StarDestroyer.Net BBS

So my parents called me and, frustrated with Microsoft's consistent attempts to screw the pooch so hard that the pooch needs therapy afterwards, have asked me to assemble a low-cost, light-duty machine for them which, all told, will let them surf the web, burn CDs and do the occasional bit of word processing.

They're already OpenOffice comfortable, so I want to see if Linux is the way to go. I've been staring at gOS since Everex slapped it into a crappy Walmart PC, but I'll be the first to admit I'm a Linux virgin, and the last thing I want to do is frustrate a pair of 70-somethings with complexity, so I'll want to set it up and hope it purrs. Bonus points if it boots up before you can make a cup of tea. And no, I can't just get a Mac, due to budget constraints.

Lastly, anyone have any comments about cedega? Apparently it lets you play just about any Windows games on a Linux machine, but I know nothing about it other than press hype.

Lastly, anyone have any comments about cedega? Apparently it lets you play just about any Windows games on a Linux machine, but I know nothing about it other than press hype.

It's a repackaged Wine, and I've found Wine to be very hit-and-miss. Some stuff works, lost of stuff has bugs, even more just won't start.

As for gOS, it was pretty user-friendly the last time I tried. The installation is a breeze and as long as you don't want to install extra software it's definitely easy enough for people without Linux experience.

I'm pretty inept with computers, and I'm finding Ubuntu 7.10 to be a breeze.

Software repositories also make finding the right program wonderfully easy.

The biggest problem is going to be the initial install, since that's where any possible hardware compatibility issues are configuration problems are going to pop up. Once you have your OS up and running, I've found it's a lot less susceptible to problems than windows, and it needs very little maintenance apart from the occasional automatic update.

However, if your parents like to install new software (like, for instance, home banking applications, which seem to be getting more popular) they may run into problems.

Not applying security updates is idiotic even w/ a firewall (if you think the risk of being attacked is high). Network apps like Firefox are frequently vulnerable to exploits and should be updated frequently (made more important as the target user isn't especially computer literate (and most people actually like to browse the web with images)). Firewalls aren't that useful since most distros turn off services by default; most exploits will be in client apps.

Frankly though, there is a significant security by obscurity component and getting hit by a Firefox exploit on Linux isn't likely either, for now.

Also, most updates tend to fix bugs and make things more stable, not less (it's not like the target user will run or do anything that depends on strictly known behavior, bugs and all). Grabbing the "newest" version also happens to be contrary to stability, since you want the bugs to have time to be ironed out.

Ubuntu 8.04 seems to have caused trouble for a lot of people wrt to sound, due to the newly added Pulseaudio, esp wrt to Java, flash, and Audacity. I've coaxed mine to work, but if you can't, just use 7.10 and update the computer a year from now when support is cut off. The Firefox 3 Beta included on Ubuntu 8.04 also seems to crash fairly often, but RC1 w/ bugfixes should be coming in the next few days or so.

You can also just use Fedora, but more user help is available for you to configure things w/ Ubuntu

Basically, if you're on call to fix things (probably won't have problems, and would save you the trouble of helping update since 8.04 is supported for 3 years), I would suggest installing Ubuntu 8.04, and using Synaptic, installing libflashsupport and flashplugin-nonfree, sun-java6-plugin (if they use Java, you'll also need to apply this workaround if they want sound in java: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=743462). nVidia drivers might need to be installed to keep things fast, might not . The rest of the stuff needed should be preinstalled by default.

I would then set up the remote desktop feature and forward port 5900 from the router if there is one to the computer in order to remotely administer the computer if there are problems. Set it so a user physically sitting at the computer has to enable it as VNC is unencrypted and there might be security issues

I wouldn't really suggest either Fedora or Ubuntu for this. Fedora's short release and support lifecycle, and limited hardware support makes it problematic, IMO, for any use other than as a development workstation, which its rather great at (and in spite of Red Hat's rather transparent protestations to the contrary, that's bascially what Fedora is *for*).

Ubuntu 8.04 is rather dramatically lame in my experience with it, and I can't in good conscience reccommend it as a n00b friendly distro.

I would suggest Mandriva or OpenSUSE. If you buy the full version of Mandriva, you get legal DVD playback, which is an added plus. OpenSUSE's rather polished GNOME implementation is considerably tamed, and behaves more like Windows than any other Linux GUI, in my opinion (including KDE). Another good option might be PCLinuxOS...i've used it before, and can definitely say its a stable and n00b-friendly system, very similiar to Mandriva. The main downside is their current primary release is over a year old, and is kind of mouldy out of the box at this point.

Ubuntu 8.04 is rather dramatically lame in my experience with it, and I can't in good conscience reccommend it as a n00b friendly distro.

