Favorite OS?

[Firaeon]

Re: Favorite OS?

Feba, what distro of Linux do you use? You may have said it before but I forget and I can't be arsed to look through the thread.

[Feba]

Re: Favorite OS?

A pet peeve of mine is when people refer to hard drive space as memory.

I don't mind it so much, as long as they've already made it clear they're talking about. Saying "my hard drive only has 50MB of memory left" and "I only have 50MB of memory left" are very different things. I personally blame memory cards.

Windows gets really fickle the less space you have, especially when it's on a single drive and temp/cache files are scattered everywhere. Since it doesn't clean up after itself very well, after a long period of usage, installing/uninstalling, adding/deleting files it becomes a nightmare to access files.

one great thing about Linux- you pretty much never ever need to defrag it. The filesystem (ext3 in most cases) is managed differently, so you don't need to worry about it nearly as much. You can also take a look at this linux defragger's thread for some more info. Most people will tell you that you never need to format linux, and it's pretty much true, but there's still the option out there if you're into that sorta thing. Still, the filesystem is MUCH less likely to become fragmented to the point of causing you any real performance degradation. Also, about your comment with installs leaving unwanted crap behind, if you use a package manager like apt, they can install things and clean up after themselves very well, in my experience at least. It's what Windows Add/Remove programs should be: have a way to add them too You can take a look at getdeb.net if you want- you download ".deb" files (from trusted sources, of course), your package manager installs them, and they're ready to go. It's pretty much entirely automated, so you don't need to worry about specifying install paths and whatnot.

Let's show how to install something in apt

Ok, now let's say I want to install a new racing game.
I need to search to know what's out there, so I run:

feba@febuntu:~$ apt-cache search car racing game
//Searches your apt's cache for "car racing game". You'd normally update before you run this, but that takes a lot of space for almost complete waste of space here, so I skipped it//

junior-games-gl - Debian Jr. 3D Games (hardware acceleration required)
pyracerz - multiplayer top view 2D racing game
slune - 3D racing and car-crashing game
torcs - 3D racing cars simulator game using OpenGL
torcs-data - base data files for TORCS game
torcs-data-cars - data files for TORCS game - Cars set
torcs-data-tracks - data files for torcs game - Tracks set
trigger - free 3D rally racing car game
trigger-data - free 3D rally racing car game - data files
xracer - Futuristic racing game
xracer-tools - Futuristic racing game - developer tools

Now here, I've heard of torcs before, so I decide I want to download that. I run

feba@febuntu:~$ sudo aptitude install torcs

//sudo temporarily gives your account root permissions. This keeps you from running programs that work outside of your /home/user/ folder, kinda like the my documents folder in Windows, but for everything you run as user. This allows programs to read and write to '/' (root). Normally this would ask you for a password, however I used it recently, so the timestamp lets me use it again without hassle. Vista's UAC is basically an extremely annoying version of sudo. aptitude and apt-get are commands, to be honest i'm not entirely sure what they specify, but they are part of apt. install obviously says to install a package, and 'torcs' specifies which package//

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
//detecting dependancies. this comes in handy later//
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
menu torcs-data torcs-data-cars torcs-data-tracks
//here we go. Torcs needs all these packages installed to run, so it will install them too, instead of having to do it by yourself//
The following packages have been kept back:
wine
The following NEW packages will be installed:
menu torcs torcs-data torcs-data-cars torcs-data-tracks
0 packages upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 84.0MB of archives. After unpacking 190MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
//I don't want to download this right now, so I decide n//
Abort.

Alternatively, if you're newer to linux and don't know the command line, assuming a fresh install of Ubuntu, you can simply click Applications, then Add/Remove programs, and search in them both by names and categories. When you want to remove it, it's just as simple. sudo apt-get autoremove torcs, or go into add/remove, uncheck it's box, and hit apply.

That said, I do vaguely recall a horror story about someone who had lower than 3/30/300MB (can't remember which) remaining on his hard drive, and had the GUI crash on him every ten seconds or so until he made more space (by deleting files I think. Knowing CLI is handy), I'd assume this is due to swap page (virtual memory) wanting more room to work with than the HDD had. I'd have to look more specifically into the cause of this, but if it was due to a swap page, it might not be a problem if you use a swap partition. Again though, this is a vague memory, so I'd have to look it up.

EDIT: HEY MHURRON, did you know that if you look at your posts like it was one of those 3D pictures, it looks like the guy from your avatar is chewing on the back of 2k-tan's head?

[Mhurron]

Re: Favorite OS?

Unix and unix like OS's reserve 10% of disk space that can only be used by the superuser in order to clean up from things that go on a HDD gobbling spree. Once you reach 90% volume space used, depending on the filesystem, you begin courting file corruption.

