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/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl General Category >> The Cafe >> What Linux Mint is good for .... /cgi-bin/YaBB.pl?num=1319356669 Message started by Oldfeller on 10/23/11 at 00:57:48 |
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Title: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by Oldfeller on 10/23/11 at 00:57:48 .... apart from being all boring that is. No excitement, much of ever any more. No Microsoft Forced Update Tuesdays, no defrags, no antivirus fights and Trojan Worm attacks. Boring. Jest dull. Have to wait 3-5 years before you need to fix or update anything, unless you really jest want to. I used to get excited when Flash tried to update itself because Flash could be trusted to break ANYTHING, but now they have an app for that in Linux Firefox that fixes all them whacky Flash updates automatically. So that's boring now too. ==================== My wife had her a real excitement though -- her 4 gig thumb drive got corrupted on a Win machine when she didn't shut it down correctly and it mashed, mangled and scrambled up her file names. This is a REALLY BIG DEAL for a teacher -- their entire life is on that thumb drive. Some of them wear them on little lanyards around their necks with the drive sheltered in the warm protected spot so's they won't lose them. Serious stuff, them thumb drives .... gots their grade book on it too. So, Windows 7 sez it can fix that sorta stuff -- wrong, it lied. (Bill Gates still lies, even after he is 100% retired and Steve Jobs is dead, Bill Gates still lies fer the fun of it) Scrambled it even worse and about 1/5 of the files were declared "corrupted". Bad got worse. Files won't open, shite fire they ain't even there no more .... Panic attack time --- might have to take her to the hospital on a respirator with her little blue drive death-clutched in her shaking hands so they can pry her fingers open to get it out. Bad, bad -- she's almost crying now. She has LOST HER STUFF ..... Got the drive away from her again (she really didn't want to let me hold it any more) plugged it into the Linux Mint box, the oldest old white HP box type computer that we own. The one that all the drives had quit on, and the USBs wouldn't work half the time -- that old junk one. The old outdated one we give to daddy to use because it has no other function so he can play with his strange Linux stuff on it. Odd, the drives all seem to work now. The broken blue stick lights up --- and his strange Linux stuff reads all the file names, even the ones with all the MS error codes symbols in them. And his Open Office will still open them up and then re-save them with new file names and they actually work again. They is risen from the daid, alive again. Don't even smell funny either, they jest work .... a little boring mebbe, but that's OK. What is INSIDE that old moldy white box? It seems quick and agile and it certainly DOES stuff, but always in a boring sorta fashion. ::) Jest not exciting like that really good MS stuff is all the time. |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by built2last66 on 10/23/11 at 08:47:44 So she messed up her thumb drive, and didn't have that stuff backed up anywhere else, and it's Windows fault? :D I agree though, Windows is exciting because you never know what the hell is gonna happen... I haven't quite found a Linux "brand" that I really want to use and invest time in learning yet... I use xp still by the way.. |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by LostArtist on 10/23/11 at 09:27:28 I want to try linux, but I use Adobe's Creative Suite a lot, does Linux support Adobe? Adobe is an industry standard so it's hard to not use it, so I'm not sure if other software that's open source or what not would be acceptable |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by built2last66 on 10/23/11 at 09:49:30 4E6D71764370766B7176020 wrote:
I'm not sure if all Linux "brands" support Adobe, but here's a list of which Linux "brand" might be good for you.. and it might be a little bit out dated but should still give ya a good idea: https://www.linux.com/learn/docs/ldp/282996-choosing-the-best-linux-distributions-for-you |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by spacepirates on 10/24/11 at 06:20:48 Last time I had Mint running on my machine was a solid four years ago. I started my linux adventure with ubuntu 6.06 (now it is up to 11.10 or something crazy), tried my luck with kubuntu, crunchbang, OpenBSD, redhat, and half a dozen others. For the average user with the average computer, linux is fantastic: it allows them to do everything they do, faster, for free (email, document writing, web surfing, etc). Once you get out of that range though, it gets kind of rough. Linux plays notoriously rough with multiple monitors and graphics heavy use, which isn't a problem unless you are playing recently released games. Right now I run windows 7 x64 for three reasons: it works with two monitors, it works with my pci-ex SSD, and it plays all the recent games. I used to dual boot, but I play too many video games now and am pressed for space on my SSD for that to be practical. I do miss the days of linux though. updated every single piece of software on your system with one little command.... alas, joy. |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by Oldfeller on 10/24/11 at 11:27:54 Nope, I remind her every few months to give me her stick and I back it up twice, once to a hard drive and