How many of you use Linux?

[Mike1]

Ardchoille: What is it that Automatix does that can't be done with Synaptic or Adept? Other than be a hazard to your system, I mean? I realize you've been speaking against it, but I thought you might know.

Since Ardchoille hasn't been around, let me toss my two cents in.

It looks as if Automatix makes some modifications that are not 'standard' and those mods end up causing problems down the road with upgrades. If you get familiar with Synaptic or with the sudo apt-get install command, you can do pretty much anything Automatix will do. And then everything will be properly installed and should not present a problem with future upgrades.

I was struggling to find Kompozer yesterday afternoon, when it suddenly struck me that I didn't have to find it. I could just rely on sudo to do it for me. A few seconds later, Kompozer was running. Let's see the Windoze users do that with an HTML editor install. I had Kompozer installed before a Windoze user could type in a license number and click to agree to all the restrictions on an install.

It's been a week since I wiped Windows and I'm loving Gutsy. I see people are struggling with it, but I must have had beginner's luck. It took a bit of tweaking to get Gutsy to play well with my ATI Radeon X1300, but once I got that handled (maybe 15 minutes effort?), everything has been smooth as silk. And with the way Storm is rearing its ugly head again, I couldn't be happier to not be using Windows. Especially when the people at Symantec and McAfee are pretty much not saying anything about Storm, other than warning people to not open attachments. LOL, that's like telling children not to unwrap presents. For the non-geek Windoze users reading this thread, you need to know that Storm is very real and is very nasty. How about a Trojan that will fight back with a DDoS if you try to remove it? Welcome to Storm. Keep your anti-virus software absolutely up to date and you're still open to being infected with Storm. While the Linux users sit back and wonder why you're running the risks you are.

I've been installing some nightly package builds for a script on a three of my own forums, this past week. After years of using SmartFTP, it has taken an open mind to find an FTP client that I am comfortable with. FileZilla and gFTP didn't feel quite right, but I'm now using KFTPGrabber and life is good again. Once you get over things looking different, you come to the realization they work every bit as well. And in some instances, they even work better!

The only problem I have with Ubuntu is that it took me until Feisty to get up the nerve to just do it.

[Q-Tip]

First computer was a cpm machine basic a nd a few apps then I got a vic 20 closy followed by a cbm 64 then I went for amiga 1500.
Did college on a hpux machine installed minix
Installed the first veriosn of linux (0.99 or some other number I think) that was a real bi*ch to set up then along came slackware use it right up to version 10 then switched to debian. The just a few months back switched to ubuntu 6.06 lts and now this week ubuntu 7.10.

Out of all of them slackware is nice if your a developer as its hands on
debian is similar but has nicer package managent tools.
ubuntu is now ready for real users to get there hands dirty ;)

Oh and did I say I did my read hat exam to and used fedora and red hat ,,, mmm ;)

I also (have to) use windows all of them up to vista!!) my workstation is always unix..

To play games I have a playstation2 and a PSP
To develop software and anything else computer related I use Linux..

[Erisianmonkey]

Thanks Mike. I think I'll stick with the terminal, Synaptic and Adept. My onlyproblem with Gutsy is that the video support for nvidia has gone downhill a bit in Gnome. (Much better than it was in the Beta though.) I used the Beta for all of an hour and a half before I tossed it. I'm kind of missing having direct control over compiz too. I'll have to do some tinkering to try and get the compiz manager working in Gutsy.

[Mike1]

Oddly enough, Feisty recognized my ATI card straight away. With Gutsy, I had to give it a nudge. Then again, I discovered Feisty some 5 months after its official release, so who's to say how well Gutsy will be working in March?

I'm not so interested in CF, to be honest. It is running OK on this machine, but I really don't have need for it. Most of my computer time is spent keeping a few of these forums alive, so as long as I am able to edit PHP files, do some minor graphics editing and get files FTP'ed to their proper locations, then I'm satisfied. I'm writing some articles for one of my own forums, so OpenOffice is coming in handy, too.

[Erisianmonkey]

Yep. Gutsy should be humming along real well soon. I managed to get compiz fusion running great after I posted last. The "negative" effect is really great for reading long e-texts. (The main reason I wanted it running, as I read a lot of e-books.) Now if only Lexmark would release a linux driver for my printer I'd be all set.

[walkerk]

http://xkcd.com/349/

[starbkjrus]

http://xkcd.com/349/

Been there, done that. Now I pay someone else to do it.

[Erisianmonkey]

http://xkcd.com/349/

That is EXACTLY how I felt trying to put debian on my old IBM ThinkPad 760xd.

[Don Patrick]

Edubuntu is my calling.

[Kent Frazier]

I started playing with Linux in 1997 with RedHat 4.2 I never really made the total commitment and always ended up going back to Windows for various reasons.

Today I reformatted the HD on my laptop and did a clean install of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). I was really surprised how easy it was. The only "major" issue I has was no sound initially and this was easily fixed after a quick search of the ubuntu forums.

The family desktop machine is still running Windows XP and there is not enough room on the HD to install a dual boot.

Our next computer will be a Macintosh which I'll setup to run both OSX and some flavor of Linux.

Kent