Windows to Linux

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maltese · Post by **maltese** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 1:59 am

Hello,
The Choices we make in life could lead others to follow. Yep. Anywho been working on Gentoo Linux my first Linux Ever. It took me 1 month from scratch to build Gentoo using the Build it yourself website by Gentoo, google, which all roads lead back to you and I. Thank you for the Knowledge you share for the do-it your-selfers out there. I am now on my r13 Kernel build as we speak. My system is quite stable thanks also to a friend locally that has been there done this. lol. Like I said before it took me one month to load Linux, but it won't take me down another 13 year road to nowhere. Thank you Windows. I will give ups for marketing for sure, Blah blah. I will hope to also find new answers for questions for people like me. Not much to comment on other then I am very impressed with my system. I am using Gnome and Enlightenment. Gnome mainly. lol. Well 11 of 21 and I am getting hungry. Until...

-V-

Philantrop · Post by **Philantrop** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 5:12 am

Welcome to Gentoo! :-)

oKtosiTe · Post by **oKtosiTe** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 5:22 am

Well, you didn't pick the easiest of distributions to start with, but if you have the patience to learn from the ground up like that, I can only applaud that.
Personally I started off with SuSE 6.whatever, later tried 7.something and 8.0 before giving up on it; didn't learn much from it because it tried to hide too much in the name of user-friendliness. After installing Slackware 8 I never looked back to the commercial distros with their out-of-control branding and the likes. Then came Debian, which I still use on a daily basis, albeit mainly for servers. At the moment I'm quite content with Gentoo on the desktop.

Aries-Belgium · Post by **Aries-Belgium** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 8:54 am

It's quite brave to start with Gentoo, if you don't have any Linux experience. On the other hand, you'll pick it up really fast with Gentoo

Welcome to Gentoo!

Sourcecode · Post by **Sourcecode** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 9:20 am

Gentoo is your first Linux?

wow, i wish you good luck, you will need it

Welcome to Gentoo Linux

Aries-Belgium · Post by **Aries-Belgium** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 9:22 am

Sourcecode wrote:wow, i wish you good luck, you will need it

Now, you're scaring him

maltese · Post by **maltese** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 2:14 pm

Thank you for all your feedback. It was nice to hear from all of you.

eltech · Post by **eltech** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 2:23 pm

Great to start off with Gentoo .. It was also my first linux experience and it was tough also. Even 4 years later i have small issues and searching these forums and posting gets me through them with an _understanding_ of what the problem was. Gentoo (linux) is also great conditioning to solving problems in any platform environment; yes even in windows. The troubleshooting and problem resolving process is a bit more "out of the box" so to speak.

Ive tried to drift sometimes to the _easier_ versions/flavors of linux, but they just are not easy for me to understand _how_ they work.

Welcome

Shucklak · Post by **Shucklak** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 6:29 pm

Gentoo was the third distro I ever used, (Fedora, then Slackware) and I still wasn't ready. Google, these forums, and a fellow co-worker is what got me through my first installation. Even with the experience with Linux I found the Gentoo installation to be quite difficult and I have to hand it to you, after one month I was not as happy as you seem to be with it. However, after a little more than a year now I am very happy with Gentoo and glad to hear someone else is too.
Enjoy

coolsnowmen · Post by **coolsnowmen** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 7:49 pm

Gentoo was my first linux....and I was asked to administer a machine for my professor...and it was 64bit amd...
I learned alot...Now I've recruited another to my cause...too bad I've become his linux tech support lacky...but as it stands today, I'ld rather help someone with linux than windows...

What really pushed me over the edge was when MS started locking me out programs I owned...
evertime MS pisses me off, I go home that night and try to learn something new in linux...

heh, now I can do a LOT

coplaniuk · Post by **coplaniuk** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 8:48 pm

Been messing with Linux over 10 years now. Started with Redhat...went to SUSE, back to Redhat, onto Mandrake, on to Debian...and so on. 2-3 years ago, discovered Gentoo...and learned how to use Linux.

