I’m a web designer and a recent Linux convert who has tried several of the large distros. This article is the
summary of my experience over the last few months. I decided to start using Linux a few months ago around the time Mandrake went to version 9 and Red Hat to version 8. With all the hype I figured I’d give it a try.Mandrake 9 was my first distro–it gave me problems with user management from the first day. It didn’t seem intuitive and I lasted about a week with it. At the recommendation of many linux users, I installed RedHat 8. I found it to be an easy transition from Windows (with the exception of networking and mounting drives). Not only that, it ran faster than XP and was more customizable.
Not one to be content with status quo, I decided to try other distros, looking for something even better.
Lycoris gave me easy networking (a HUGE plus) and found my
windows HD and mounted it by itself, but that was about all I liked about it. It tried a little too hard to look like Windows. The default software selection was pitiful and there was no way to change what was installed. Overall, it was not only not geared towards a power user, but dumbed down just enough leave me wanting enough to not use it for long. I’d still recommend it to someone who just wanted a web browsing/office distro however.
SuSE was very pretty but I found it slower than RH and it didn’t come with a lot of the software I’d grown accustomed to using with other distros, notably Gaim. Installing it via FTP was also a huge pain (I ended up having to do it twice because of some errors I made in the configuration). YAST and YAST2 seemed awkward and slow. SuSE wasn’t bad, and I can’t really put my finger on the problem, it just seemed that doing things in SuSE
always took a little longer than they should have. It lasted a few weeks, and I’ll admit, I missed its beautiful interface when it was gone.
Yoper was a HUGE disappointment. First, couldn’t even install it because it kept bringing me to a bash$ prompt… eventually, searching Google (not on Yoper.com) I found a weblog where someone said you type “yoper” at the prompt… maybe this should have been obvious, but why you have to do that, I may never know. It ran very slowly–much slower than Red Hat or Mandrake (optimized for speed?) and was by far the ugliest distro I’ve tried. The KDE theme was nice, but the colors they chose for the control panel and other aspects of the desktop were hideous, especially the horrible desktop backgrounds.
After I felt I had some experience with Linux, and and at the urging of friends, I tried Mandrake again only to find I was still unsatisfied with it. It seemed to try to look like widows too much with the tiny taskbar and it wasn’t up to par with the good looks of SuSE or the simplicity of Red Hat’s Blue Curve. The very worst part was that by now the 9.0 release was few months old and I had to download 280mb of updates for it. The size of the updates is not my complaint (you’re talking to someone who has downloaded about 15 Linux isos in the last couple months). RPMDrake was a nightmare. It was slow, and once it finally started updating RPMS, half of them failed. When one failed, it
would stop downloading the rest until you said it was ok to do so, so leaving it going all night was pointless. I had to sit there and babysit it through each of 64 downloads. Once the downloading finished I figured, well, half is better than none, but no–half (as far as RPMDrake was concerned) was none… Nothing installed. Time to breakout the RedHat cd’s again.
As a side note, During all this, I also discovered Knoppix. While this is not a Linux that is normally ‘installed,’ maybe it should be. I have very few complaints with it and have found that though it runs off a CD without even needing a hard drive, it is more functional than other full distros. Knoppix is very
easy to use and it has (in my mind) the most important software. I tried a couple other live-eval type distros. DemoLinux for one would not boot on either of my computers, maybe I am just unlucky. I tried an audio/video oriented distro, Dynebolic which wasn’t bad at all for what it tried to do. I missed having Gnome or KDE, but it seemed overall to be very functional. Suse’s live eval gives you a good idea of what SuSE is like, but is not practical for situations where you’d like to have Linux up and running in under 5 minutes. Gentoo’s Unreal Tournament CD worked like a charm, and did what it was supposed to do and not much more. No complaints there.
After going back and forth from one thing to another, I’m now on my fourth install of RH 8 and I don’t plan to change again. As far as I can tell, and from my experience so far, it is the best Linux distro out there. I have a full OS with all the software I need in under 1.5gb… try doing that with Windows XP. It’s easy
to use and updating it is a breeze. Updates always go quickly
and smootly, even Kernel updates. After searching Google,
mounting drives is almost no problem (permissions are still
somewhat confusing) Having to manually edit the fstab file, while
not overly difficult by any means, seems like a stretch… is
that considered to be usability? After messing around with
linuxconf long enough (which isn’t recommended for RedHat 8),
reading enough manuals and asking enough questions, I can
sometimes get samba up and running half right. I think it would be great if other distros would take lessons from Lycoris in this aspect.