As for automatic clean up, Unix and Linux do what some startup script tell it to do, the 'user friendly' distros have more involved scripts since it's assumed the user doesn't know what they're doing and can't intelligently manage the system. OS X has a daily, weekly and a monthly script that clean things up and create reports of off the process accounting systems. By default they run at 3am, and the machine has to be on to run them as they will not be scheduled to run when next possible if the machine is off.. Servers are usually fine, but users should probably look at rescheduling the scripts for a time they know their machine will be on.

[Firaeon]

Re: Favorite OS?

I also forgot to mention that the other day, on Windows, I was very low on memory, like 20 MB left on the HD. I went to remove something, but apparently I didn't have enough memory to remove the program so I could make more memory.

Fail.

[Feba]

Re: Favorite OS?

I bet if they released a client of FFXI to Linux, it would have little to no problems with people who knew what they were doing.

excepting the fact that the Windows port is bad enough.

[Firaeon]

Re: Favorite OS?

I voted Linux. I use Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn 90% of the time I'm using a computer. It's flexible, it doesn't limit me, and I can do most things I want with it, with less problems than that Windows crap. You know, before I used Linux, I had nothing to compare Windows to. Now, I cannot stand Windows. It gives me problems. It's a pain in the ass. I mean, the first time I've used it for a while, was when I went to install FFXI. It took me 2 god damned days to get it to work, because Windows had some files messed up, the video card was all screwed up. I had to call SE twice to help me with it. I bet if they released a client of FFXI to Linux, it would have little to no problems with people who knew what they were doing. Windows is just buggy. Piece of shit to say the least. And Vista? Who cares? It's like the same thing as XP, only now you have eye-candy that hogs up a shitload of your system resources, an annoying security feature that, when disabled, just brings you back to the equivalent of XP security, and some cute little widgets on the side. Oh, and less software/hardware support.

Vista is CRAP.

[Feba]

Re: Favorite OS?

I was tempted to call "Catfight!", but Mhurron is a dog.

[hongman]

Re: Favorite OS?

Ok first off - wtf is YMMV?

And second. Maybe I came across a lil strong, but sadly, this is type of crap is what is becoming more common on these forums.

I dont know you from Adam, nor can I tell your tone. But you came across to me when you said you ran it on a lower spec machine to mean "Well if I done it, then you could of on your old setup." type thing.

Ok, seems a bit unreasonable, but the recent culture here is led me to lean on the side of certain people being malicious rather than not, in the case where Im not 100% sure.

EDIT: and its not everyone, a more accurate statement would be people I get the impression enjoy shit swapping banter like this. Sadly, you made it on the list.

[Feba]

Re: Favorite OS?

....fight! fight! fight! fight!


hey everyone, something's going down between Mhurron and hongman! Come watch!

[Mhurron]

Re: Favorite OS?

Oh see, and here I thought your little outburst was because you got pissed when I said I ran it on lower speced machines it must work for you. Wait, thats because you did.

I don't care what your machine is. I really don't, I never have and I never will. You gave a broad statement that you didn't think would run it, I said I had a lower speced machine then most would try to run VMware on but for my use there were a lot of things I didn't need turned on. There is sort of an implied YMMV there.

Do you fly down the throat of everyone who gives their experiences?

[hongman]

Re: Favorite OS?

Point out where I said YOU said it was going to work for me.

Dont worry, I'll wait too.

[Mhurron]

Re: Favorite OS?

Point out where I said it was definitely going to work for you.

Don't worry, I'll wait.

[hongman]

Re: Favorite OS?

Mhurron oh great wise one - I do love the way you know absolutely jack about what I run and what I deem "acceptable" performance, given the vast amounts of variables involved in this to say "Well I run it blah blah blah".

Did you know the specs of my old machine? No.

Do I even remember the specs of my old machine? Hell no! I am pretty sure it ran along the lines of P3 512.....I think. Given that might run Vmware fine, but you also dont know what apps I intend to RUN within/alongside VMware.

Feba:

1. Laziness - hey, at least Im honest.
2. These apps you wont have heard of, Im sure - they were programmed especially for a handful of our clients. Its called TradeCapture, which itself hosts lots of smaller plugin type apps.

I appreciate you guys are trying to help by suggesting ways round - but in all honesty, there is no point becuase of point 1, and also why would i go around all these workarounds just to create more potential problems/places for problems to happen?

Sad fact is, Windows XP is doing its job fine for me (I hate you for making me defend M$), so add to the fact that I feel little need other than personal interest to get back into Linux, and you will see where I am at now.

[Feba]

Re: Favorite OS?

Ah

[Mhurron]

Re: Favorite OS?

Building packages.