Moving to Linux

Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
by Chris Short

Originally Written 24 Apr 2003

Like a lot of people, I for one am tired of playing Microsoft’s silly little game. Update this, patch that, buy our new operating system that turns out to be nothing but a glorified service pack. I’ve had it with Microsoft and the money pit that corporation has created. The sheer cost of staying up to date with Windows 2000 or Windows XP (Home or Professional) and Microsoft Office is, by itself, reason enough to look at other operating systems. Then let’s not touch too much on the “OS Nothing” experience Microsoft has been serving up. First there was Windows ME, a glorified service pack or third edition to Windows 98 that gave most people a lot of headaches. Now I’m reading about how Windows Server 2003 isn’t going to be much of an upgrade but more like a service pack to Windows 2000 Server editions. These are great money making ploys but there are better things that I could do with my money. The alternative: Linux. Linux is an open source, fully customizable operating system that could be engineered to power your microwave if you wanted. I’m moving to Linux.

I’m not a “new” Linux user but I might as well be. The last time I used Linux on a day to day basis was the summer of 1999. I’ve had many frustrating dual boot scenarios since then but have never been truly satisfied with having two operating systems on one computer. I’ve also had to think about other users in my home. My senior year in high school I used Linux at work and had two Linux gurus sitting across the room from me. But, at home I used Windows because of the slim chance my parents ever wanted to use the computer for anything (and they did). After moving out of my parents’ house I wanted to make the move but my new career and new wife weren’t quite ready for the Linux experience yet. There were times where my Linux experience was needed but the United States Air Force isn’t exactly going to dump Microsoft any time soon. My wife however is ready for the move to Linux. Moving to Linux now is a very viable option considering the leaps and bounds being made in the open source community everyday.

The fact that Linux is open source means that I’ll be able to get the operating system, productivity suite, and any other software that I might need for free or close to free. Open source is truly a just cause. Emerging standards in the open source community will help make the transition smoother. Improved hardware support makes the transition possible. The hardware that ventures out of the labs today is supported under Linux a lot faster than it used to be. New hardware compatibility under Linux is possible via compiling the kernel to include the support. In the Microsoft world buying an upgrade to your existing operating system was almost a requirement for full-fledged support. Tux will now be my friend and not the laughable “Start” button. There will still be patching but the patches will be developed quickly and won’t be nearly as plentiful as in the Microsoft arena. Also, the fact that I’ll be able to have complete control of everything from the kernel on up is another “selling point” for moving to Linux. Want to streamline a kernel for improved performance, no problem. Want to performance enhance your desktop environment, no problem. Want to use a journalled filesystem, no problem (well you have to pick one, that could be difficult). Linux is truly a viable alternative for the desktop user.

Moving to Linux won’t be a cake walk but the people at Red Hat and MandrakeSoft will definitely make the experience a lot easier in the future. I’m looking for a “crutchless” changeover from the Microsoft environment to Linux. There are a few Linux applications that allow you to run Microsoft software under Linux, such as, WINE and CrossOver Office. Those options are there just in case. They won’t be used until they’re absolutely necessary due to file type incompatibility or lack of an alternative. I don’t intend to find a lack of an alternative. The GIMP replaces PhotoShop, arson replaces Nero and Easy CD Creator, Kino and Cinelerra can replace Adobe Premier, OpenOffice and Ximian Evolution will quickly replace Microsoft Office. But there are some programs that I need to still find solutions for due to file type incompatibility, such as Microsoft Visio and FormFlow. There are also Windows-based programs that I really like, for example, Macromedia Studio MX. However, those bridges can be crossed when I get to them. It might at times seem like I’ve sacrificed ease of use but that usually isn’t the case because in Linux you create ease of use. Sure someone’s opinion of ease of use isn’t already incorporated but the ability to control that ease of use is worth the time it takes. Researching before the move to Linux will be important to obtain the functionality I require.

