Contrary to popular belief, the cops will not arrest you if you don’t use Windows. There are some interesting alternative operating systems out there —and with perseverance, you won’t go crazy trying to use them. Chief among them is Linux, the largely free, enormously geek-popular system that hard-line anti-Windows users rave about, which has Tux the penguin as its mascot. Read the rest here.
Linux – Good Windows Alternative, but Installation can be Tricky
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
.. not because I hate Microsoft, am anti-Windows, but because I like Linux. Plain and simple like that..
Too bad that more often than not using an “alternative operating system” is seen as being a “microsoft bashing troll”.
I installed RH 8 BlueCurve is sweet, and in conjunction with Apt-RPM, it is better than debian except you do not have all the software that debian has.
one thing I can not figure out however is how to edit the meues…..I have tried everything and it seems to me that RH just does not want you messing with there menu layout.
Watch out for the latest kernel upgrade from RedHat, Jeremy. It just dumped my Gnome desktop for no reason. The files are still on my drive but the desktop itself won’t work anymore and I don’t have any menus when I click on anything other than the panel.
It sure looked good, though. Time to reinstall…
“Contrary to popular belief, the cops will not arrest you if you don’t use Windows.”
Not when Senator Hollings, Hollywood and Microsoft have finished their immediate plans.
It is a shame the reviewer did not have someone who knows the field check the article before publishing it …
Linux “mostly free”
“paid versions come with nifty software”
“You’ll need to make a 3.5-inch boot floppy from a file you’ve downloaded.” – if your BIOS supports a PIII, presumably it supports booting from CD?
“the default log-on ID for Linux is “root,” or, in some cases, “local host.localdomain.”” – okay, so people can find information which confuses them, that’s a valid point (inadvertently made)
An interesting newbie-friendly review, but with these glaring errors, is it really a Washington Post story?
I use free software because I want to be free.
” one thing I can not figure out however is how to edit the meues…..I have tried everything and it seems to me that RH just does not want you messing with there menu layout.”
Unfortunately the gnome2 menu editor wasn’t stable before RedHat 8 was released. If you want to edit the menus you can edit the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications. It’s case sensitive, so make sure you double check your changes before you save, as a simple typo such as “base” in place of “Base” will break your panel. I expect that a gnome2 menu editor will be released soon, I’ve considered writing one myself but I lack the time.
“It sure looked good, though. Time to reinstall…
”
NOOOOOO!!! This is not a windows machine, you don’t ever need to reinstall to fix your problems. The following text *SHOULD* help, if it still doesn’t work you were gonna reinstall anyway.
Grab CD 1
Startup the computer.
At the grub menu hit B (I think, or whatever key edits an item)
Scroll to the kernel line and hit E
Cursor to the left until you have just passed “root=”
Insert a ” 1 ” (no quotes)
hit enter
press B
Insert CD 1 into the drive
log in as root
mount /mnt/cdrom
cd /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS
rpm -Uvh –force kernel*686*rpm (change 686 to 386 if you have less than a PPro)
ls -l /boot (look for the vmlinuz and initrd lines, and make a note of them.)
vi /boot/grub/menu.lst and verify the lines match the menu file
reboot
You should be back to the old kernel rev.
I don’t think this review or article is very helpful to people who want to learn about Linux. But, it is these types of articles that seem to rule on computer news type websites whenever Linux is the topic. I do believe it is good to portray distros as an end user would see it, but I also think it would be better to have people who know Linux but have the knack of telling people about it in terms that are understandable. Many of the Linux reviews people that post here have written would be much, much better, I think.
hmmm…well I had no problem with it, and if it did not boot, Grub places it as a boot option so you can boot into the older version if the newer one does not work.
hmm… I wonder why the upgrade did not place the option to boot into the old kernel (in grub). Yesterday, I upgraded to the athlon kernel and (i use lilo, ugly in redhat) it placed an option called linux-bak.
I did face a problem with X though! Since I had installed nvidia drivers (3d accelerated drivers) the new kernel could not start X ! >:-) I ‘up2date’d kernel source (from the console) and recompiled the nvidia sources. Things are back to normal.
One problem I am still facing is with the sound – from an audio cd. Gnome CD shows it is playing the cd but no sound from my SBLive. I found a thread in the sound-list at Redhat and it seems some are facing the same problem… any ideas ?
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>.. not because I hate Microsoft, am anti-Windows, but >because I like Linux. Plain and simple like that..
>Too bad that more often than not using an “alternative >operating system” is seen as being a “microsoft bashing >troll”.
