Linux desktop

[AD5TQ]

The last I saw, Dell was playing games with Linux pricing. The Windows box Versus Linux box was about the same price. BUT the rebate on the windows box was twice as much. The Windows box was about 200 cheaper. You could buy the windows box for less and then install Ubuntu yourself.

Or you can buy the new Everex gOS Linux PC from Walmart for $199.

[G1WDF]

Hi Jeff, I personally would recommend trying Mepis 7.0 or the Antix lightweight version.
Its found and configured all my harware on every version I've used.
It comes with a really good download package manager called Synaptic.
There is lot of ham software available to download f.o.c.
Mepis uses the KDE desktop and is probably the easiest for a Windows user to try.

Reagrds, Richard.

Registered Linux User 381260.

p.s.Good support to be found on the following site..
www.mepislovers.org

[KE7NVY]

Still haven't decided what to do about the old machine, although I'm leaning toward replacing it with a new one as I do still have a couple of apps that I need Windows for.  I sort of wanted to use my notebook as my "higher-powered" machine for XP (it's a 1.6GHz Pentium-M with a gig of RAM), the idea being that I could continue using it for packet or PSK-31 in the event of a power outage by power-poling a cigarette lighter jack into my DC distribution system (I used to have an old P-3 notebook that came with a car/air adapter that plugged into a cigarette lighter).  Then I found that the notebook requires a 20V DC supply, so that won't work.  So I started looking at new notebooks, hoping to find one that will run on 12V, but so far the only information they list about battery operation is that you can get different capacity internal batteries - no specs about what the external DC supply requirements are.

Anyway, I installed Ubuntu on my notebook just to try it out.  It worked ok but wouldn't give me a display resolution any greater than 1024x768 even though the machine itself is capable of 1600x1200, which is what I use with XP.

So I downloaded the Debian/KDE image and installed that instead.  It uses the full available resolution, but I can't get it to give me access to the USB external hard drive where most of my data lives.  Sometimes I can see the drive (folders and files, I mean) but can't access any of it unless I su to root (permissions are 700 on folders and 600 on files), other times I can't even see the folders/files.  If I su to root and try to change the permissions on the data, it lets me change the settings on the folders but not the files.  chmod and chown both keep saying "operation not supported" on the files.  So I can't get at any of my data without booting back to XP (I did make it a dual-boot installation).  I know there's got to be a way to fix this, I just haven't found it yet.  The external drive is formatted NTFS, could that be the problem?  I'd hate to have to reformat it as FAT32.

Sigh...

Jeff KE7NVY

[KC0DBY]

Yeah, linux isn't going to be happy with the NTFS drive, I've found ways to read and write to an NTFS partition, but they never work for very long.

[KB9XN]

Go for the Dell.
I got a couple of them and they are great for the $$$$$

[KE7NVY]

Ok, just to kind of wrap this thread up, I went and ordered a new desktop from Dell, a reasonably powerful one that will run the short handful of Windows apps that I still need to use fairly well.  It's a 2.2GHz Core-2 Duo with 2GB of RAM and a 320G drive.  It arrived yesterday, and I spent most of today getting it set up.  It came with XP Home installed on it.  The first thing I did was repartition and reformat it, including a FAT32 partition for sharing data between XP and Linux.  Then I reinstalled XP and all the drivers and junk.  Finally I installed Ubuntu 7.10 alongside XP.  I had to futz around for a while to find the right ethernet driver on Intel's downloads site and get it compiled and installed, but eventually found success.  I'm running Firefox on Ubuntu right now.

Thanks to all for your input.

Jeff KE7NVY