With exception of Debian, which I didn't get to use very long before falling in love with the Cow, my problem with the other distros is that they focused too much on User Friendly instead of functionality. That's the whole reason I hate Windows and Mac OS -- to much smoke and mirrors. Nothing wrong with the ease of use...but I'm one who firmly believes you need to learn to draft by hand before one uses CAD.

I have to admit, I wish Gentoo was my first distro. It would've saved me several years of iterating over those other distros. I really didn't know anything until I had to bootstrap my installation.

Welcome to Gentoo, and enjoy the fresh grass.

Philantrop · Post by **Philantrop** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 9:07 pm

Coplan, my Linux vita is quite similar to yours.

User-friendlyness is not the main problems, IMHO, with, let's say, Suse. The real problem is that they make Linux just work - until something breaks. There's a GUI for everything and hardly any user ever learns about the inner workings of their system. Thus, their users are mostly totally helpless when they get into trouble.

Furthermore, what drove me away from those mainstream distros was their dependency handling. Especially in later Suse versions whenever I installed a new package, a myriad of dependencies were pulled in as well. Even those I knew I didn't really need. Yes, I could choose to ignore the warnings but you can ignore yourself into a total mess like that. :-/

Up to and including Windows 2000, you could more or less easily avoid the millions of wizards and obscure GUI tools. This changed significantly in Windows XP already. What I've seen in Vista is a new dimension in that respect.

The other extreme I tried was Linux-From-Scratch (LFS). That was simply too much from some point on. I wasn't able to keep the entire system consistent and up-to-date anymore. Then a colleague recommended Gentoo to me. I was very sceptical but decided to try it after my LFS system finally was in a state I couldn't bear anymore. Since then I've been deeply in love with Gentoo and use it exclusively whereever I need Linux.

coplaniuk · Post by **coplaniuk** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 9:58 pm

Philantrop wrote:Coplan, my Linux vita is quite similar to yours.
Furthermore, what drove me away from those mainstream distros was their dependency handling. Especially in later Suse versions whenever I installed a new package, a myriad of dependencies were pulled in as well. Even those I knew I didn't really need. Yes, I could choose to ignore the warnings but you can ignore yourself into a total mess like that. :-/

Funny you should say that. I've been into evaluating other linux distros lately for the sake of checking them out and writing articles about them (Worry not...havn't found anything nearly as fitting as Gentoo). Anyhow, I'm currently running Ubuntu on one of my partitions. The dependancy tree kills me. I want to uninstall something, and my removal queue jumps up to 52 packages slated for uninstallation. WTF? Now, Ubuntu is based heavily on Debian, so I imagine that Debian has similar problems. I havn't found anything equal to the USE flags in there yet. It all comes down to the USE flags.

I wrote an article for Linux Forums -- a little quest of mine to find a good distro for my 2gig partition on my 800mhz laptop. My final choice was Gentoo, because it ran the smoothest. But those who aren't Gentoo fans couldn't believe that I fit the distro with its portage tree on the laptop. Just goes to show...those people don't know the power of USE.

15 distro evaluations now....still like Gentoo the best.

maltese · Post by **maltese** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 4:21 am

I have just Emerged XMMS. Pretty cool. Like Winamp so I am used to it. I do have a request. Anybody have any experience with loading Call of Duty UO? I would like to install it here.

Dralnu · Post by **Dralnu** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 6:24 am

oKtosiTe wrote:Well, you didn't pick the easiest of distributions to start with, but if you have the patience to learn from the ground up like that, I can only applaud that.
Personally I started off with SuSE 6.whatever, later tried 7.something and 8.0 before giving up on it; didn't learn much from it because it tried to hide too much in the name of user-friendliness. After installing Slackware 8 I never looked back to the commercial distros with their out-of-control branding and the likes. Then came Debian, which I still use on a daily basis, albeit mainly for servers. At the moment I'm quite content with Gentoo on the desktop.

