[boogalooper]

Maybe there has already been one of these, but searching for Ubuntu or Linux is breaking the search function for me, so here we go! OS Nerdlinger thread... engage

Vista totalled my computer for the second time in three months a few days ago. Just shutting-down-with-updates like normal, go to power it back on the next day and it BSoDs on me. BSoDs on me in safe mode, in recovery mode, in everything. Searching for a way to fix it without losing my 150gigs of unimportant data, I read that popping some ram out and getting it to under 4gigs of ram can solve the problem; it doesn't. However, now it not only BSoD's on startup, but it freezes up when attempting a fresh install of vista!

So, in a desperate attempt to get anything working on my 6 month old laptop, I whip out an Ubuntu 8.10 cd, and hey, look at that, it installs without a hitch after I killdisk my harddrive. I figure I will bum around on it for a few days while get a new Vista dvd downloaded.

But hell, after using it for a few days and getting over that initial terror of seeing a new OS in front of me, I actually really like it! It seems to alleviate my biggest problem of vista, in that it gets rid of a lot of the bloat; Skype for linux, for example, is a paired-down, non-flashy contact list, instead of the 8-tab monstrosity its become in windows. There are other examples too! Using the terminal for stuff brings me back to the old days. Installation of new programs is clean and easy and - best of all - uniform. The dual-desktop thing is getting used far more than I thought it was.

I haven't used it enough to really break the OS yet, but it seems to be holding up pretty well. I like what I am seeing, so far anyways. I also like that the online support community is incredibly vast. So far I haven't had a problem, driver or otherwise, that hasn't been solved exactly within minutes thanks to a google search. Their (perceived?) holier-than-thou attitude when it comes to Windows and Macs kind of bugs the shit out of me, though they make up for it with generally being extremely polite and helpful to newcomers.

I might still head back to windows eventually. It's only a laptop, so I wasn't really gaming on it at all, but sooner or later I am going to get the itch to play Sins of a Solar Empire or GalCiv2 again and then its only a few beers away from a fresh install of vista. Also it sucks because XP isn't really an option due to having an SATA harddrive.

Any other Linux-based OS users in here? Any decent sources of info a new Ubuntu user might like to see? Any horror stories? I'll admit I was bummed when using it wasn't exactly like Lex locking the doors in Jurrasic Park.

PS hey guys I'm not a bot its me luckystrike
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[boogalooper]

Dual-booting with a small xp partition for my minor computer gaming needs seems like it might be pretty decent. Is there any way to use Ubuntu to get around the sata-driver problem in installing xp? Also, is it possible to create a second partition through the xp install process without killing my current Ubuntu install or am I going to have to start the whole thing over from scratch? I imagine it would be possible.

Also, any popular abandonware/older games out there that you know have been ported to Linux? I wonder if anyone has gone through the trouble of porting, say, fallout or something similar.
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[boogalooper]

I've used wine to run utorrent, but that's about it. Seems to work alright, but that is a pretty simple program to mess with. Does wine often suffer from any sort of lag or run things slower than they would run natively on Windows? There's no way it's going to run Sins of a Solar Empire, is there?

I've done the XP install on this very computer using nLite in the past, but at the time there werent any working sound drivers for it, so I attempted to jump ship back to Vista, but my cd drive was fried for some reason. It was the day after I bought the laptop so I took it back to Best Buy and got a new one. Haven't tried it again yet, but i might give it a shot. Or I might just do virtualbox. Or I'll stick with wine!

If I can get this beast to run old games/emulators, hell. I might never go back until I build a desktop and install XP or maybe Windows7 on it if its any good.
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[boogalooper]

[boogalooper]

Here's a nickel kid, buy a better computer
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