I’m not going to dive right in, of course. I’m going to do my homework so that I don’t find the first web site I go to is a Linux support site. I’m going to make sure that once the install process starts there won’t be any hurdles that would cause it to fail. I’ll know what programs I want installed under Linux before moving to Linux. There are so many solutions out there that finding one won’t be the problem. The problem will be narrowing the solutions down to the one that suits my needs and the needs of all the users in my household. Look out Linux, here I come.

15 Comments

quux

January 5th, 2005
at 10:45pm

You’re at least five years late to the party. What the fuck took you so long?

TtfnJohn

January 5th, 2005
at 11:10pm

Welcome to the party! There is a Linux analog to Visio…actually two. Kivio is a KDE application and DIA is a commercial product. So take your pick.

No Macromedia Studio for Linux yet but that doesn’t mean you can’t bug them about it.

Happy computing.

ttfn

John

dave

January 5th, 2005
at 11:22pm

Crossover Office runs Flash & Dreamweaver close to flawlessly for me at quite reasonable speeds. Same goes for Photoshop (which they officially support I think). And all the advances they make are contributed back to the WINE project.

Just make sure not to use WineX/Cedega, or at least not to pay for it, since those bastards at Transgaming don’t maintain an official policy of giving anything back - in fact they don’t even make it apparent that their product is based upon WINE. Barely anywhere on their website do they mention the WINE project. That pisses me off, quite frankly.

Shahms King

January 6th, 2005
at 1:30am

Dia is totally not a commercial product. It is a GNOME application for flow-charts and diagrams.

Karl O. Pinc

January 6th, 2005
at 2:03am

Some free advice, worth what you paid for it.

Use Dia as a substitute for Visio. (Tho I can’t speak to Visio, I use Dia. See also sketch in place of illistrator.) Maybe there’s a commercial company behind Dia, as somebody’s said above, but it’s free software, just like kde.

Stay away from proprietary, binary only drivers. They kill a big Linux advantage, the ability to easily upgrade.

Do dual boot. But do it by installing on a new, additional, hard drive and installing the boot loader (grub or lilo) onto floppy. Then, to boot linux you boot off the floppy. To boot MS you boot off the hard drive. I just did something similar, switching from Red Hat to Debian, and it works great. When you’re ready to switch OSs, make the Linux drive IDE bus 0 Master, boot off your install/rescue disk and edit /etc/fstab to change the drive letters (unnecessary if your /etc/fstab is using partition label names instead of raw hardware devices, as many newer Linux distro’s do.) But you will want to boot off the rescue disk, mount your Linux filesystems, chroot (man chroot) to them and run either “lilo” or “grub-install /dev/hda” (hda if you’ve IDE disks, sda if you’ve scsi.) That will put the boot loader on your Linux drive. (I forget my lilo, so there _could_ be a problem or you might have to edit /etc/lilo.conf, but I’ve done this with grub on both IDE and SCSI disks.) Naturally, your distro’s installer will have to give you the choice of where to install the boot loader if you’re going to install it on floppy. And you’ll have to learn the basics of the mount command, the chroot command, and the grub-install command, and maybe even have to read the fstab man page.

I used the new Debian installer for sarge and am very pleased with the results. Just be sure to use “aptitude” to install/uninstall/search for packages (and of course debian.org for searching packages). Debian has just about everything there is available for Linux. It does not have to be upgraded often at all if you don’t want to (years), yet you can pick and choose how cutting edge you want to be on a per-package basis. It’s one downside, hard to install, seems to be gone. It does work best if you’ve got a constant Internet connection as that way you can automate security (and other) updates and install packages at will. But that’s pretty much a given for any OS these days. A kinda-fast connection _really_ helps when you’re getting started as there’s always more to install and it’s always getting updated so even if you have a complete set of (the umpteen) Debian CDs you’ll still need to download.

When using debian, seriously consider installing all the recommended packages with a new package, e.g., install foomatic and gimp-print stuff with cups, etc.