I too started with SuSe. T'was 9.3, and I still have the books and CDs. It was cool, but I never knew what a fast system was until I tried out Gentoo. I didn't know my lumbering hulk (2.53 GHz p4, 512 RAM) could move this fast.

SuSe IMHO was a good newbie distro, and I really recommend it. Its easy to use, and tech support is nice, but you don't know what you are doing.

Gentoo IMHO has a serious advantage over LFS - Package Managment.

I looked into LFS, but that looked like a nightmare, and I decided it wasn't worth the effort.

loxins · Post by **loxins** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 12:17 pm

I started my linux experiance with gentoo. I was trying to accomplish things with win for years before I accidently put a Gentoo Livecd in the cdrom. Minutes later I formated everything and gentoo went up on all machines. Gentoo = freedom. No doubt. You control everything. i always find it strange when people that have tried gentoo consider anyother distro. Gentoo Rocks.

coplaniuk · Post by **coplaniuk** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 3:34 pm

Funny thing about my story...I guess you could say that I accidentally found Gentoo as well. Ok...maybe not accidentally...but I tried the distro because I went through a phase where I liked cows. I thought "Hey...this distro uses a Cow as its mascot! Lets try it!"

I had said earlier that I didn't really KNOW linux until I used Gentoo. But there is another element to that as well. Before Gentoo, I used Windows primarily. It really came down to maintaining Windows was (at the time) easier. Windows Update...I thought it was unbeatable. But emerge/portage made Linux easy to maintain for me. So aside from some things that are unavoidable (Cubase, games), I don't use Windows nearly as much anymore.

masterdriverz · Post by **masterdriverz** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 6:32 pm

The only reason I used Gentoo over 3 or 4 other distro's is because it was the only one I could easily find a download link for the CD, and an install guide.

Dralnu · Post by **Dralnu** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 6:36 pm

coplaniuk wrote:Funny thing about my story...I guess you could say that I accidentally found Gentoo as well. Ok...maybe not accidentally...but I tried the distro because I went through a phase where I liked cows. I thought "Hey...this distro uses a Cow as its mascot! Lets try it!"

I had said earlier that I didn't really KNOW linux until I used Gentoo. But there is another element to that as well. Before Gentoo, I used Windows primarily. It really came down to maintaining Windows was (at the time) easier. Windows Update...I thought it was unbeatable. But emerge/portage made Linux easy to maintain for me. So aside from some things that are unavoidable (Cubase, games), I don't use Windows nearly as much anymore.

From my experiance, Windows Update is the worst peice of buggy programing to come out as any form of package manage ment.

Plus, I'd like to know what you consider maintaining Windows, to be honest. Basic anti-virus/spy/adware, system reg cleaner, ect, or did you actually get into the core and tweak it?

(I ask out of curiousity. I dual boot, and would like to try to get XP to outrun a dead snail if possible)

Archangel1 · Post by **Archangel1** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 1:21 am

Dralnu wrote:From my experiance, Windows Update is the worst peice of buggy programing to come out as any form of package manage ment.

Plus, I'd like to know what you consider maintaining Windows, to be honest. Basic anti-virus/spy/adware, system reg cleaner, ect, or did you actually get into the core and tweak it?

(I ask out of curiousity. I dual boot, and would like to try to get XP to outrun a dead snail if possible)

I don't even think you can describe it as package management - it's only applying patches to some of your system. Incidentally, why is it done in Internet Explorer? Why not a program in it's own right - what it's doing is _so_ far outside the scope of a web browser it's ridiculous.

It's quite possible to make XP outrun a dead snail - I dual booted on my previous machine for games, and as soon as Windows was installed I disabled networking, then never installed anything other than the games I couldn't get going in Linux. It's funny how much faster it is without a virus scanner and firewall and all that crap

Q-collective · Post by **Q-collective** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 1:38 am

Archangel1 wrote:It's quite possible to make XP outrun a dead snail - I dual booted on my previous machine for games, and as soon as Windows was installed I disabled networking, then never installed anything other than the games I couldn't get going in Linux. It's funny how much faster it is without a virus scanner and firewall and all that crap

So, you don't multiplay?

runningwithscissors · Post by **runningwithscissors** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 5:11 am

Q-collective wrote: So, you don't multiplay?