I’m running it on a PII 450 w/ ~350mb or ram and a 3gb hd.
RedHat is responsive with the notable excepton of OpenOffice.org, and even that isn’t bad once it’s finally started. I don’t really notice a huge difference when I jump over to my 1.13ghz XP laptop. Blue Curve is great. It’s the only theme for Linux I’ve found that is not distracting, overdone or just not good looking.
Unified GNOME and KDE is fine with me… I like being able to choose between the different desktops without feeling like I’m switching OS’s entirely. KDE, in my experience is infinitely better than XP’s interface. The level to which you can customize it is amazing. I love GNOME for it’s simplicity and uniformity, I really like the default right click>new terminal option.
Maybe this should have been an intro, but better late than
never–my background is as a web designer and developer. I’m probably not quite a “power user” but I do like to get as much from as OS as possible, and don’t mind taking some time to learn how do do that. On the other hand, when I need to actually work, I want something that (to borrow a cliche) “just works.”
Just a final observation, here’s the mandatory reference to the wonderful woman in my life who is not 100% computer savvy or techie. My wife, who just wants it to work, has complained about every distro but Red Hat. what does that mean? Maybe nothing, maybe that Red Hat is easier to use… In any case, it’s the distro I’ll stick with.
About the Author:
Marcus Vorwaller. Long time web designer and recent linux convert.
and give Xandros or Libranet a whirl.
New Libranet coming out within a few weeks so
you might want to wait til then.
It seems to be rare that a “newbie” will try many distros out to find the one that suits him (I didn’t!), and that’s what makes this article so interesting. I chose SuSE because so many people were raving about version 8.0, and because some bloke on the Register would link to it everytime Windows did something stupid:
“Windows sells your children to Outer Mongolia: get SuSE linux”
The array of speed differences you found is interesting. I’ve often wondered what factors influence the speeds of the distro (bar compiler and flags). Surely they all use the same components? Maybe it’s the way the selection of software components interact. I’m surprised you found SuSE slow and as a result are even more keen to try RH!
The wife test is all conclusive, you could have just written “My wife approves” and we would have been satisified. 😉
I’ve always thought that SuSE was a well intergrated and diligently constructed OS (from experience and web-opinion), but you’ve encouraged me to look to RH for those features. Thanks for the article and well done for doing a thorough job! Also, reviews have led me to think that RH is not designed for the newbie, is this your opinion?
You didn’t specify. I imagine you used 8.1, but if you used 8.0 that might explain the speed problems since 8.0->8.1 was GCC 2.95->3.2.
I upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 using apt and was quite shocked by how much faster it was; I’d let myself hope but had been disapointed by such hype before, so when it proved true I was very pleased!
I’m an old-hack at this Linux stuff (Gentoo and Debian user). When I started I liked the online support that people gave, from google to IRC Linux was the best supported OS.
Is it still the same for a noob (read: newbie)?
Intersting article. But you could try Slackware, I bet that you would choose it. Simple, Solid, Stable !
http://www.slackware.com
The array of speed differences you found is interesting. I’ve often wondered what factors influence the speeds of the distro (bar compiler and flags). Surely they all use the same components? Maybe it’s the way the selection of software components interact. I’m surprised you found SuSE slow and as a result are even more keen to try RH!
If you notice a major speed difference going from one distribution to another, the difference will in all likelyhood be due to the harddrives being used in different transfermodes. Unfortunately, not all distribution take care to put the drives in DMA mode if supported, and instead require that the user invoke /sbin/hdparm to make the change. That was for instance the case the last time I installed Debian from scratch. This is not something most beginners will be aware of.
I did similar tests and came to the same conclusion. RedHat 8 is beautiful though I believe it needs a little improvements though looking at the new Gnome they’re on their way.
Knopix is good too. By the way, as a fellow Web Developer have you tried Quantro? Absolutely fantastic piece of software – there is certainly nothing like it for web design on Windows (UltraDev sucks big time – I can’t understand why everyone raves about it).
