"Easy" way to remove MFC-dependence AND port to Linux?!

[Uatu]

Really?! Chee... Almost everything you can do in linux seems to require su... (The Helix version of Ubuntu, installed to HD, seemed to su/sudo fine.)

[manikus]

Well, I might be remembering wrong. I am seriously lacking in the sleep department and that does tend to effect my memory as well as my processing skills.

Okay, you're totally right. Apparently I had disabled root (on purpose as I recall), so of course it wouldn't let me 'su'. I'm such an idiot sometimes.

I'm having real trouble with my main box, so I've decided to make the switch to linux a lot quicker than I had planned, like probably this morning.

I'm going to use a distro called 'aloofix'. It is is super lightweight - only 45 MB installed. I will then run VMWare on top of it, so I will still have a Windows install (in addition to Server 2003), I will just be able to manage it a lot better and filter my internet connection through linux before running it into windows. Plus, anything goes wrong with Windows, just reload.

[Uatu]

VMWare - did you buy VMWare? Or is there a free Linux version floating around?

I still like my Windows machine, and can't give it up just yet

[manikus]

VMWare came to me through Ubuntu. It has a client version preloaded. Though I've used the server version for Windows quite extensively running a virtual 5 server LAN for 3 months. I also have used Microsoft's Virtual PC running a server an client for a couple of months. VMWare is very good and easy to manage, Virtual PC is okay for servers and pretty good for clients, but only if they're Windows. You can run some linux distros in VPC but not officially, and you can't run it on linux.

When I first started using VMWare through Ubuntu, I registered with them and all that good stuff and after a month got an offer from them to try the server software for free, which I ignored and then like a month they sent me a link to to the full version for free. I didn't ask for it, they just did it. I hope they do it again. If not, I can get it from school.

[Uatu]

Ha ha, I see... Very generous of them (and in line with the Linux GNU philosophy!)...

[Arminius]

Originally Posted by manikus While Helix is cool, I and my instructor don't think it's the best choice to be using as a regular OS for a home user. His recomendations were if you want to ease away from the Microsoft apron strings, try Ubuntu, but if you want to use the best linux that you can get without compiling a version yourself, to try Red Hat/fedora/CentOS.

From my experience so far trying different distros out I believe your instructor is right. If you are installing to the HD and making it your primary OS you definitely want one that you compiled yourself. Compiled on the same system you plan to boot and run it from. Because then it is basically adapted or customized to fit your system specs perfectly.

Out of those three best you recommended manikus which one would you say is the most intuitive for someone accustumed to Windows but also very familiar with DOS and command line utils and operations? Which one lends itself the most to understanding for someone who has mastered x86 OS's but is quite new to Linux?

I think it would be cool if something like FreeDos were to develop their OS to the point that it could do everything leading 32bit OS's can do. Or if there were a DOS interface for Linux that allowed me to use DOS commands and have them translate to Linux commands behind the scenes and have the command line shell show DOS style file management and DOS style paths instead of that confusing Unix gibberish.

BTW: I had Ubuntu installed on a separate partition for a while and was using it as my primary OS while I experimented with installing different customized XP installations on my NTFS partitions.

I was having a big time until the MBR on my Linux partitions got messed up and I could no longer access it. I couldn't even get partition magic or any other partitioner to work with it or repair it or even delete it.

I ended up doing it from DOS with an old DOS version of Partition Magic. DOS is definately my choice of OS, always was and always will be. But I guess times have changed and I just have to accept it. DOS is obsolete as a primary OS. But at least I can still boot to DOS 7.1 from USB or a separate partition and play my old DOS games in it or write a small program in QBASIC just for fun. Or I could load up the old WWIV bbs software and play around with that.

Anyway, by then I had found the perfect minimalist XP distro for me and had it set up already on my NTFS partitions when the Linux partitions died so I just reclaimed the space I had given to Linux and created a bunch of NTFS partitions to use as storage and organization of game materials like graphics, sounds, intaller packages, archives, etc.

I will probably still go back to Linux eventually but right now I would rather spend the time working on DC stuff and other projects than learning a new OS. I need productivity more than anything right now. And with my new super fast super small version of XP [mostly using non-microsoft utils: agent ransack instead of indexing/ms file search for example] and my custom partition scheme I have just what I need to achieve that.

[manikus]

Red Hat is an enterprise OS - there's a corporation behind it so it works very, very well. But, it's not free. (I got it from a book that I mentioned earlier in the thread - Mark Sorbel's Practical Guide to Red Hat.) Fedora is the early but stable beta of Red Hat. It is free but will have some bugs But, it will also have features that Red Hat doesn't.
And then there is CentOS. This is the one that I recommend. CentOS = Red Hat - proprietary images.
CentOS is great and a new distro typically comes out 3 to 6 months after a new Red Hat distro. And, of course, CentOS is free. A nice advantage to this one is that all of the literature for Red Hat works exactly the same, and there are a lot of good books and tuts, how-tos, etc for Red Hat.

Unlike Windows, you don't need a GUI for linux. Everything can be done with the CLI.
Anything you can do in Dos, you can do in linux. Seriously. I'm sure I mentioned this before, but in the beginning, there was the almighty UNIX, and all was good. But, then someone wanted to make money by controlling access to the code, so they were hired by IBM to create a proprietary operating system. This was Bill Gates and his little start-up called MicroSoft. He would take the UNIX and backwards engineer some of it and emulate other bits, but ignore lots of it. He would change slightly some of the command names to keep from being sued by AT&T. Eventually, Steve Jobs little company called Apple would introduce a GUI built on top of the CLI in such a way that the user never need look at the CLI again. Then for years MicroSoft and Apple war over who can do what with the GUI and eventually claiming to be very different, we arrive at the present day with GUIs that are 99% the same in their functionality.
Meanwhile, a couple of decades earlier, a young man by the name of Linus Torvald, takes a look at the now open-sourced UNIX and writes his own kernel and calls it linux. He also open sources and future users will recreate the GUI of MicroSoft and Apple, but will also continue to develop the CLI to be more like UNIX.
So, there you have it. If you install CentOS, you can choose to do it in 'text mode' and always work in a command line environment.
As for the directory stucture of linux, it's the same as UNIX. Really the only difference from MS is that it's a logical anchored system (root) versus a physical anchored system (c. That and it uses slashes that go the other way.

[Uatu]

If I was as smart as Linus (and about his age), I could have called it Edix!

[manikus]

Linus Torvald is just a little older than I am, but I wager a lot smarter.

He's from Finland, but now lives in Portland, OR, USA. Coincidentally, so do I.

I think when I present my capstone in a couple of months, I will invite him to come.

Incidentally, if I were 12 times smarter and I had created linux, it would have sounded silly - erix.

[Uatu]

Ha ha... Edix sounds kind of silly, too (then people would say, "Oh, you're that famous - Edie guy!).

Perhaps it was for the best that Linus made Linux...

Ah, from Lapland, eh? He must have magicked his system then!