May your preferred diety bless you Von..
This man hit on the head. If you don’t like Microsoft as a company this is NOT a good enough reason to dump your hard drive and start over in Linux. Not even good enough…
If you hate the Windows way of doing things OS and interface wise and want to learn a different way of approaching things all together — a unix-like way and you are a very technical person. Then try linux.
If you dislike the Windows OS, and you want things to work out of the box and you want a way of doing things that don’t require a lot of tweaking then save your money up and please buy a Mac.
If you are Windows power user or gamer and hate Microsoft suck it up and stick it out with XP. It is not that bad. If you want a decent command line you can download cygwin tools and such. You will just fuss and moan and end up going back because Linux is not Windows and things don’t work like Windows and Lindows on its best day is still not Windows. If you want Windows, stay with Windows. You can hate the company and use the products.
I have used Linux for years and it really does not take me that long at all to set up a fully functional linux box but I set up Linux boxes for programmers who may program for Unix but lived their whole desktop life on Windows. It is a change and one that should not be taken lightly.
You download the Video drivers for the Nvidia stuff from Nvidia, the ATI drives from gatos.sourceforge.net, get the core fonts from sourceforge again, snag the ltmodem drivers for the laptop and then you go.
Install the OS, install the drivers and then set up the desktop thinking back every moment your days as desktop tech worrying about menus and desktop links. You edit out the unscaled entries for the fonts in the XF86Config, making sure the proper video driver is loaded, set up the ppp options for the laptop folks, Get LinNeighborhood set up for the samba browsing, Evolution set up for their mail and OpenOffice link on the desktop. Check that one annoying Mozilla file to make sure it is really doing AA for the rendering.
There are tradeoffs for every OS but they like doing their coding and unit tests on their desktops before checking in the code changes for a review and having it moved to the test environment. Being able to code in a Unix-like environment and then moving their code to the server for testing and production instead of sharing some development server where everyone was stepping on each other’s toes for unit tests and such.
Yes, we do have copies for CrossOver Office around for Visio but at least we don’t use Access.
It is not for everyone and I would not move the secretaries over any time soon but it has come a long way pretty darn quick.
Installation is the most easiest part of Linux. It is the after part that is hard. Installing new apps, installing new hardware, using the system, making sure things actually work….
For complete information on my post, lilo gave me the option to boot to the old kernel. It still didn’t work. It booted up to Gnome just fine but once again I had a blank desktop and no right-click menu when I clicked on the desktop. The only thing I can think is that it had something to do with an add-on to the panel I made. After the reboot the battery view option disappeared and this was loading before the kernel upgrade.
I agree wholeheartedly with rajan r (gasp). Installation of Linux is pretty good. Running it can be nice, too. I really like the Gnome desktop on RedHat 8. However, maintaining the system and fixing it when things go wrong is the difficult part and I’d rather spend my time working on other things.
That’s not a kernel problem, you somehow corrupted your desktop. What to do is control-alt-backspace then control-alt-f1 log in, type “mkdir old_gnome_settings; mv .g* old_gnome_settings” then hit control-d and control-alt-f7 and log in again.
I appreciate the help, although I’ve since just reinstalled. I couldn’t find any help on doing what you’ve suggested, and I know about the standard “RTFM” answer some elitists would give, so where would I have found the steps you’ve suggested? It seems like most of the help files don’t cover troubleshooting and the man files were useless for my problem. I’m seriously interested in where I could have found such information.
I also still wonder how I corrupted my desktop by running their update program? RedHat’s distro was freshly installed the night before and the only customizing I did was to add the battery indicator to the gnome panel and add php-mysql (why that’s not an install option is beyond me). Sometimes stuff like this can be frustrating to the end user.
I think there may be a bug in the save session feature in RedHat 8. I’ve managed to lose a profile twice, and it went away as soon as I stopped using that function. Did you happen to select it when you logged out?
redhat identifies my sound card, it is a VIA VT82C686 AC97 Audio controler. redhat decided to use the module via82cxxx_audio.
when the system trys to play a sound, it just hic-ups a tone over ans over again.
I love redhat 8, it is definatly better than any other desktop linux becasue of the better unity in look and feel, but this needs to get fixed.
thanks
Aitvo: Usually I don’t save sessions. Since this was such a fresh install I’m pretty sure I didn’t use it. I did change the login graphical screen to the gnome instead of the RedHat. Maybe that had something to do with it? I just thought the different graphical logins were just different images but maybe there’s more to it…?