well that sure make buying another machine sound more better and better  
I can always take my XP machine and run it totaly offline

Group reporting now is 4 or 5 strong, Mint 16 installed for all of them with only one machine needing a bios tweek because the machine's BIOS was very old and a USB keyboard is being used at this point in time.   Is actually a motherboard/BIOS issue on the old hardware.

Casual users who wanted just the functionality that they used to get before got it with no effort and no trouble -- Mint installed automatically for them.

Power XP users (1) who wanted more than standard had to go do some stuff, and so far they got it with about the same level of effort they had to put into XP to get what they originally had.  

(still are holding a grudge at MS for making them move, though).

One person will have to wait for Mint 14.04 to get the very high resolutions on his video system and fancy monitor, but it will come automatically with 14.04 Mint.

So, counting me we got 5-6 walking around in the red steel suit at this point in time.

We got one who opted for a Chromebook, he correctly judged it fits his needs the best and he had the money to go run out and buy one from Walmart.  Art will tell us how it all works out, he's still figuring out he doesn't have to do anything to it except push his Cat5 cable into the receptacle socket and turn it on -- there IS nothing to do to set up or maintain a Chromebook, Google does it all for you.   All you have to do is log in using your Gmail address and password.

Justin is still out of touch on this XP dying subject, and his clock is ticking down to only 6 days remaining.

New stuff people report, Mint 16 has boot disk repair now as part of the install DVD (nice touch that,  since I can attest it is good to have it around).


==================



Things you want to do before loading up the Mint.  

1)   Copy your browser preferences to a thumb drive per the requirements of your browser.   You will need these preferences to load them on to the same browser in Linux.

2)   Make a backup copy of all your precious family pictures on to a thumb drive.  Backup any other stuff that is worth reloading too.


Since you are running a dual boot machine, you would like to think you can always go back into your XP mode and do these things after the fact -- but you need to do them now to have a copy sitting in a drawer in case the doom worms of next Weds get to you before you actually have a chance to go do it.

Reality is, those of you who plan not to go on line using XP any more will eventually forget and leave your Cat5 plugged in when you switch over to XP, or you will forget where you are and go do it on-line anyway.

Eventually, your XP catches a bullet and dies.   Your Mint suit does not.  

Eventually, you will wind up running the suit full time, so get your precious stuff off of the XP side and on to a thumb drive that you leave securely closed up in a drawer somewhere.   Your wife is going to want those pictures of the kids and will be expecting you to produce them years and years after all the dust has settled with this XP mess.

Good advice, the No Script add on for Firefox -- I just did it.

If someone were to successfully crypto-lock my hard drive, I would simply take out my install DVD and cold boot it and reinstall Mint on a freshly scraped and Linux formatted hard drive.   Then once the hard drive tested clean for the crypto infection I would use the thumb drive with my browser preferences and whatever vital data that I had been backing up all along.

Whole thing wouldn't take me 25-30 minutes to do  (with some scrape and reformat delay of course).

I would expect as you watch this issue develop that you see some prevention go into place by the Linux guys pro-actively blocking this execution.  

Something kernel deep that would require you to log in your administrator password to do a full encryption on your hard drive is likely already in place, but it will get made much more vigorous according to the popularity of this nasty trick.

Serow, have you just spotted the first try for a kill shot for XP?

I'm actually running mint 15 on my old laptop.... and thinking about 17 for my new one...

One thing i'm going to shoot for.... keeping a 32 gig thumb drive in one of my usb ports and storing all my information there, pics, vids, and documents, that way if the laptop gets locked, I can reload mint and still have my information saved.

Kinda like backing up your information on an external drive... i'm contemplating buying a 1TB hard drive and store all the information there.

Yep, my whole extended family runs Linux now, at least part time.  

I used to tease my son in law the IT professional that his whole job was just running from crack to crack in MS's shaky dam, plugging up all the little cruddy software leaks.   He used to defend MS saying how great it was, meanwhile my daughter the engineering manager jumped ship over to Mac and started saying "Honey, look, no worms, no viruses, no defrag".

(Mac is suspiciously a whole lot like Llnux, more so than Apple feels comfortable with now since FOSS has been busting MS's chops recently over stealing FOSS code.)

Long story short, my son in law fell in love with Ubuntu and now all of their machines, including the Macs are now dual boot Linux machines.