7.10 is still available until the bugs are worked out. Whatever Ubuntu's faults, it's got a very active community backing it and it aims squarely for the beginner market, something that I'm not sure is the case for OpenSUSE or Mandriva.

7.10 was also deeply problematic, not only in my experience, but in the experience of my LUG. Nearly every one of our members was ticked off to it to some extent, and everyone in that group, myself excluded, is an Ubuntu/Debian enthusiast. Many of them had been using Ubuntu on the desktop but went back to Debian following 7.10.

My own experiences with 7.10 have included it being every bit as unstable as 8.04, and as an added minus, the artwork in 7.10 makes it look like a turd and peanutbutter sandwich. IMO the last good Ubuntu was 7.04, but 7.04 also started this whole dangerous declining quality trend, given that if done as an upgrade from Edgy, it caused massive breakage.

7.10 ticked me off, too, but ever since the kinks were worked out it's been running like a champ. Ubuntu's releases have become betas-in-disguise it seems, but the big problems generally disappear a few weeks after launch. Upgrade installs are a whole kettle of fish, you can pretty much expect those to break stuff.

As for UI design, I stick with XFCE; not pretty, maybe, but it gets the job done. Not that Gnome was ever that bad.

Ubuntu/Debian updates don't change version numbers, they tend to backport fixes, with a few exceptions such as Firefox (backports of actual upstream version changes are in their own repo). The security and update repos are also separate, so you can get security updates w/o bugfixes.

Bounty
Having the right hardware makes a huge difference for stability. For instance, I've had no hardware problems on my good computer (save some issues when trying to get Beryl to work after just switching to Linux a little more than a year ago). However, with my old computer, I've had nothing but problems with the video card. Ubuntu 6.06, 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10 have all had problems on that machine.

If it's to be a new machine, easiest way would be to get it preinstalled from Dell.

EDIT: Looks like those aren't sub 500$ PCs. There's the KPC, but that doesn't use Ubuntu, no optical drive and the long term viability of Foresight Linux or whatever is questionable (EDIT: Looks like it's community supported, but still not mainstream). Of course, you can always slap Ubuntu on, but that defeats the point of buying a machine w/ preinstalled Linux.

Having the right hardware makes a huge difference for stability. For instance, I've had no hardware problems on my good computer (save some issues when trying to get Beryl to work after just switching to Linux a little more than a year ago). However, with my old computer, I've had nothing but problems with the video card. Ubuntu 6.06, 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10 have all had problems on that machine.

Hardware does have a material impact on stability, but this doesn't affect all distros equally. On systems where I've had severe problems with Ubuntu, other distros are running great, hence my general low opinion of it. In fact, I've seen it run like crap on Dell laptops with it pre-installed...

Which in fact takes us to Pu-239.

EDIT: Looks like those aren't sub 500$ PCs. There's the KPC, but that doesn't use Ubuntu, no optical drive and the long term viability of Foresight Linux or whatever is questionable (EDIT: Looks like it's community supported, but still not mainstream). Of course, you can always slap Ubuntu on, but that defeats the point of buying a machine w/ preinstalled Linux.

Foresight is built using the rPath system and is quite an excellent distro. One of their leads, Ken van Dine, I've had the pleasure to meet, and I personally have the utmost confidence in the quality of that system. I don't use it myself, but IMO the rPath technology is first rate, and I will say the *people* who support Foresight Linux are exceptionally kind and civilized, and eager to help. One of the things I dislike about Ubuntu and Debian users, like you, is the incessant tendancy to take a dump on everyone else's stuff. You're the OS X users of the Linux world, but unlike OS X, you have nothing to be proud of, as the recent incident involving OpenSSH/SSL demonstrates.

There's something to be said about popularity and package availability though. Granted for Lag's purposes the availibility of obscure packages in Debian/Ubuntu . Plus every distro has had its security flaws. I'm not dumping on the technical quality of Foresight, I'm just concerned about package availability and community support.

That, and as a Ubuntu user, I have a vested interest in having as many people use it as possible, so it becomes the closest thing to a "standard" Linux distro . I'm not particularly a fan of creating yet another package format.

We already have DEB and RPM (I actually believe that RPM is the superior format compared to DEBs (and it's the official LSB format), but aptitude doesn't work well w/ it- it's easier to create .debs though). Ideally, a better course would have been to modify one of those, then again, I suppose politics would become a problem (Debian and RedHat are fairly conservative about changes, as they should be, since their target markets demand stability. Debian has been twiddling their thumbs forever about adding multiarch support).