once to removable media. She has a new thumb drive now, with her very last trustworthy back up on it. IShe also has her corrupted/fixed drive, with instructions to go get a file off of it IF SHE MUST HAVE IT, pull it to her desk top, unplug the bad stick and then open the file and verify that it is exactly correct, then rename it on the desktop to something different than before, then move it over to her new thumb drive. In doing so, her anti virus gets 3 cracks at it and if she thinks its good and Word or Powerpoint thinks it is a good file, then she can save it. I think she gets the point about backing up frequently, but we shall all see since in the past if I didn't flat ask her for her thumb drive it didn't get backed up at all. Luckily, she only does minor tunes to her past lessons to put them in line with the current books page numbers and the current month/day due for assignments, etc -- so using a 4 months old backup really doesn't pose much of a strain and I don't think she lost anything vital. |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by Oldfeller on 10/24/11 at 12:25:25 How to start with Linux Download a ISO image of Linux Mint to your desktop, then use a CD burning software (I use Roxio) to burn the ISO image onto a bootable CD that you stick in your primary optical drive and then you boot off of it. Me, I always stick with the Mint LTS versions as they were cherry picked for stability and they are supported for 3-5 years now until you go to the next LTS version for the next 3-5 years. I find that I actually like stability and boring .... Next, once you decide to install the software after you play with it a bit, only install it as a dual boot system (keep your old windows and all your old stuff) because nobody really goes over to Linux cold turkey all at once. You can tell your boot loader which OS to boot first, it doesn't really matter much which you want to use mostly. You can autoboot to Windows, it won't hurt my feelings. What will happen is what always happens .... Windows gets all forkled up with a trojan attack, or a virus, or a bot, or (heck you name it -- something new most likely) and you wind up using your Linux in the interim while the Windows anti-virus packages catch up with the new nasty. And you go back to windows as soon as it is cleaned up and working again. This happens 2-3 times until you get hit with a good one and your Windows won't fix without a total hard drive scrape job (system recovery from the boot prompt). ???!! :o ..... and you suddenly realize you don't want to fork up your Linux by doing that because most of your working stuff is over there now. Your Linux Mint kept right on working right on through the worst the nasty attack boys could throw at you and it didn't even bobble once. Your Linux Firefox has all your stuff on it and you got used to Open Office now to the point it doesn't really matter which one you use. You find yourself liking the rapid boot times, fast response times, and the fact that the various Linux softwares can read corrupted windows files that windows can't even SEE the durn things any more, and fix them. Why fork up something that works good for something that doesn't? Now you have become an "at heart" Linux user .... heck, next time you may just let Linux take over the whole c: drive and simply quit trying to fix Windows each time it gets crapped up. Retired people can make this swing over easier than working folks can, although Open Office can read it and save it all, there are some softwares (graphics and games) you use that only exist in Windows. This may change with Win 8 as Win 8 will force a major software upgrade for all active softwares to be compatible with ARM chipsets. Once this is done, the stuff may wind up being a lot more Linux compatible as well .... (but not if Bill Gates can help it -- he has to keep you feeding his upgrade gravy train ;) ) |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by spacepirates on 10/24/11 at 12:36:43 Oldfeller, three things: 1) if you are *super* thrifty and don't want to "waste" a CD/DVD, you can install linux (and windows, for that matter) from a USB thumb drive (assuming it has enough space). Unetbootin is a program that extracts an ISO to a USB key like it was a cd/dvd. 2) simple, cheap, amazingly useful storage solution? Dropbox. Free, and you get 5gb of storage space for anything you want backed up, available anywhere there is an internet connection. 3) if you REALLY just want to barely get started you can try a linux distro without even downloading anything! https://try.cloud.ubuntu.com/ as a side note, if memory serves me right, Linux Mint is a fork of Ubuntu. That is to say someone took Ubuntu, polished up some things and made Linux Mint, so they are pretty similar. EDIT: dropbox link: http://www.dropbox.com/ |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by Oldfeller on 10/24/11 at 12:50:24 Yup, Linux Mint is Ubuntu with a pretty, easy to live with front end and all the proprietary drivers that Ubuntu won't pre-install for you put into place and tuned to work good for you up front. And then, during the 3-5 years of LTS, when the myriad Ubuntu fan clubs finally figure out how to fix all them little surviving buggies, the Mint people always go fix Mint with the fixes and then push it out to everybody as auto updates (when Ubuntu lets you fix your own on your own sometimes). Mint is Ubuntu made easy ..... ;D Mint is the second most popular distro now days, ain't it amazing how many lazy people there