[D'Agger]

Originally Posted by Damo2k

http://biebian.sourceforge.net/

That's surely another sign of the apocalypse

[jozi]

Wondering if you guys can point me towards a distro for me.

I decided a few weeks ago after the parents complaining about their pc being slow I'd install a distro on it, after some searching for parent friendly distro's I ended up with Mint 13 (Kubuntu looks good for myself as well). Finally got round to installing it today and it seems like my parents might manage fine with it.

This got me thinking a bit more about running a distro on my own desktop but I have a few questions related to hardware and other things.

In the past I've tried to run a distro or two and found I had trouble because I had a ati gfx card. I'm using quite and old card at the moment (ati x800xl) which I probably won't replace till next year. Has linux support for ati gotten better, am I likely going to run into problems?

I've got a creative sound blaster xfi elite pro with the break out box, I'd love to have this running properly as I have the pc wired into my receiver for surround sound. I'm going to go with the assumption that it will work and is fully supported? I found creative drivers for linux but no idea how good they are. I've also just found out about Ubuntu Studio, would this be ideal to run with the xfi card?

To complicate it more I use a few adobe programs, photoshop, indesign, but mostly lightroom. While I don't think these are available for linux, I did find someone running a virtual os (windows 7) so he can run his adobe programs. How hard is this to setup and get running, is there a big impact to system performance running a virtual box?

Finally I want something that looks pretty and flashy but not tacky Better than windows, something like this or this

Any recommendation?

[LiamOSullivan]

I can only really give any input on bits of that, but here goes.

Originally Posted by jozi

In the past I've tried to run a distro or two and found I had trouble because I had a ati gfx card. I'm using quite and old card at the moment (ati x800xl) which I probably won't replace till next year. Has linux support for ati gotten better, am I likely going to run into problems?

As far as support goes, Ubuntu is one of the better distros. My recommendation would be to boot a live CD of Ubuntu and see if it gets detected. I think the correct command to check out that sort of stuff is
# lspci
so you could run that in the live Ubuntu and see if it picks up your card.

There are other distros out there with more up-to-date kernels, but those are much more complicated if you're only starting up.

Originally Posted by jozi

To complicate it more I use a few adobe programs, photoshop, indesign, but mostly lightroom. While I don't think these are available for linux, I did find someone running a virtual os (windows 7) so he can run his adobe programs. How hard is this to setup and get running, is there a big impact to system performance running a virtual box?

Setting up a windows virtualbox is very easy(The hardest part is getting a legal copy). I set up a Windows XP one the other day, and while I didn't time it, it took me only one cup of tea to install it; I don't imagine W7 being much worse.
As far as performance goes, you can usually choose the resources you'll allocate to it, so you can give it quite a bit of your system resources. It's not as quick as booting the OS itself, but for most tasks it's fine. I've never actually used any of those adobe programs, but they'd have to be very heavy to not work nicely in a virtual machine.

Originally Posted by jozi

Finally I want something that looks pretty and flashy but not tacky Better than windows, something like this or this

If I'm not mistaken, both of those were Gnome2, but fairly heavily customised, which is a shame. Gnome2 development has ceased if I remember correctly, which is annoying, because Gnome2 was nice.
There are still ways to use Gnome2, but I'd advise against it unless you're reasonably confident of what you're doing.

Bodhi Linux is, in my experience, the distro to go for if you want a reasonable amount of simplicity and awesome looks. (They even have a Desktop of the Week page). It's a massive mindfeck for the first few hours using it because it behaves fairly weird, but once you figure out where the settings for everything are it gets fairly nifty. The only worry I'd have recommending it is that it's based off a fairly old Ubuntu release, and their new release is only in the alpha stage.

Other than that, have a look at normal Ubuntu, normal Ubuntu with the Gnome Shell(Looks something like this out of the box) and Linux Mint(Never used it, but keep hearing good things).

[LordChessington]

Noob here. Only used two builds a few years ago; Fedora on college computer (i.e. no admin access) and a little Ubuntu on a friends computer. Found both fine to use.

I have two desktops; My main PC which is mainly for general usage, games and a little development (and has a legal Windows copy), and my media PC/server which has +2TB worth of media files and is hooked up to my TV (not legal Windows copy).

After reading through this thread, Mint seems to be the easiest out of the box to set up compared to Ubuntu in the 2009ish posts. Has this changed? I looked up Ubuntu 12 and it looks pretty damn user friendly now. It has what looks like an android-type app marketplace which sounds like any codecs Mint had that Ubuntu didn't would be easily retrievable. Is this correct?

On my main PC, I would like to dual-boot and install a distribution that would run Eclipse for Android development. Does anyone have experience with Android dev on Ubuntu or other linux distributions? Would there be any problem getting Eclipse to detect my test phone (Galaxy s1)? Would it need drivers?

On my media PC/server I have 2GB which is sluggish with Win7 and am too poor to get more RAM, so I would install Ubuntu as a main OS. This PC has an obscure small profile MSI graphics card, but I only intend the PC to be used to play media files. Would installing Ubuntu be suitable to be a media server for other PCs (Windows) in the house? Would the obscure graphics card have trouble being detected by Ubuntu? Would 2GB RAM have any effect on the speed of Ubuntu 12?

