PC is a pretty sweet portable starting at $349 with Linux and solid state disks
• Ubuntu has done a great packaging job.  Easier to install than Windows (less questions, less reboots)

You can download a Ubuntu CD, boot it and it'll make your PC look and act as if you have it installed, which allows people to try it out risk free.  One interesting feature they recently added is the ability to install Ubuntu dual-booting with Windows.  They've always made that easy, but now you can install it right on an existing NTFS partition so you don't have to reconfigure your disk... you can still use all your windows files on there, just takes up some space.  As I mentioned in the Mac thread, as of v8.04 it comes with Compbiz Fusion, which is their 3d desktop with all the fancy desktop effects like OSX is famous for, and MS introduced in Vista.  Did I mention this all comes at less memory, and generally runs faster than Windows or OSX?

Oh yea, most important... all your software (OS, Apps) is updated with one command.  No other OS is capable of doing that.... even more nice, you almost never have to reboot after an upgrade... even for full distribution upgrades (Linux equivalent of service packs).  Got an old PC that's not performing well?  Probably will do better with Linux.  Did I mention the price?  Yea, you know.

[briefcase]

I installed CentOS the other day, which is supposedly the "free"-er version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It went decently enough and seemed to find all of the hardware in the system. The installer didn't give me the option of installing eight different text editors, three different window managers, etc., etc., and I don't know enough about Linux anyway to be able to make an informed decision about which option of the many is best, which is something I've run into when installing Linux in the past.

The purpose of the CentOS installation was to set up a Nessus server, which one can do in Windows, but the Windows offshoot lacks certain things, like being able to integrate with Nikto for more in-depth web server penetration testing. Once I got over the Nessus/Nikto integration quirks, it all seemed okay, and I might keep the system set up that way (or at least image the hard drive and wipe it so that I can put the image back at a later date), if for no other reason than the Linux setup went without any problems, but figuring out the Nessus/Nikto integration was touchy.

[Baiter]

For everyone else, Red Hat/Centos is primarily for setting up servers.  Red Hat is getting closer to the better package management of a Ubuntu/Debian (allowing one-click install or update of everything), but it's not really geared toward easy desktop use like Ubuntu/Debian.  There is a server version of Ubuntu or Debian too depending on your purposes.  The deal with Red Hat, being one of the few commercial Linux distributions, is that if you buy proprietary sever software (from Oracle/BEA, IBM, etc), they will only certify their software on commercial varieties of Linux (Red Hat, SuSE) rather than the free ones (Ubuntu, Debian, etc), because proprietary companies don't have controlling influence over free distributions.

For desktop purposes the nice thing about Ubuntu is that it comes in 4 different flavors with pre-configured window managers: Standard Ubuntu (Gnome Desktop), KUbuntu (KDE Desktop), XUbuntu (XFCE Desktop), and even an Edubuntu (also Gnome, but for kids/education).  You can of course customize any one of them, but the purpose of those (and any Linux distribution) is pre-packaging of software they think you might use the most.

[Mr. Fuzzy]

Huh? What? Where?...I'm confused...and it's not the first time.

Did the Penguin-People break out of the Asylum?

-Dan

[Baiter]

Did the Penguin-People break out of the Asylum?

Locks froze.  The question is, how did the Fruits get out of theirs?

[Mr. Fuzzy]

Through the Windows..out onto the Vista.

[Baiter]

Interesting to note that Linux has 2% Desktop market share.  Low you think?  Actually not bad, improved by 50% in the past year, since so many low cost notebooks are coming with Linux pre-installed.  After all this Apple hype you'd think they have a, what, 15% - 20% market share?  No, it's less than 5%. 

There's a long way to go for both to break the 10% barrier combined, and as discussed in this forum, both are equally capable desktop platforms as any version of Windows.

[Baiter]

Nice little Mini-Notebook Dell is putting out with the option of Windows XP or Ubuntu Desktop.  It's being called a Eee PC killer because of better specs at the same price range ($299 start TBD), and neither Vista nor OSX will run on it.

http://gizmodo.com/5038298/leaked-dell-inspiron-910-mini-note-specs-and-release-date