Well I would not call Slackware suitable for starters! For me it’s simple/solid/stable too, but I don’t think it’s suited for the average user. imho it’s made for server purpose not for desktop (not that it runs bad
)
To get a good working linux desktop, we need to wait for:
– 2.6 kernel (it get as responsive as windowx nt/xp under heavy i/o loads and faster
)
– RendR (to change resolution on the fly, this one of the biggest pains atm especially for twinview)
– Packages should not be optimized for 386 only, hell who does really run current distros on 386 cpu’s?
– kde 3.1+/gnome 2.2+
If all these points succeed, Linux distro’s are equal to 2k/XP or even better, technical speaking. Many things have to been done on UI and easy user! Why don’t they hire Eugenia for it?
I don’t know if it’s a webdesigner thing, but I also have tried several distros (RH 8, Mandrake 9, Libranet 2, Lycoris, don’t shoot me… Lindows 3, ..). And I find RH 8 the best. And it’s the one I’m gonna stick with.
Although I hate rpms (actually, there’s nothing wrong with it, until you want to update something and get stuck in depency hell, and yes, I use apt-rpm with synaptic).
“Many things have to been done on UI and easy user! Why don’t they hire Eugenia for it?”
Eugenia is busy enough I think, with “Sequel”. 😉
Oh, I just wish there would be a wysiwyg html editor for us webdesigners who want to switch to linux. Could someone please start coding one asap?
Wanna learn to be a Power User ™ ?
http://www.gentoo.org <- a very educational, fast, easy to maintain and update distribution with a very friendly community.
>Eugenia is busy enough I think, with “Sequel”. 😉
I haven’t done anything for Sequel, for 3 months now. I help the Sequel team only when they need help, I am not part of the core team as I haven’t the time to be…
yoper is optimized for a PIII or above (i686). I didn’t know it would even run at all on a PII. But then the latest 3.2.2 RC4 won’t install and run on my P4 (3.2.1 RC3 did fine – go figure), so its not fully baked yet either. I run Mandrake 9.0, after trying hard to like RH 8. For me, Mdk just works (though you need to pick the right server for updates to work well, and that’s trial and error). The ONLY thing that keeps me dual booting with Windows is a good home finance package (MS Money). When THAT runs on WINE, well…
i686 includes PII and even Pentium-PRO, it is not PIII.
The best choice for beginners is often just what your friends know, have (can give you) and use.
They can help you with the install/setup and all. Some hardware can be problematic but not unsolvable, but to a newbie that may just be too hard.
Some hardware really doesn’t work, but that is something else.
Personally, I have Mdk9.0 and RH8.0 and prefer the first by far.
My girlfriend has approved it, the only problem she has is that OOo is not MSO.. which is true for all linux distros.
And no, I won’t go the Crossover office way; I believe in native apps… (wouldn’t do wineX either)
BTW, really wonder why the reported had problems with Mdk…
User management? You do that once,…
Didn’t like mdk kde? Why not select gnome?
Also, you don’t really have to download all that upgrade stuff, you can be selective.
But what counts: 2 more linux users!
http://www.gentoo.org <- a very educational, fast, easy to maintain and update distribution with a very friendly community.
I agree! It seems as though the author hadn’t even tried installing Gentoo, just using the LiveCD for UT. I’m a long time Red Hat user (3 years), and have tried all the *major* distros. I then went back to Red Hat and stayed there for a while. I then was researching LFS and found Gentoo. I installed it on a test machine, loved it so much that I installed it a week later on my Red Hat machine. I haven’t looked back since. Gentoo is _my_ dream OS. The entire thing is optimized for your computer, and I’ve learned more through the install/usage of Gentoo than I ever thought possible!
I personally use Slack now.. I’ve tried Red Hat and two older versions of SuSE plus some others. In the end I always turn to slackware. Despite knowing very little of Linux when I first installed it I had no troubles getting my sound card working etc. It has taught me much and seems to be a much better desktop distro in my opinion – mainly due to speed.
We even use it to run a media box in our living room – playing DVD’s DivX’s mp3’s MPEGs and anything else we need. It plays DVD’s smoothly on a machine that was incapable of playing them properly in windows 98.
