[km]

Alright who wants to just start a collection to buy DAIS a new hard drive

(seriously)
_________________

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[km]

DAIS IDE or SATA
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vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[km]

Instead of being unable to use the computer due a paralyzing fear of flipping just wrong bit, he can make backups and do a clean install and look for files at his leisure, on a hard drive he is not actively using.
_________________

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[km]

[km]

Or if you've got so many old drives laying around, dual boot. That gives you more options next time you blow up windows, at least.

I'll also expect you'll be pleasantly surprised how much better your computer runs. And having a package manager is one of the most convenient things ever. All your software is up to date, and is generally managed so that it all works together. No registry to fuck up. All of your personal files and configuration stuff are saved in one, easily backed-up place.

WINE, the windows compatibility layer, works for a lot of things, especially older software. DOSBOX works well too, for even older things. Emulation is kind of a weak point, but I have only really tried native stuff; going through WINE might work well.


Just slap Ubuntu or Linux Mint on there. Neither are perfect, but they definitely have the most polish and are best suited to first-time/most users, at least on the desktop.
_________________

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[km]

So, don't try to help DAIS because he's dumb and stupid and it's all his fault. People like him shouldn't be allow to use computers! People should spend their lives learning the ins and outs of bullshit system instead of doing things they actually want to do! Yeah!


oh ok


And if you're going to do the fucking retarded GNU/Linux thing, at least do it properly and say GNU/Xorg/Gnome/Linux or whatever. If you are claiming that Linux doesn't work without GNU, you should include the other software it needs to work too, right? Or could just drop it because it's completely a non-issue and just makes you look like an overly pedantic asshole.
_________________

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[km]

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu

You can even install it to a USB drive so that it isn't so goddamned slow, and you'll have some usable read/write space, instead of the tiny amount of slack running off read-only media like a CD gives you. Use Unetbooin to achieve this.


There is a command in linux that will do a byte-for-byte copy of stuff. It takes a while, and you'll need to hook up a hard drive that is at least as big as the one you are copying from; an external is fine. If you get the command wrong though, you can fuck shit up pretty hardcore (at least in terms of getting data back), so I don't really want to explain it until you've got the CD running and the hard drives hooked up. Once you do that, PM me or something and we can talk on AIM or whatever (there should be a client on the disc, or worst-case you can open Firefox and use Meebo or Google Chat_.

It may not be a bad idea to make TWO such backups. One for doing work on, and the other as a spare in case that one gets messed up. Or just make one backup and pull both drives out and install a new OS on a new drive.



Uhh, it looks like Kanotix hasn't been updated in over a year man...
_________________

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[km]

I tried Arch a two weeks ago and it was such a pile of shit I switched back to Gentoo. The packaging system is godawful.

Gentoo is a bitch though because nothing will integrate properly. KDE4.2 is all kind of fucked up. Considering backing up what I have in case I want it back and trying the new Fedora beta. I can't give up KMS, it rocks too hard.
_________________

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[km]

If a package isn't in their relatively small repos, you have to get some bash script some random person used and try to run that, and hope you don't need to repeat the process with too many dependancies. I tried to install the ATI drivers and then decided that this was even more stupid and obnoxious than waiting for everything to compile. I mean, if I'm going to have to sit there and compile shit, I may as well use a nice package manager to do it. I also prefer gentoo/bsd-style init. My laptop is pretty damn fast, so I don't really worry about compile times and these days I have plenty of other things to do while I wait. And I always find myself missing USE flags wherever I go.

KMS = kernel mode setting, a new feature in 2.6.29. It's one step in the not-so-gradual revamp of the linux graphics stack - the kernel handles resolution changing and a lot more of the memory management. Anything that makes X suck less and gives me a native-res framebuffer console with improved VT switch behavior for pretty much free is a must-have to me. The only pre-packaged distro that I know that uses it is the Fedora beta.


Honestly, I find myself just sitting at the console more often than not now. With a native res fbcon and screen, the only thing I've used X for recently is Wireshark.

I think KDE is a cool project and is trying to do a lot of great things for the linux desktop, but it's not there and not actually suited to getting any real work done yet. I'm sort of working my way up to becoming a contributor to the project.
_________________

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[km]

Setting up your own kernel on arch isn't any different than on Gentoo. The first config usually takes a bit of work, but there are very few options that break everything. As far as drivers go, just compile things that might be useful as modules and then pare down the list of what you compile, if you care. Make sure you add your new kernel to GRUB (/boot/grub/menu.lst). I have an entry that just says to boot /vmlinuz without a version number so that I don't have to change it every time, though you'll want to keep a known-good kernel around as option in case you break something.

If you've got a popular netbook, it's pretty likely that someone out there has a good .config you can start from. People just sit there and tweak netbook configs endlessly, for lack of any real work to do I guess.
_________________

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[km]

shit yeah
_________________

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.