are like me out there who simply don't want to fork wid it at all .... |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by built2last66 on 10/24/11 at 18:45:12 I'm gonna try Mint, I mostly use windows for games and I play them on XP so they aren't that graphic heavy... I just gotta back up all my book marks and crap first :D |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by EJID on 10/25/11 at 09:55:54 I couldn't resist ;D http://i805.photobucket.com/albums/yy340/StinkyWeaselTeets6/ATGATT1.jpg |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by Oldfeller on 10/25/11 at 12:12:50 Ain't it the truth? Windows crashes because lots of programmers pumb hate Microsoft and Windows and they throw wrenches in its works jest for the fun of it. Android, OSX, Linux -- nobody hates them with a purple passion like they hate Bill Gates and Windows. Mebbe all the Microsoft trash they have had to put up with over the years has affected their attitudes a bit .... Come on now, tell the truth, how many times has Windows locked up and you lost whatever you were working on and had to redo it? And didn't you hate Bill Gates for jest a minute or two while you were re-typing it? ;D |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by verslagen1 on 10/25/11 at 13:12:59 Oh I hate bile, and windump. But I gotta use it. But what a smart base turd, releasing a 'new' version every couple of years. Making you pay for 'updates' every year. And then complaining about piracy... hipocrates. |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by LostArtist on 10/25/11 at 14:54:35 5B7870727178787166140 wrote:
almost never . . . I save a lot, and I use the "cloud" to save a lot of files and text and whatever, but it's also important to say, that I don't do anything important anyway so whatever I lose if I lose anything, isn't that big of a deal anyway |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by Oldfeller on 10/26/11 at 15:15:47 Well, to be sure I still work 40 hrs a week but it is at a night security officer's job on a college campus keeping all the kiddies safe, so I have the luxury of telling Bile "goodbye" for my personal work station. My wife however is a completely different animal -- she uses laptops and I have 2 spares stacked over in their carriers and she has one in use -- it dies, she drops it off and takes the next one. At one time (conflicker worm (2nd version) I think) she had 2 out of the 3 down at one time and nothing I could find could clean them up. When that happens, rape and scrape and reload all the software .... :P Compared to Bile's stuff. boring old Linux Mint sure tastes good to me !!! |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by built2last66 on 10/26/11 at 15:25:30 She must be doing something pretty terrible to them, if you can't use Windows then you can't use anything else... maybe she should go back to good ol fashion pen and paper? I'm thinking of doing that myself. I know Windows has it's faults but it's not half as bad as the elitest Linux/OSX crowd make it out to be... Macintosh has always been complete 1 button un-upgradable garbage but you never seem to hear anyone complain about that... it's always "I didn't save my work, and the power went out.. SCREW WINDOWS".. hehe.. just down right silly... now Windows has auto-save.. not sure if Linux or OSX even had it, but it was still Windows fault... Windows seems to be really, really, really stable now.. just so much spyware/malware/virus crap for it it's unbelievable... |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by Oldfeller on 10/26/11 at 16:40:22 She lives at a University and she takes electronic transfers of papers, etc from all her students, so she gets exposed to all the neat new viruses and stuff as the kids seem to pass it along just like they do the biological germs. University still uses Novell Server and WinXP, so don't be looking for Win7 to be saving anybody's bacon 'cause it ain't there yet. I'll pass along your recommendation that she drop back to the quill pen and ink well era but I jest don't think that's very likely to happen. ================ Stupidest thing she ever did was click on a link that told her her PC was infected with the AdAlert virus and click here to down-load the repair software ..... she was trusting Bile's Microsoft she was because the message looked like one of Bile's very own system alert windows. Heck, I can remember back 10 years ago I got an email from my ISP saying my daughter's machine at college was a "bot farm bot" and was processing 10 megabytes of somebody else's net traffice every single day for me to pay "over allotment traffic" charges for. She had logged on to some piratebay site of some sort and had "joined up" when asked to. She thought it was a torrent of some sort. Not everything bad out there is Bile's fault to be sure, but I do find it interesting when I get a Linux Firefox alert that someone else is trying to control my machine and I find I have yet another ad-based something trying to "tick-suck" my processor cycles while it tracks my purchasing habits. Linux isn't elitist, it is way way too boring for that. If you think it is elitist then I guess you are saying you think it is in some ways superior -- I tend to think of it as boring reliable and Bile's stuff as being partially buggy defective in its basic structure. Heck, XP is 10 years old and they are still patching it every Tuesday morning. It has gone through 3 major service pack rewrites and two smaller supplements on top of that. Plus 