Sorry for longwinded post

[BopNiblets]

Originally Posted by LordChessington

After reading through this thread, Mint seems to be the easiest out of the box to set up compared to Ubuntu in the 2009ish posts. Has this changed? I looked up Ubuntu 12 and it looks pretty damn user friendly now. It has what looks like an android-type app marketplace which sounds like any codecs Mint had that Ubuntu didn't would be easily retrievable. Is this correct?

Yep, I think it's "restricted extras", but it's been a few versions since I've used Ubuntu.

On my main PC, I would like to dual-boot and install a distribution that would run Eclipse for Android development. Does anyone have experience with Android dev on Ubuntu or other linux distributions? Would there be any problem getting Eclipse to detect my test phone (Galaxy s1)? Would it need drivers?

Not sure about this but my GS1 worked in USB Storage mode on Linux a few years ago, so Eclipse (or the android SDK) should detect it.

On my media PC/server I have 2GB which is sluggish with Win7 and am too poor to get more RAM, so I would install Ubuntu as a main OS. This PC has an obscure small profile MSI graphics card, but I only intend the PC to be used to play media files. Would installing Ubuntu be suitable to be a media server for other PCs (Windows) in the house? Would the obscure graphics card have trouble being detected by Ubuntu? Would 2GB RAM have any effect on the speed of Ubuntu 12?

Sorry for longwinded post

2GB should be fine for Ubuntu media server.
If you're streaming over the network the graphics card won't matter as it will be the GPU on whatever device you're streaming to handling the video, you could even run it headless in command line mode for extra performance?

[_Godot_]

Complete noobie, this is probably asked before, but between Fedora and Mint, which would be the best for a beginner? They both look good.

[Mathiasb]

Originally Posted by _Godot_

Complete noobie, this is probably asked before, but between Fedora and Mint, which would be the best for a beginner? They both look good.

Mint, Fedora is kind of bleeding edge.

[LiamOSullivan]

Bleeding edge? Ehh, not so much.
I'd agree that mint is probably the better choice for a noob though, unless they have aspirations of setting up servers, in which case getting the hang of YUM would be good.

[Mathiasb]

Originally Posted by LiamOSullivan

Bleeding edge? Ehh, not so much.
I'd agree that mint is probably the better choice for a noob though, unless they have aspirations of setting up servers, in which case getting the hang of YUM would be good.

I knew I'd get this reply. Fedora is known for trying out new stuff as soon as it's out, for good and bad.

[LiamOSullivan]

Originally Posted by Mathiasb

I knew I'd get this reply. Fedora is known for trying out new stuff as soon as it's out, for good and bad.

If you ask a debian user, they'd say the same of mint.

Fedora does use new bits and pieces, but the software it uses is generally 'stable' with grub being one exception. Ubuntu is actually quite similar, I think, with the exceptions of the LTS releases. Unity would be a very good example of that.

[Tom Dunne]

Originally Posted by LiamOSullivan

Fedora does use new bits and pieces, but the software it uses is generally 'stable' with grub being one exception. Ubuntu is actually quite similar, I think, with the exceptions of the LTS releases. Unity would be a very good example of that.

Hmmmm, I'd tend to agree that Fedora is bleeding edge. I've experienced a significant number of freezes on my laptop since I installed it a few months back. No amount of clt-alt-backspace would let me back in - just a good old fashioned power off.

[Mathiasb]

Originally Posted by Tom Dunne

Hmmmm, I'd tend to agree that Fedora is bleeding edge. I've experienced a significant number of freezes on my laptop since I installed it a few months back. No amount of clt-alt-backspace would let me back in - just a good old fashioned power off.

Ctrl-alt-backspace has been disabled by default for quite some time now. You could've tried Ctrl-alt-F1 or so, to switch to a terminal. YMMV

[Tom Dunne]

Originally Posted by Mathiasb

Ctrl-alt-backspace has been disabled by default for quite some time now. You could've tried Ctrl-alt-F1 or so, to switch to a terminal. YMMV

Clt-alt-backspace has worked on a number of occasions for me with Fedora 17. I have gone to the terminal on occasion to kill a few rogue processes, so it looks to me that both are in fact enabled.

[Baldy Conscience]

Just installed Mint 14 on an old laptop, it looks great!

I had some x264 videos downloaded, and Windows XP had them rendered like cartoons or something, handled them really badly, even in vlc player.

In Mint they looked brilliant, scaled up to 42 inches - quality HD goodness.

*****************************

I have Mint 13 on a different laptop, dual booting with Win7 - how hard/easy is it to go to Mint 14?

[BopNiblets]

Originally Posted by TheNinthGate

I have Mint 13 on a different laptop, dual booting with Win7 - how hard/easy is it to go to Mint 14?

They recommend a fresh install (just backup your home directory and Package Manager selections through the backup tool) but there are a few ways:
http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2