Multiplayer is really for idiots who hone their 1337 94|\/|1n9 sk1||z0rz!!!11! for 16 hours a day.

Unless you have loads of friends to play against (look at me, I use Gentoo for fuck's sake, over a dial up connection) it isn't of much use.

I played a few halo deathmatches and only won about 4 or 5 of them.

Dralnu · Post by **Dralnu** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:23 am

runningwithscissors wrote:
Q-collective wrote: So, you don't multiplay?
Multiplayer is really for idiots who hone their 1337 94|\/|1n9 sk1||z0rz!!!11! for 16 hours a day.

Unless you have loads of friends to play against (look at me, I use Gentoo for fuck's sake, over a dial up connection) it isn't of much use.

I played a few halo deathmatches and only won about 4 or 5 of them.

Multiplay is, in many cases, there to curve the sheer lack of playability with player-killing.

Its a game comapnies way of playing M$ and overcharging for somethign crappy

coplaniuk · Post by **coplaniuk** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 4:02 pm

Dralnu wrote: Plus, I'd like to know what you consider maintaining Windows, to be honest. Basic anti-virus/spy/adware, system reg cleaner, ect, or did you actually get into the core and tweak it?

(I ask out of curiousity. I dual boot, and would like to try to get XP to outrun a dead snail if possible)

I hack at everything. I grab tweak-UI and several other tools to hack out a lot of things that I don't need. I remove a large protion of services, many of which aren't even necessary for desktop machines.

Probably the biggest improvement you can do to Windows XP is to change the Virtual Memory settings. By default, it manages automatically. Set it to manual, and set the minimum and maximum size to be the same (I'll explain). Up to 1gig, it should be 2x your RAM. 1gig+, you can usually get by with setting a size equal to your RAM. Note...it's windows...it always needs virtual memory because it sucks like that. Now...why do you set minimum and maximum to be exactly the same? Because windows spends a lot of processor time trying to determine how large the VM file should be. And when it figures it out, it needs to reallocate the VM so that it can resize the file. It really slows down program startups/shutdowns and file opening/closing. If you only give it one choice, it never resizes.

I also turn off all the frills like menu fade-in/fade-out, etc.

I've never benchmarked my results...but it is noticably faster. I'm currently running Windows XP on an 800mhz machine. Default installation ran sluggishly slow. Now it's pretty tolerable.

Dralnu · Post by **Dralnu** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 4:10 pm

coplaniuk wrote:
Dralnu wrote: Plus, I'd like to know what you consider maintaining Windows, to be honest. Basic anti-virus/spy/adware, system reg cleaner, ect, or did you actually get into the core and tweak it?

(I ask out of curiousity. I dual boot, and would like to try to get XP to outrun a dead snail if possible)
I hack at everything. I grab tweak-UI and several other tools to hack out a lot of things that I don't need. I remove a large protion of services, many of which aren't even necessary for desktop machines.

Probably the biggest improvement you can do to Windows XP is to change the Virtual Memory settings. By default, it manages automatically. Set it to manual, and set the minimum and maximum size to be the same (I'll explain). Up to 1gig, it should be 2x your RAM. 1gig+, you can usually get by with setting a size equal to your RAM. Note...it's windows...it always needs virtual memory because it sucks like that. Now...why do you set minimum and maximum to be exactly the same? Because windows spends a lot of processor time trying to determine how large the VM file should be. And when it figures it out, it needs to reallocate the VM so that it can resize the file. It really slows down program startups/shutdowns and file opening/closing. If you only give it one choice, it never resizes.

I also turn off all the frills like menu fade-in/fade-out, etc.

I've never benchmarked my results...but it is noticably faster. I'm currently running Windows XP on an 800mhz machine. Default installation ran sluggishly slow. Now it's pretty tolerable.

Alright. I'll look into that. Thanks

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