Whatever disto you use, learn to use it’s package manager. Often, you can avoid dependencies and install packages from newer releases of your distro if you learn how to use the package manager to recompile source packages. Stay away from packages that are not part of your distro unless you know what you’re doing. Stick with the package manager or, sooner or later, your system will get bit-rot. Do keep up to date with security updates. Ignore this paragraph at your peril.

Buy RAM instead of CPU.

You won’t regret learning to use an editor. Emacs or vi, pick one. (Myself, I’m an emacs fan. Wikipedia.org has a good emacs article.)

In shell (at least in emacs mode) the tab key is your friend. (I thought it was my friend everywhere, but I’ve not yet figured out how to tell gnome to use emacs editing keystrokes.)

Left mouse button copies, middle mouse button pastes.

Likewise, you won’t regret learning the documentation reading tools, less and info.
At least learn to search and go to the top and bottom of the document. Learn to find the sentence/paragraph that applies to your situation. Don’t know the answer, know how to find the answer.

Don’t be afraid of learning the details. This is Linux, not Windows, your knowledge won’t go obsolete.

Always leave yourself comments in the config files.

If you want to rip-and-replace, switching Linux distro’s or starting over, save /home /etc and /var. (Learn what this command does “tar -cf - -C / . | ssh user@host.example.com tar -C / -xpf -”. Likewise: “tar -tzf foo.tgz” Likewise: “tar -czlf foo.tgz /” Likewise: “tar -xpjf foo.tbz” Likewise: “telinit 1″ Likewise: “aptitude update ; aptitude upgrade” Getting to know your devices is helpful “man 4 hd”) (A little shell scripting goes a long way. See: grep locate find head tail cut bash file “diff -u” “man init” is also interesting. It should lead you to /etc/init.d/rc via “man inittab”. dd and cmp will copy floppies if you want a backup of your boot disk with your boot loader.)

Don’t forget to look at The Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ Note /usr/local/. Read the RFCs at rfc-editor.org if you’ve networking questions. (Linix is based on open standards, and my preference is for primary sources.) Don’t forget about w3.org and linuxbase.org.

Consider getting a PCI video card and an extra monitor and configuring X11 for xinerama to have a double wide screen. Consider re-purposing an old computer as a thin-client for other household members, or just so you can put the noisy monster in the basement. Consider “rsync –link-dest” idiom and another old computer with a big drive for backups — cron is your friend.

Find a local Linux user’s group. Nothing like having a geek on hand.

Software RAID, so when the controller fails you don’t have to purchase a compatible controller to get to your data.

My choices, YMMV:
gnome over kde
postfix over sendmail, exim
cups over lpr (this one’s a no brainer)
arch or darcs over cvs or subversion
postgresql over mysql openoffice.org over whatever (for MS compatability)
docbook (& lyx or mebbie openoffice?) for serious writing (tho I default to emacs, which has a docbook mode)
sawfish over metacity (I want viewports & rightclick raise/lower of windows)
mozilla-firefox over galeon (maybe) or mozilla
mozilla for serious web development
emacs over vi

ian

January 6th, 2005
at 2:24am

If I were in your shoes, I’d try Mepis for my linux distribution. First off, Mepis is a run-from-CD distro, so you can try it out before installing it. It has Win4Lin patches already installed in the kernel, so you can install win4lin and run Windows 98 applications as a task under Linux. There is a quite active user group, and the developer Warren Woodford is quite good about adding features based on user feedback.

Mepis is debian-based, so updating is simply an apt-get away; you can also use synaptic, if you’d rather.

MEPIS Linux comes with java, flash, divx, realplayer, etc. pre-installed. LiveCD so you can check it out and also super simple to install.
username: demo pw: demo | username: root pw: root

You can go to the Mepis homepage at: http://www.mepis.org

You can download Mepis from: http://www.mrbass.org/linux/mepis/

ChojinDSL

January 6th, 2005
at 9:31am

If your just looking to make the switch with the least amount of hassle. Go for something like (in signicant order) Fedora Core, Suse, Mandrake, Mepis.