Yes, you can easily teach a Mac to dual boot Linux, and many of the Apple people do this to get to certain pieces of software that not available on Mac.   A Mac person will use a Linux partition and Wine just to run a few MS softwares that they can't get at all on Mac.

Mac has an issue that occasionally Apple simply abandons older OS products completely when the hardware is still good (just like MS did with XP).  The unsupported Apple OS will continue to run since it isn't prone to wormies, but the softwares on it will get no neat new features.  So folks take older mac products and add Linux to it so they can get current features on their software.

Apple claims to be based off of Unix and admits having some BSD code in it (which is permitted by the Berkley Software Distribution License). Where Apple is producing piles of little brown bricks for shite right now is that people can now prove the real source of some of their code from back in the day was Linux, not BSD.

FOSS license says, you include FOSS code, you turn over the whole code mass back to FOSS.

Apple isn't hated, and it does contribute to ARM and all the rest of FOSS.  So, a blind eye may be turned upon Steve Job's little discretions that date back to when he was running NeXt and Apple may be given the chance to quietly fix their code to remove the "accidentally borrowed" stuff very discretely.

Meanwhile, MS has been given notice by these actions that proprietary Windroid won't be tolerated, that stealing FOSS code means they lose whatever they attach to that FOSS code to.


===========================


Linux (Android) variants of a lot of main stream Windows softwares are being worked upon by the old Windows vendor base.   They see the desktop as being a future dead end, and x386 as being abandoned by Intel starting this year.   Unfortunately, like MS they are entering an already crowded marketplace a day late and a dollar short.

Microsoft and Intel are releasing even more vapor that they intend to take over the low end side of Android tablets by the end of next year.   They plan to use up all of TSMC's production capacity and squeeze out them durn irritating little guys as well.

This is the #5 ranked fab company (Intel) and the #6 ranked mobile OS company (Microsoft) stating they are going to use other people's fab lines and somebody else's OS to bust everybody else's chops.

(but just btw in tablets)   And this is with Intel still not even having a phone chip at all right now ......

The Chinese Cheapie guys (no longer very small at all any more) simply smile at them.  The Chinese now have their own state of the art ARM processor fab plant in production right now with 20nm ARM chips shipping this spring with 2 new 14nm lines going in as we speak for use by this fall/winter.   There is floor space laid out for 2 new 10nm lines as well.  No 28nm at all, just 20nm and the more modern stuff.

Remember, right now China sells 4x more stuff to themselves right now than to the entire remaining North American and European markets.   And I still predict a Chinese OS (android based, yes, perhaps) will be listed in the top 5 OS products within a year.   Xaomi has one that is a candidate, as is Badu.

old_rider wrote on 04/03/14 at 09:45:34:



I do this now, by having a folder on my desktop called "Kelly's Stuff 4-1-14" that has all my data stuff in it.   It also has my booksmarks and preferences exported in HTML format current in each backup as well.

I back it all up monthly to a big thumb drive using the date to keep the sequential backups organized.   When my thumb drive finally fills up, I delete a half a dozen from the top of the list and keep on backing them up as the list keeps it organized by date.

I do not leave the thumb drive plugged in all the time, because that is a good way for it to catch something since it is FAT32 formatted and any virus would just see it as a tasty little DOS snack.   The folder full of data stays on the desktop and the thumb drive lives in a drawer when it isn't getting loaded.

If I do get munched, I will have dated layers of backup to rebuild from.  Throw in the current Mint DVD, do a standard install and copy over the "Kelly's Stuff 4-1-14" folder from the thumb drive and I am back in motion again.

Less than an hour to do, easy peasy.   So far nothing has ever munched my Linux (the red suit is jest too tough to crack).

AND, everybody recognizes that Serowbot is rapidly becoming a Linux expert himself, so he too can answer your questions, as can old-rider, Steve H, etc. etc.    You got lots of Linux experience available right here on the list ... and as more of us put on the suit in the next 5 years (Vista and Win 7 scheduled to die) it will become prevalent, not the exception.

"MS sucks", sez Tony Stark.  "Microsoft will give their most modern OS away for FREE, gratis, zero cost, nada dolero
to anybody but you, their long term faithful XP customer.   So, let's go kick Microsoft's butt some, they really deserve and need it".

Art Webb wrote on 04/04/14 at 11:23:34:

If you wreck your computer, maybe OF will send one of his dolls for you to play with.