530 Tuesday AM forced updates .... PS when Windows locks up, you tend to lose the file in process. If you have autosave on, you get like 10 minutes of loss to the saved file (which for Windows is an improvement over losing the whole durn thing). Failing to ask Windows permission to unplug your jump drive and then scrambling hundreds of file names -- that is a file system structural flaw of more consequence. Did you know that Linux file systems don't permit your files to become fragmented very much at all? Defrag software doesn't really exist in Linux because it isn't needed? Systems REGISTRY FILE is another Windows thing that drives systems nuts, making them run slower and slower over time as the file gets cluttered with crap over years of use. Bile's baby has lots of non-optimal things about it to love. Count up the money you have spent on Microsoft this and that over your years of computing ..... .... the total is plumb scary big and you got some pretty sorry stuff to use for having spent all that much money on it .... Linux was written by computer professionals in their spare time as a ego fulfillment exercise and it costs zero $$$ for you to use it .... .... the only price you pay is putting up with the boring goodness ..... (and mebbe occasionally have some folks accuse you of being elitist and thinking of you like you use Apple stuff which is also boring good but VERY VERY EXPENSIVE dollar-wise) ========================= Here's your informative YouTube burb for today's current operating system advancements .... [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa1RCg-Ccp0[/media] |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by built2last66 on 10/26/11 at 17:35:58 Oh so your wife buys into all those fake alerts and crap.. I've seen a million people with all those bloatware/malware/spyware/virus problems, and believe me if everyone converted to another OS such as Linux the same kind of problems (not the exact windows environment) will start to occur. The elitists are out there, the kind that will try to vote kick you off of a game server just for mentioning that Apple is garbage, even if they started the trash talk first :D I'm happy with XP.. not gonna buy Windows 7 or whatever they're up too.. and will most likely be making the change to Linux once theirs a flavor I'm satisfied with.. got root? |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by Oldfeller on 10/26/11 at 19:35:39 Yup, got root authority any time I want it (some system items actually will ask you for the root password as you are modifying your system with some changes). Can sudo at any time at will from a terminal window, can only remember needing to do so ONCE in the last 2 years though .... All in all, have sudo'd or root passworded 3-4 times ever -- have to give "permission" more times than that for ANY SINGLE VISTA sit down & use session. Mint doesn't rub your nose in it very often, but it will tell you politely if something tries to use your computer that likely ain't you .... "Warning .... an unidentified web site has attempted to change your Flash settings through file modifications to Adobe system files. Do you wish to block or allow? (click here for more details)" Fork no !!! Flash is most of the remaining issues that exist with Mint Linux, since Mint tries to use Adobe Flash so as to offer the full web experience and Flash is about as buggy as Bile's stuff is. So Mint generally watches Flash like a hawk .... ;) |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by Boule’tard on 10/27/11 at 06:30:36 Meh. They both have their purpose. I use nothing but Windows at work, and 90% Linux at home. The home computer is dual-boot because I have to have full compatibility with MS Office files. OpenOffice can't edit them well enough for me to trust them to look exactly the same in Windows. Also, some websites (that I need for bill-paying and whatnot) will not run right unless I boot into windows, and I don't have the energy to figure it out. It would probably involve me having Linux spoof a Windows install, similar to how you can make Opera spoof IE. XP is pretty secure once it's behind a ZoneAlarm or Komodo firewall. I don't worry about it picking up a virus, especially since the whole rig (along with my wife's windoz machine) is behind a router. Whatever the OS, it is a good idea to run Firefox with the NoScript and Flashblock extensions. That breaks most websites, which you then re-enable one by one. |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by built2last66 on 10/27/11 at 06:59:02 Komodo firewall, XP built in firewall, NOD32 anti-virus, Malwarebyte's.. and I'm actually smart enough to press ctlr + s to save stuff.. I haven't had to format from any worms for years because the more paranoid you are on the internet with Windows the better.. |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by built2last66 on 10/27/11 at 07:36:41 Not having a CD burner or DVD burner I'm using UNetbootin to extract the Mint .iso onto my Droid phone to use as a USB drive.. seems I'm stuck at "10 of 23" files extracted.. And yes I know Ubuntu has a Windows installer but I'm not to fond of Ubuntu... I want to see the performance difference on this old rig I'm using at the moment.. :D |
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Title: Re: What Linux Mint is good for .... Post by built2last66 on 10/27/11 at 09:51:50 Was a fun try, but a no go... my Droid can't be used as a bare bones USB drive.. :( |
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