Please recommend a "Windows like" UNIX flavour

[meow2222]

Mint's popular. Avlinux is good. I really cant recommend centos.

The one remaining hardware issue area with linux is webcams. Use a driverless (is it UVC?) webcam and youre on safe ground. Such kit is extremely cheap.

Try what you fancy by booting from the dvd, it runs live. Its slow that way, but you get to check youre ok with it before installing.

Linuxes generally have some big upsides. Pick one with every app you want already installed, as adding apps later doesnt seem to go as smoothly or easily as with windows. Desktop linuxes generally come with everything you want and far more already setup.

NT

[Tim Watts]

On Monday 03 February 2014 18:04 [e-mail] wrote in uk.d-i-y:

God no, not for a desktop!

[news]

Re Mint Maya - Printer/scanner support is very good - answer is to run it from a CD and try it (could probably research it but just as easy to try it from CD) As for old windows software that's a much different story. I couldn't get Winamp to work (replaced by other Unix pod-casters), I doubt that you would get turnpike to work BICBW. Much to my amazement Quicken 2004 ran under WINE with no issues at all.....

[Bod]

I duel boot with *Zorin*, it's one of Linux's latest distros and is probably the nearest thing to a Windows system. After the install, it found all of the drivers automatically. I've even installed Microsoft Office 2007 on it, using a program called Wine, Wine is included in the Linux install. A very good system.

[The Natural Philosopher]

MAY do. scanner support is patchy.

Printers are mostly very good.

photo reader,

almost certainly

Turnpike, up to 5 use WINE, version 6 apparently not

accounting stuff,

depends on what it is. If simple should work under WINE.

Or leave XP in a virtual box for the windows stuff you 'cant do without'

yes

when running well, leave well alone...

[The Natural Philosopher]

Most of us keep XP or similar in a sandbox virtual machine where it cant catch diseases and only takes about 5 seconds to load up from 'suspended' state.

You need to move any data to the linux side of thngs if you want to access it from Linux though. Windows can 'see' the linux system but not vice versa.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You have to be joking right?

select application click, wait, its there?

Doesnt work for you? select, click, its gone.

Desktop linuxes generally come

And adding the rest is trivial on the Synaptic system and even easier with Mint via the program manager.

[Andrew Mawson]

Well thanks to the suggestions here I now have Linux Mint16 blown on a DVD, and the aforesaid system booted and running - so that bit was painless. It found it's way out onto the web so with the built in Firefox I can browse away merrily :)

Also amazingly it had no difficulty getting the in built sound system (This machine I'm talking about is an HP DC7600 small form factor) working, which I never succeeded in doing under Win 7 .

SO.... how feasible is it to integrate a MINT16 system into a network of various pcs running XP, through to Win 7 pro ? File sharing is the real thing, not applications

Many thanks to all who responded so quickly

Andrew

[Mal]

PcLinuxOS. Very easy transition. Not bleeding edge or sexy but does most things easily

[Bernard Peek]

Being Linux there are multiple different options depending on precisely what you want to do. If you only want the same options that you would have with an XP box then it's pretty easy.

Start the file manager (Nemo.)

If you want to see other machines on your network select Network from the Go menu. If you want other machines to see your Mint system then right-click on a folder and select Sharing Options.

[Adrian Brentnall]

HI Sounds interesting - What's involved in setting this up ? I've got a desktop and a laptop - both running XP Pro, but without the original install disks (desktop was by Dell, and their 'install' partition disappeared several hard drives ago - laptop came with an OEM WinXP on it, also without disks.)

How does it work in practise ? A fair bit of the computing work here is web design, so (for instance) an image that came in via an email (Thunderbird, presumably under linux) would need to find its way into PaintShopPro (running on the XP Virtual machine) and then into WYSIWYG (Windows-based web design program). Is this possible - or does it involve major fiddling ??

Thanks Adrian

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not trivial but not hard either.

SAMBA is the server that 'exports' drives to windows and 'cifs' is teh client but I am sure the clients already exist in the gui-sphere so you can browse for windows machines and mount drives easily.

I would imagine you can export drives too.

I use NFS so I never did that. Linux mint forums are excellent on this kind of thing

[gremlin_95]

This would be good. I have been a Macbook user since 2009, whilst I like it more than Windows I would much prefer something more flexible; both hardware and software wise. With this in mind, I am planning on building my own PC when I finish studying this term and running something other than Windows on it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I am not sure about cloning an installation into a VM

This may help

Looks a step away from trivial, but provided you have a little knowledge shouldwork OK.

screen/keyboard is slower but otherwise almost seamless.

I do it all the time switching between the gimp (linux) and email (linux) and corel draw and corel paint (XP) and Rhino 3D (Xp)

The linux box files system appears as a windows share.

[The Natural Philosopher]

The problem is that actually doing a 'default install' is bloody trivial.

And is well covered by You tube videos and the manual on the Mint site.

Where you need help is when you step off the broad forest path into the undergrowth...and that is different for everybody.

[Adrian Brentnall]

Hmmm.... does look a bit complicated! The particular problem I had with the web design software was that 'almost everything' worked (having done the playonunix / wine thing). The little bit that didn't work was that any text box that you created (the program is a kind of dtp approach to web design) was only 1 pixel high - which kind of made it unusable. Works fine on Windows, of course....

There seems to be a particular piece missing from the jigsaw - and, if/when I have time I may go looking for it again (think it's a missing-and-needed dll) - but the author of the program, not unreasonably, says 'It works under Windows' - and that's as far as he's wanting to go...

Frustratingly close!

Ah, OK.. - thanks, I see

If only I could make that final link & get the software running under Wine... - but buying two copies of Windows XP (one for each machine) to install on a virtual machine isn't really 'on'

Thanks

[Huge]

Piece of piss. Linux can mount Windows shares. Windows can mount Linux shares. I do it both ways round. Hell, my Linux box can mount the filesystem on my Blackberry Z10, using SMB (Windows protocol) and

*neither* of them are Windows ...

[Adrian C]

Hmmm... Will MS bother going after folks using pirate versions of XP post abandonment?

OTOH, legitimate XP install CDs and keys will be ten a penny soon, one careful previous owner etc...

[The Natural Philosopher]

Buy? don't do that. dozens of ahem free copies around as long as you don't want updates..or simply clone your existing system as above

It really doesn't look that hard.

First merge IDEs on existing system. then clone the disk, and remove a couple of DLLS if necessary,. Then tell vbox to use the disk image

[Mark]

+1 that's what i have been using since 2007 I just prefer the Xfce gui to gnome -