For me personally, these “newbie-friendly” distros caused my to be lazy about learning linux. Eventually I faced a problem I couldnt solve and this resulted in me installing windows again.

After a while the obligatory happened, windows crashed, took all my files with it and got me so ticked off that I decided to try linux again. I decided that I needed a “difficult” distro, something where you had to do a lot of the work yourself.
I found gentoo. http://www.gentoo.org
The manuals led me through the lengthy installation process and the excellent forums helped me with any problems I have yet encountered.
Gentoo’s package management and its friendly and helpful forums are what makes it the distro of choice for me.

JamminJoeyB

January 6th, 2005
at 11:57am

Welcome to the world of fun computing. I switched from windows 3 years ago because I was interested in learning something different. I find linux to be fun. You can spend hours tweaking just the desktop I feel your pain when it comes to windows at work. Also being USAF I get tired of patches, forced reboots in the middle of the day for some security patch pushed over the network. I haven’t rebooted in over a month. BTW I haven’t tried Form Flow under wine. To be honest I don’t even use it. I just haven’t run across a problem that I couldn’t find a open source solution for. Maybe one day I’ll need it till then I’ll just keep hitting sourceforge to find what I need. The amount of projects there are incredible.

Larry Shields

January 6th, 2005
at 4:53pm

I would also suggest, that you look at Libranet.com, you won’t go wrong…It’s is a very easy Debian installion, comes with many programs…If you visit there website, you will see more info…A Great users group with many gurus to help or right from Libranet for a full year of support…

Version 3.0 will be out soon, I myself can’t wait…

Try it, I’m sure that you will like it very much…

Larry

Bill Sconce

January 6th, 2005
at 5:18pm

Another vote for Libranet. It was my vehicle for escape from Microsoft, three years ago now. Libranet made a lot of things a whole lot easier, and at a critical time.

And it continues to please, day after month after year.

-Bill

Steve Haines

January 6th, 2005
at 7:13pm

I love Libranet. Made the move six months ago in the middle of the soybeans in Paraguay. No help, no guru, no store, no nothing. But the LN list is really, really helpful. I tried installing RedHat, Debian, Peanut Linux, and Ubuntu. I think LN is by far the easiest install, with Ubuntu second. Right now I can boot Win98, LN, or Ubuntu. Go for it!

Richard Brown

January 7th, 2005
at 1:46am

I would encourage you to go the Libranet route. It’s Debian which means you get apt-get - best package manager possible. And it is an excellent installer and it is very complete. It does some hand-holding but has a power user feel.

Don’t dual boot. Why cling to what is a total waste of space. There are plenty of progs that can replace what you need.

Enjoy and join a lug!

Rich

Lockergnome's Linux Fanatics

January 7th, 2005
at 4:53am

Moving to Linux

Originally Written 24 Apr 2003 Like a lot of people, I for one am tired of playing Microsoft’s silly little game. Update this, patch that, buy our new operating system that turns out to be nothing but a glorified service pack. I’ve had it with Microsof…

Bob Robertson

January 7th, 2005
at 1:34pm

I’m glad to read over on LinuxToday that you intend to update these articles.

Unlike the trolls and fanatics of whatever stripe, I’m always fascinated to see how things don’t work for people, to better see how problems are overcome.

If it matters, Debian works very well for me. I run “unstable” and just an apt-get cycle keeps software versions up to date. No need to worry about what “version” or “release” of the distribution is supported today.

Good luck, and don’t let the idiots get you down.

Deathdellic

June 21st, 2005
at 8:31pm

i like how you add all of your personal incompatibility with linux in a real life use senario! and i was really interested in formflow! formflow would be nice and i would love to have the ability to run it on wine or cedega or whatever!!!
If you ever think of a way pop me an email i would love to jump that last hurdle and get over that lasy winblows need>>>>