Linux

[Railroad]

I have OpenSuse 11.4 because it's free, but also because it's solid as a rock. What used to be "open office" is now "libre office," and every time these wonderful open-source folks crank out a new product, things just get better. Your thoughts? I hope to never return to Microsoft. Your opinion?

 

[aps45819]

pretty sure Open Office is still Open Office

OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

 

[Railroad]

pretty sure Open Office is still Open Office

OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

Whatever we choose to call it, I love it. And yes, LibreOffice comes with OpenSuse, thus following the latest release of the OS, but I think that it elegantly integrates with multiple OSs.

 

[glhs837]

On my Ubuntu machine, its names LibreOffice, then the name of the specific app, writer, calc, etc

 

[Railroad]

On my Ubuntu machine, its names LibreOffice, then the name of the specific app, writer, calc, etc

Ain't it great? Okay, maybe I gush too much.

 

[jrt_ms1995]

pretty sure Open Office is still Open Office

OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

Yes, OpenOffice is still OpenOffice, and LibreOffice is LibreOffice. LibreOffice came about when a group of developers, pissed about the Oracle purchase of Sun (founder and prime sponsor of OO) among other things, set up their own group, took the source code, re-packaged it, and went into competition. More or less the same, right now.

OpenSUSE, and particularly with the KDE desktop, is a little slow on my laptop, but I like many of its other features. And I can't seem to get BOINC running properly on it (or maybe that's another distribution?).

 

[ftcret]

I have OpenSuse 11.4 because it's free, but also because it's solid as a rock. What used to be "open office" is now "libre office," and every time these wonderful open-source folks crank out a new product, things just get better. Your thoughts? I hope to never return to Microsoft. Your opinion?

You are a geek...

 

[David]

I have OpenSuse 11.4 because it's free, but also because it's solid as a rock. What used to be "open office" is now "libre office," and every time these wonderful open-source folks crank out a new product, things just get better. Your thoughts? I hope to never return to Microsoft. Your opinion?

I used to have Fedora on my office workstations because our servers were running RedHat. We eventually moved to RHE on the servers and I became less than impressed with the constant install errors/issues I had with Fedora, especially on laptops.

Getting sick of wasting a lot of time, I downloaded and tried all of the major free Linuxes after doing some net research to see which were the most popular.

I ended up with Ubuntu. Love it! Easy to install and configure. Even a normal windows person could use it. Their latest version will even install Ubuntu over windows as a dual-boot system. No more messing around with loaders, etc...

Their web site and online docs are also wonderful.

 

[merc669]

I am running latest of Ubunto on a external drive with my laptop. All is great except when heavy graphics are used. Then the transfer speed from USB back to computer slows things down and the Video goes flaky. Otherwise its great. I do have one issue. I was used to switching from "X" to a full screen Command Terminal (F1 thru F6) and back to "X" on F7. When I try that all I get is a black or burnt looking screen, no cursor, will not Accept commands, nothing. When I go back to "X" with F7 then is all normal and back to the desktop. Tired most of the other Forums with no luck. So its either Ubunto or something in my config. Ubunto uses a different config than the rest as far as setups it appears and location thereof. Anyways, other than that I like Linux but may try Suse. But I want to put it on an internal drive and keep my Win7. Are there issues with GRUB doing it this way?

Bill....

 

[jrt_ms1995]

I am running latest of Ubunto on a external drive with my laptop. All is great except when heavy graphics are used. Then the transfer speed from USB back to computer slows things down and the Video goes flaky. Otherwise its great. I do have one issue. I was used to switching from "X" to a full screen Command Terminal (F1 thru F6) and back to "X" on F7. When I try that all I get is a black or burnt looking screen, no cursor, will not Accept commands, nothing. When I go back to "X" with F7 then is all normal and back to the desktop. Tired most of the other Forums with no luck. So its either Ubunto or something in my config. Ubunto uses a different config than the rest as far as setups it appears and location thereof. Anyways, other than that I like Linux but may try Suse. But I want to put it on an internal drive and keep my Win7. Are there issues with GRUB doing it this way?

Bill....

There are some issues; GRUB will overwrite the Windows boot loader in the master boot record on the disk, then, if you decide to get rid of the Linux installation and simply delete everything or reformat that drive partition, you'll be unable to boot Windows (until you restore the Windows boot loader to the MBR, which can sometimes be troublesome.) Now, if you install an additional hard drive, install Linux (and GRUB) to that, then just change the disk boot order (to the Linux drive first) in your BIOS, you can boot Linux or Windows from GRUB, your Windows disk's MBR is unaffected, and you can simply pull or reformat the Linux drive and go straight back to Windows unimpeded.

Sorry, I didn't write that very well, but you should get the idea. Boot loaders can be a PITA and are much less intuitive than they could be.

 

[merc669]

There are some issues; GRUB will overwrite the Windows boot loader in the master boot record on the disk, then, if you decide to get rid of the Linux installation and simply delete everything or reformat that drive partition, you'll be unable to boot Windows (until you restore the Windows boot loader to the MBR, which can sometimes be troublesome.) Now, if you install an additional hard drive, install Linux (and GRUB) to that, then just change the disk boot order (to the Linux drive first) in your BIOS, you can boot Linux or Windows from GRUB, your Windows disk's MBR is unaffected, and you can simply pull or reformat the Linux drive and go straight back to Windows unimpeded.

