Chile Forum

PClinuxOS is a rolling distribution. In other words, once you setup your package repositories and software becomes available you just select it and install to upgrade rather than waiting for them to release once a year.

Most of the software is not even on the CD, it is mostly just to get you started so you can then install what you want from the greater repositories, rather than say like Mandriva having sets of DVD's around with about 90% of it you will never need or even understand what to do with it. So, it saves a lot of waisted bandwidth passing complete distributions around for everyone concerned.

I have not tried it yet, but you might be able to find it in the repositories now.

Now this is generally against my religion, but this how I install windows xp. Get a live distribution of linux, like PClinuxos. Boot it up from the cd, and use the disk partioniong wizard program to wipe and format your drive in to something that windows can read. something like fat32 or NTFS. Windows, and likly your laptop maker, will not show you the full drive, but linux will.

By the way, tried the new minime addition PCLinuxOS 2008 and loved it. No more or less than what I needed on my old PIII laptop with 256 mb of ram. It will take the Pepsi challenge with any windows vista machine I have seen.

After more than 8 years of service, including getting a second owner as a remanufactured machine, and three years of bouncing around buses and planes in Chile that old IBM thinkpad finally gave up its hard drive the other day. I slapped another drive in it, reinstalled linux, and it is back in service likely for another 8 years. I still love that little IBM T22 more than my new dell. Much better built.

There is whole mess of software for broadcast and recording studios under linux. There are lot of professional recording studios that run linux because they can cluster computer horse power cheaply. Same as doing rendering for all those cool graphics you see in the movies.

My only word of caution would be to do your research in regards to the sound card you choose.

Here is short list, I have not looked at most of these and just gave it a two second google.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_audio_software

Yea, running windows as a server is security and financial suicide on the internet. Windows was never meant to be a server or even be connected to a network. It was designed to be a desktop, and then was hacked to be a server and network client. Thus, all the inherent security problems in Windows. Windows predates network computing, and those legacy designs and limitations are still in windows Vista. Basically if you are running windows, you are running windows 98 with a whole bunch of hacks stacked on top of hacks. Linux on the other hand was modeled on Unix servers, and then modified to be a desktop.

I am not sure I posted this on this thread, but my calculations are that running an all linux shop or more specifically an open source shop saved my business more than $40,000 US last year in software in just the desktop field. That does not include any time value calculation for waisted crash time, and virus and security infrastructure required to run a windows network, or even my servers savings. I could easily add another $30,000 in software and hardware cost for the windows equivalents on the server end for mail servers, databases, file servers, and so on. I have not ran a virus scanner in like 5 years.

It now takes about 2 - 3 hours to train a new staff member in Linux (the less they know about computers the faster they learn linux), and by the end of the day they are fully productive. Really we just give them a computer and throw them to the wolves with like a 30 second intro to where essential programs are located in the menus and what they are called. There is no real training involved. The new linux kde desktops in most distros are nearly indistinguishable from windows Vista or Xp, minus the annoying graphics and strange menu behaviors.

I have one duel boot computer in the office. I had it booted the other day in windows, and one of my paralegals came in to the office to sit down to work. She came flying in to my office complaining about where her icons and programs where. She wanted her linux desktop back. She had only been using linux for about a week.

Five years ago, even the most hardcore linux advocates would not have recommended linux desktops to the average user. Really, it is more than linux. I am just using linux as a generic term. There are opensource versions for most major programs. openoffice, firefox, and bunch of others are all available for windows and macs for free. The QT programing library is being ported to windows, so even the KDE desktop will be available with most of its programs as I understand. Really, I don't know know how to do anything much more advance than how to use a mouse anymore in windows. I don't do windows.

Depends on what you mean by desktop publishing, but for the most part yes. For word processing, I would suggest you download openoffice.org for windows and give it a try. Openoffice is a full replacement for office. See if it does what you need to. The exact same program is stock in every linux distor. Firefox also, if you are not already using.

For graphics and photo editing there are methods to run photoshop on linux using wine wich is a sort windows emulator layer that allows a lot of windows programs to run on linux. Likly the only single program I miss from windows in fireworks graphics because it is what I learned to use years ago, and it is not as cluttered as photo shop. There is kind of movement to merge the two, but I don't think that will be good. I have not payed much attention to it lately.

The gimp is the native program for graphics in linux, and I am not a fan. It is one the single most screwed up opensource projects ever. Hopefully they will get it sorted out some day. It has great potential, and a terrible community of developers.

Photos editing has been fairly good recently with google's picasa being released for linux. It at least gives me nice photo management and batch processing features.

Fonts are not a problem. All the windows fonts can all be installed, at least in the PClinuxOS or mandriva derivatives very easily. There is a nice little administrative program for fonts.

Yea, not real big on the BSD type distros, but they are not bad. I just am not a familure with them. I tend to stick to the mandrake or Red Hat children, of which PClinuxOS is one. To date, I think mandriva or PClinuxOS are the most mature, and easy to use without eliminating all that is great under the hood with linux as Ubuntu does. I just don't get Ubunto. It is like the ugly step child of linux or something, but they managed to convince a whole lot of people in a very short while to try linux.

The faults of linux are just a matter of time before they are fixed. Like I said before, even for computer expert installing linux use to be a real challenge say even three years ago, let alone about 8 when I started in on linux. I use to schedule a whole day for it, and prepare for every imaginable distaster to occure several times in the process.

Yesterday I installed the PClinuxOS 2008 minime edition on my own computer. I clicked the install button, started to get up from my computer to go have a cup of coffee and do some other things, and it was done before I could get out my chair. I spent another couple of hours adding in the things I use the most (minime is just the bare bones KDE environment, then you have to select your software from the repository for download and installation), tweaking things, seeing what was new; but, I had a fully functional and ready to go installation in under 5 mins and was working answering email and other stuff while tweaking things to my personal needs.

The number one issues outstanding are hardware issues and drivers. That is not the fault of Linux and open source, that is the fault of the companies producing hardware and refusing to release drivers. I really think Microsoft has been putting the screws to hardware vendors to not support Linux. The change on that front however has slowly moved from a trickle of a few companies to now a full on torrent of companies rushing to support Linux.