One advantage of DEBs is that they are somewhat quasi-cross-distro compatible, since most debian based distros synchronize with Debian every now and then. The same cannot be said for RPM, which leads to inconsistency with dependency names (or at least used to).

Yes, I'll happily admit Ubuntu is somewhat technically inferior compared to other distros. I'm just not switching out of lazyness (was eyeing Fedora awhile ago), since I've been using Debian based distros exclusively ever since I dumped Linux from Scratch by the wayside in 2002 or 2003 (which was when something like apt-get was exclusive to Debian).

There's something to be said about popularity and package availability though. Granted for Lag's purposes the availibility of obscure packages in Debian/Ubuntu . Plus every distro has had its security flaws. I'm not dumping on the technical quality of Foresight, I'm just concerned about package availability and community support.

Foresight, because it uses the Conary system, has access to an extremely large number of packages. I haven't used it myself, but from what I understand, they provide a nice GUI front end to the Conary repos. As far as community support is, the Foresight community is extremely knowledgeable, pleasant and courteous...I find the Foresight IRC channel to be one of the best on Freenode.

That, and as a Ubuntu user, I have a vested interest in having as many people use it as possible, so it becomes the closest thing to a "standard" Linux distro . I'm not particularly a fan of creating yet another package format.

That's deeply problematic, from my perspective. Not everyone wants to be forced into, as Wong puts it, "goose-stepping conformity." If standardization is really desired, the use of Linux at all becomes dubious, and the use of any non-RPM distribution, especially so. If Ubuntu became the standard of Linux distributions (which currently, thankfully, it still isn't, given the continuing popularity of Red Hat), that would be horrible from my perspective.

We already have DEB and RPM (I actually believe that RPM is the superior format compared to DEBs (and it's the official LSB format), but aptitude doesn't work well w/ it- it's easier to create .debs though). Ideally, a better course would have been to modify one of those, then again, I suppose politics would become a problem (Debian and RedHat are fairly conservative about changes, as they should be, since their target markets demand stability. Debian has been twiddling their thumbs forever about adding multiarch support).

I'm not at all convinced either package format is anything close to ideal, in fact, I'm rather skeptical of the current package managers in their entirety. The Slackware approach of a .tgz that can simply be unpacked at / seems elegant in its simplicity. Kris Moore of PC BSD is also an intelligent skeptic of package management, in my opinion, although his preferred approach of instead having apps install themselves from a C program analogous to a Windows setup.exe IMO is far from ideal.

One advantage of DEBs is that they are somewhat quasi-cross-distro compatible, since most debian based distros synchronize with Debian every now and then. The same cannot be said for RPM, which leads to inconsistency with dependency names (or at least used to).

With RPMs it really depends on the package and how good a day you're having. I've installed ancient Fedora RPMs without difficulty on OpenSUSE, and LSB-compliant RPMs should in theory work everywhere...however, an OpenSUSE 10.3 RPM is unlikely to work on Fedora 7 and vice versa.

Yes, I'll happily admit Ubuntu is somewhat technically inferior compared to other distros. I'm just not switching out of lazyness (was eyeing Fedora awhile ago), since I've been using Debian based distros exclusively ever since I dumped Linux from Scratch by the wayside in 2002 or 2003 (which was when something like apt-get was exclusive to Debian).

Well I wouldn't say that Ubuntu is technically inferior due to a lack of innovation, and I will readily say that Ubuntu used to be much better, from my perspective, than it is today. I greatly enjoyed Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty, but I've had severe problems with Gutsy and Hardy. Some aspects of Ubuntu are innovative and well conceived, such as upstart, and others, such as the Ubiquity installer, are somewhat more problematic. Your continued use of it probably makes sense though unless it gets dramatically worse, since at the very least, you're in a position, being an experienced user, to deal with the breakage as it occurs.

I have to confess that I feel, in some respects, the same way about the OpenSUSE distros...Novell isn't doing proper quality control on them, in my opinion, and 10.2 and 10.3 have both had a lot of bugs. They have not been as bad as Ubuntu, from my perspective, but I've been less than a happy camper. Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, on teh other hand, has, for the most part, been a pleasure to use, and I'm really hoping that SLED 11 will be as good.

Now also, on this subject, my whining about Linux package management in this post is not just idle whining - Destructionator4 and I are working on a new system for our own use that I think will neatly solve some of the problems we're having with it (and not just on Linux).

As a final aside, I'm sorry if I flamed you excessively in my previous post, Pu-239, its just that I know the Foresight guys personally, and reacted somewhat negatively on that basis. That said, I myself have bashed many an operating system in this very forum, so I can't hold others to a higher standard than I hold myself. I get ticked off by sytems that suck, and I'm sure you get ticked off by systems that suck also (which is why we're both using Linux).