CNN Breaking News
– A worm shut down computers running Windows 2000 software across the United States.
you sure know how to stir it, Dale
Here ya go, Dale:
(I figured you’d want a big Mac…)
yep! that’s one of the problems…
Problems? I LOVE the choice!
I advise newbies to try mepis. You can even use it while you install! Software installation with synaptic is super easy too. Click on the software you want, hit apply, and voila!
I use mepis on my “It just works” laptop.
My desktp PC seems to get a new distro every week! But I keep slackware on constantly. (Multiple distros)
People- you can run Window$ AND Linux on the same machine. Just a selection at startup!
I am usuing Windows right now and not having any problems.
I’ve played with linux from time to time, the last couple of times using run from a cd distros. Knopix and…the other escapes me (dynabolix?). I keep running into a bug which affects typing. One letter or number being substituted for another. Then another will go haywire, until after a little while, the keyboard gets to be useless.
I have never had a failure running windows XP Home. However I use up to date spy and virus software. There are few viruses written for Apple because the target is so small.
Ron
Do you have a non US keyboard?
In general I’d agree. I’m fed up with my iBook G3 at the moment. It’s been painfully sluggish for several weeks now. Not the broadband speed, that’s ok. It’s doing anything else–mouse response, program launching, scrolling–ouch, ouch, ouch–and Firefox keeps crashing.
This one is reaching it’s 4-5 year planned obsolescence at age 2.
Wait- Firefox on a mac?
That would, of course, be Firefox for Mac! Has worked great until recently.
I havent kept up with macs 
Didn’t know firefox was released for powerPC archetecture!
Try linux on your Ibook. Less “just works” But I find linux very simple, even though it is complicated. It just makes sense! Reliable too! If it works, it works, and wrks, and works 
Seeing Erikthepiper mention “mepis” several times, I spent a few minutes looking into this and was reminded of why Windows continues to be more or less the default OS. Before I go further, I should point out that I’ve owned computers since 1982. I have four at home and more or less take care of three or more at the office. I have several websites. I know a lot more about computers than all four of my professional partners, three of which are PhDs and one an MD.
I had no idea what mepis is. So, I go to the website and…after looking around a bit, I realize it’s a version of Linux. I made a couple of attempts to try out Linux a few years ago and just couldn’t see the charm. So, I click on the download part of the mepis.org website, and there’s a list of mirror sites for download. ( Now, I know what a mirror site is, but a whole lot of computer users don’t.) Each mirror has a list of, oh, 6 to 20 different possibilities for things to download and no indication of how to proceed. None appear to be the familiar .exe or .zip files. Going back to the website, I find this under “How-tos”
- How to Boot at a Different Display Resolution
- How to Boot with a Different Keyboard
- How to Burn a CD from ISO
- How to Resize an XP Partition
- How to Use Boot Arguments to Fix Problems
- Howto Rescue Data From an Unbootable Windows PC.
- Installation Tips
- Troubleshooting CD Read Errors
Ok. So, how do I install this? I don’t even know what to click on.
Over on the left side of the site there’s this list:
- Apt-get Pools
- ISOs
- Kernel
- Other
What the hell is this?
My point is: I probably know more about computers than 95% of the population and I have no idea what any of this means.
This Linux thing will never get anywhere until these geeks learn to speak English. It will continue to be what it has always been…probably a really good option for the tiny fraction of people who speak CompGeek.
No offense to Erik, by the way, who is obviously trying to be helpful.
And before I end this rant, the only thing that really bugs me about the “get a mac” mantra that one always hears, is that the Mac people know very well that the reason they’re relatively safe and problem free, at least when in comes to security issues (viruses and such) is that there still a minority OS and the virus writers don’t bother. If everyone went to Mac tonight, a year from now people will be saying, get Windows Longhorn, or whatever they’re calling it. Macs would be the targets now if they had Windows’ marketshare.
Dale
Ubuntu, marketed as “Linux for Human Beings” is, in my opinion, a fantastic choice for those wanting to try out linux. You can download it free from their website or they will send you a free copy on CD (shipping and handling is free as well). They send out two CDs. One is an installation CD and the other allows you to boot and run Ubuntu directly from the CD, so you can try it out without installing it on your system. Installation is easy as pie and it’s easy to use as well. Ubuntu bills itself as “Linux for Human Beings” Get it at http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Even if you aren’t using Linux and don’t want to you should definately consider using OpenOffice, the free opensource productivity suite for Windows, Mac and Linux. I just started using it about a month ago and I think, for almost all purposes, it is much better than MS Office. The layout is very easy to use and will be familiar to MS Office users. The programs are at least as powerful, if not more so, than MS Office. It outputs to and reads more file types (including handling Adobe PDF files beautifully). It uses far fewer resources than MS Office. It’s really simply superb. Get it at http://www.openoffice.org . Of course, Ubuntu comes preloaded with OpenOffice and lots of other great software.
Peace,
Chris
The iBook G3s are pretty awful…mine only lasted a year and a half. I replaced it with a PowerBook G4, which is much better but still has problems (it came with the infamous non-closing screen latch, and the right half of the screen has started to become darker than the left).
In general, my experience with Macs has been that the software is great, the design of the hardware is great, but quality control is spotty. I’ve owned six of them since the 1980s and each one developed hardware problems fairly early on in its life, or had them from day 1. The first generation of the newest flat-screen G5 iMacs had a 40 percent failure rate, according to surveys I’ve seen. That’s not good.
But I still love Macs, it’s irrational but there you go.
My G5 at home has had it’s fair share of hardware glitches, but honestly, I’d rather deal with that than the software garbage that you have to deal with on a PC (that was one of the reasons why I switched to Mac, that and the photo editing software for mac is better). Hardware problems are something I can correct on my own, but I’m sure no computer programmer. I’ve owned several PCs and only two macs, but to be totally honest, my top o’ the line HPs (desktop and one laptop, 2 years old, pre compaq) failed as often as my G3 and G5.
What Dale said!
I’m also an old computer user. I started out with a Atari 800 machine (with 64kb of memory and two floppy drives), and word processing software that consisted of a horror called WordStar and a spreadsheet program named Visicalc. I’ve lived through and had to master every miserable version of DOS and Windows since the stone age.
I would love to see Linux and the open license community offer a viable alternative to Microsoft. But sadly, as Dale says, until the geeks stop geeking and begin to speak english, it just isn’t worth the pain to relearn everything again. At this stage of the evolution of computer technology you would think that someone in the Linux community would understand this.