Ok! Now What!?!

RWBRWB Icrontian
edited November 2006 in Science & Tech
I am fracking physiqued! I have the next 3 days off of work, and I wanna play with Linux.

I wanna get WoW working.
I wanna watch movies, I apparently need a decoder?
And do other cool shiz! But first the above two things I need addressed and have no idea what direction I need to go.

Comments

  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    you're physiqued? I guess it's good that you have a body structure?

    For wow, check out wine.

    What you use for movies depends on your preferences. Some people like VLC.
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Yeah.... I couldn't spell it and FF2 decided that's what I meant :P

    I do have one complaint, the Internet seems SLOW and sluggish all around. Hell, I can't even get to the Add ons site for FF 99% of the time.
  • LincLinc Owner Detroit Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Why Gaming Sucks on Linux (with link in first line about WoW on Linux)
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    OK How do I know everything is installed? The system seems a tad bit sluggish in some ways... reminds me of Vista.
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Holy crap... at least my laptops multimedia keys all work...
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    What desktop environment are you using? KDE seems to take up more resources than GNOME, but both are orders of magnitude heavier than something like Xfce.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    I am using GNOME, there are others besides KDE?
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Xfce is the other common full Desktop Environment. You can also switch up which window manager you have installed for GNOME or KDE and choose a lighter one or try removing some of the widgets you have installed.

    Wikipedia has a decent comparison of GNOME, KDE, and Xfce that shows what the common default applications are. I use GNOME for my Desktop Environment and Metacity for my Window Manager because I am lazy and boring, but lots of people run GNOME/Enlightenment because Enlightenment is pretty. My old Pentium machine ran GNOME/IceWM because of its low system requirements. One of my HTPCs used to run KDE/EvilWM but I really can't reccommend EvilWM for regular desktop usage. If you are 1337er than I am and think that NeXTStep was the best OS ever you can use WindowMaker with either KDE or GNOME.

    You don't _need_ a Desktop Environment since you can roll most of the required utilities together from individual packages but using one is convenient since all of the bundled software works well together.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    I don't think Linux is for me... if they came out with WoW for Linux, I'll come back.. but as it stands I might be able to get it running, but a patch is all it takes for WoW to stop working.

    Although I am gonna continue to learn it, I am gonna try getting Fedora to run on my desktop as a server to learn the OS, I did buy a book on it after all and need it for work :P But man it's just not a practical OS. Plus for some reason web pages were loading SLOW at times, but downloads were coming in just fine.
  • jhenryjhenry California's Wine Country
    edited November 2006
    Correction: it's not practical for you.

    There are a lot of us who find it much more practical than OS X or Windows, for a particular task. There is no one superOS(TM) that excels at anything and everything.

    Personally, I find it much more practical as a coding / development environment since my music files and music videos won't play and hence will not distract me. Also, I find that my downloads are a bit faster on Linux (personal, subjective experience). It's also a lot easier to configure to my tastes, and it's just better for some things. For playing around, viewing "videos", and playing video games, Windows is more practical. Plus, Office 2003 is great IMO; OOo just doesn't vibe right with me,
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Linux isn't practical for everyone or every application. It's common sense to use the best tool for the task at hand and if Linux isn't the tool for you, don't use it.

    I don't know what jhenry is talking about though:D, my movies and music play juuuust fine. Also, I found that I like OOo an order of magnitude more than I like MS Office. Microsoft doesn't even include a decent vector graphics package and OOo can export straight to PDF without messing with Acrobat or PDF printers. Tables and bulleted lists in OOo Writer are a hell of a lot smarter than their MS Office counterparts in my experience. All-around a better product I'd say. Of course, I don't have to deal with corporate deployment; I suppose IT should stick with what they're used to.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • jhenryjhenry California's Wine Country
    edited November 2006
    My m4p iTunes files don't work with AmaroK or any other player I've tried including mplayer... Neither do my WMV music videos...

    Sure, the direct export to PDF is great, but OOo just takes so long to load it drives me nuts. If they improve speed, then I'll use OOo solely except for some school Excel programs.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Solution: don't use proprietary DRM formats. What computer do you have? OOo loads snappily on my 1.3GHz Celeron w/ 512MB PC100.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • jhenryjhenry California's Wine Country
    edited November 2006
    Solution: don't use proprietary DRM formats.

    Ah yes, the answer to all ails... :honoes:

    It's a Celeron 2.7 on an Intel Mobile chipset... and OOo lags like hell.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Netburst is evil, Netburst Celerons even more so. At least my Celeron has a Tualatin core and the same cache as a Coppermine.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • TheSmJTheSmJ
    edited November 2006
    If you're going to need Windows for games anyways, why not just stick with Windows all the time?

    I had my machine dual booting Windows and Linux long ago and found it to be a much bigger PITA than its worth. Every time you want to play a game you'll first need to reboot the computer, wait for Windows to load, etc, and then reboot again and load Linux. Why not just stick with one OS in the first place?

    I can see it being useful if theres one or two apps that you just can't live without, but even then it'd be far easier to run it in a virtual environment within your primary OS.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Excellent points TheSMJ. Realistically, your choice of platform is determined by the softwares you want to run. Gamers should use Windows until such a time that at least EA and Blizzard start releasing for Linux. If you only play Epic and Id games you have a choice but everyone else should stick to what they know. If Windows works for you and you like it then by all means stick with it because it's the right tool for your job. I have found that I detest dual-booting because it is a PITA. After I realized I hadn't booted into Windows in 8 months on my desktop I simply formatted my Windows partition.

    I honestly don't game that much anymore. I would like to, but being an engineering major means I don't have a whole lot of spare time. I do most of my gaming on my console these days anyway and barely have enough time for a new game every few months or so.

    Virtual environments are another PITA all their own though. I have had real trouble getting Cygwin to work and their documentation was totally unhelpful. I've had better success with MinGW but it doesn't implement a full POSIX layer so many applications still don't work. At least on the Linux side I have a non-zero success rate with WINE.

    I honestly don't see a reason why OS choice has to be an either-or proposition though. I own more than one computer, therefore I can have a few Windows boxes and a few Linux boxes. As a matter of fact, two out of the three computers I have with me at college run Windows though it is the Linux machine I use the most.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    I started Linux because of server uses, and that's what I'll be working on today when I get my book in for setting up LAMP. I need that experience, as for my main system which is my laptop, it'll be Windows from now on.
  • hypermoodhypermood Smyrna, GA New
    edited November 2006
    QEMU does a pretty good job at virtualization for free. You can run linux in a window from within XP. It can actually be easier to setup if you have new hardware because it provides "standard" emulated hardware. It is great for comparing different distros side by side.
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