Sorry, I didn't write that very well, but you should get the idea. Boot loaders can be a PITA and are much less intuitive than they could be.

Understand completely. GRUB installed itself onto the external drive as I found from directions on another. I changed BIOS to boot from USB Device first. When it booted it started at GRUB. It showed Ubunto First but also show my Win7 on Another drive. So I could boot either way from the external drive Ubunto or Windows. Was not bad. But do see the advantages of doing this this way vice having it ruin current boot loaded on main drive.

 

[Mongo53]

I experimented with some of the Linux Distro's but never had time to really learn Linux, I barely got them running using written step by step instructions.

I tried Ubuntu, and that was the easiest of the few I tried by far. I does install and works as easy as windows, "for Windows Users".

Problem was, I wanted to run a home server, and even Ubuntu needed enough Linux Knowledge that I couldn't figure out the things I wanted to do to setup what I wanted on a server.

I got beta copies of windows home server, when the betas were up, I saw Windows Home Server v2 on sale for $50, I bought it and couldn't be happier.

I'm sure Linux has lots of other advantages, but, I just couldn't pick up on it and learn in the amount of time I had.

 

[CAE]

I have OpenSuse 11.4 because it's free, but also because it's solid as a rock. What used to be "open office" is now "libre office," and every time these wonderful open-source folks crank out a new product, things just get better. Your thoughts? I hope to never return to Microsoft. Your opinion?

I've been a Linux fan for over 10 years (I remember downloading 20+ 1.44mb floppies to install Slackware in the early 90's). As of about 6 months ago, I'm totally Microsoft-free at home and love it! I run Fedora on most machines, and the kids are on Ubuntu since it's a little more friendly (XUbuntu in the kitchen just recently!).

While I use LibreOffice (nee OpenOffice) daily, I'm not overly impressed with its ability to interchange documents with MS Word that have even moderately complex formatting. If you keep things to yourself it's just fine. If you do tables, odd formatting, etc. and have to exchange with a Word user, it can get a little flaky. Powerpoint doesn't do any better. I do run a Win7 VM under VirtualBox for times like this (at work), so I guess I'm not totally MS-free.

Other than that, I don't have a single complaint. For serving up media it's great. Doing backups of all my machines is a snap. I even upgraded my Netgear router to run DD-WRT, a Linux-based firmware that gives you a bunch more flexibility.

I encourage everyone to take an older PC that doesn't run well and put Ubuntu on it and play for a few months; chances are you'll be impressed and get your work done, all while wondering why we've sent Microsoft so much money over the decades. It *is* possible to cut the cord to Redmond!

 

[somdfunguy]

My default install on the laptops/desktops that are brought to me is now Mint. I find it easy enough for the nontechnical users to use, yet still a nice stable OS.

 

[Severa]

Currently have Fedora 16 on my netbook, along with Libreoffice. I actually have Openoffice on the two desktops in our house (Win XP on mine, Win 7 on husband's computer) For the basic stuff like kids projects, Libre/Open Office work well for us.

I've been fiddling around with Linux on and off for the past few years, have tried lots of different distributions. Ubuntu is good for starters (like David said, their online help, especially their forums? excellent) but I get bored easy and like trying out the different distributions. Distrowatch is a good place to go check out all of the distributions at a glance.

 

[CAE]

Currently have Fedora 16 on my netbook, along with Libreoffice. I actually have Openoffice on the two desktops in our house (Win XP on mine, Win 7 on husband's computer) For the basic stuff like kids projects, Libre/Open Office work well for us.

I've been fiddling around with Linux on and off for the past few years, have tried lots of different distributions. Ubuntu is good for starters (like David said, their online help, especially their forums? excellent) but I get bored easy and like trying out the different distributions. Distrowatch is a good place to go check out all of the distributions at a glance.

That's kind of how I feel... Ubuntu is so straightforward I could probably get my mom using it!

However, the new Gnome3 and Unity interface is horrible! My only complaint about Ubuntu is that it's been getting more and more bloated over the years (Gnome3 and Unity just add to the bloat). It used to be, you could take an old, useless machine and resurrect it with Ubuntu, but no more. You need a lot of horsepower, memory, and disk. I've been running Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE instead of Gnome/Unity) for a few weeks and like it. In fact, I installed XFCE on my Fedora laptop and I'm sold (I looked into it after I heard that Linus Torvalds was done with Gnome and switched to XFCE). Give XFCE a shot if you miss Gnome2.

People claim that Fedora is less stable than Red Hat, but I've never noticed.... I run Fedora on my laptop and most machines at home and it works great. At work, I can't take the chance so we run our servers on CentOS which is supposed to be the same as RH, minus the RH licensing/support.

If you have a REALLY old machine that you'd like to bring back from the dead, try Vector LInux... it's the best of the 'small' distros that I've played with (puppy, dsl, etc.). They just released v7 this week, I haven't checked it out, but v6 was a decent OS that ran well on a 10 year old laptop I had in the kitchen for ages!