Long live slack.
I suppose that he could be focused also on his proffessional area in Linux. It doesn’t seem clear why he is trying Linux for ? If he did it for web surfing , chating , email, mp3 ripping every distro is able giving that. I use Slackware 8.1(I like cause it is stable) Libranet 2.7 and have tried Mandrake , Lycoris. All these distros can do far more that I have mentioned and all of them have Gimp included which can replace somehow Adobe Photoshop. If he was looking for eyecandy in linux than visit kde-look.org or some other sites. If he wanted secyrity than I think that Linux firewalls are far better than counterparts in windows.
I think that if every newbie would describe their experience in Linux than everebody would choose the distro that has fullfilled a particular personal distro. For me it was mandraka for its unistallation boot manager.
The reviews in OSnews should be more focused in distros that fulfill our daily needs.
I recently tried Red Hat 8, Mandrake 9 and Debian 3. I decided to stay with Mandrake because that’s what I know and I know where to get stuff, I know its quirks, etc… Red Hat just frustrated me. Mandrake still requires a few hours of tweaking before its good, but once that’s done its great (of course by then a new version is out
.
However, I lent my windows-using friend the same three distros, and he chose Red Hat 8. I tried to convince him that Mandrake 9 was better if you play with it a bit. But he seems to like blue curve quite a bit and just the overall “feel” of the system.
I’ve set up Red Hat 6.2 on a box not capable of running X before and did everything via the command line, so I know how to set up a system. But now I can’t be bothered, I just want the distro to work great out of the box so I can start coding/doing interesting things. For me, Mandrake is the closest Linux distro to that ideal.
azazel
Good article. Try the WYSIWYG site editor from IBM.
Curious if the journal regarding YOS was from LPH. In which case, you do realize that LPH is the webmaster for Tux Reports.
http://journals.tuxreports.com/lph/archives/000015.html
He hasn’t published lately in that journal but he said in a pm he was “tinkering” (?) with JAMD and evil entity. You should also get to know his daughters. Birdie (I think) is the one who writes many of their reviews on the Tux Reports site. I think they spend a long time with these distros but don’t publish too often. Their red hat article is the last full review. On the forums there is something from LPH about Xandros Usability Report.
slackware will never be for newbies. it’s definitely for newbie geeks though. so is gentoo. redhat does the best here since they are always targetting the corporate world with their products. so it results in something actually usable for general tasks. mandrake is nice also. but i stopped using it ever since they came out with 9.0. i think 8.2 was the sweet spot. 9.0 seems all wrong for me. dunno. very subjective feeling about it. so i stick with rh8.0 with my desktop, and rh7.3 for my 166mhz dial-up server!
All I have to say is that my wife has disapproved:
Mandrake – Her – too slow, ugly blue scheme – I didn’t like the buggy gui tools, they always lock up on me
Lycoris – Her – not many programs, installing new ones is hard – I didn’t like the dumbed down distro
I just installed RH 8 – and the wife loves it – the ability to tweak, and everything works. She has learned how to use apt-get, and is now addicted to frozen bubble. – I love how it just works. Apt-get takes care of it – about twice a week I run apt-get update, apt-get upgrade and let it take care of any updates. I used the kde 3.1 rpm’s and got rid of bluecurve and it is a wonderful distro after that. Hasn’t crashed on me, haven’t had any programs lock up in nearly a month, I love it!
A small suggestion, if I may… run apt-get update/upgrade nightly via cron. Use the “-y” option on both for them to run without user interaction. Works great for me and my servers.
-fp
have have fiddled with Vector Linux and installing only the base system & kernel without X then installing Slackware’s X with good sucesss…
Vector’s gcc compiler is pretty good…
I like Bluefish because it has that lightweight BBedit sort of feel to it. Quanta is good and Screem which has more features is really coming along quick and they just had a new release.
For WYSIWYG stuff the openoffice web editor has a few more features than Composer but I have to check out this JAMD ark mentioned.
I’ve also tried all the large distros, and agree with all of the comments in this article. Recently, tired of all the bloat, I decided to “bite the bullet” and create my own linux distro using LFS 4.0.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org
Having read lots of comments and opinions about whether doing this makes sense (I’m not even an IT pro, but just a hobbyist) made me have my doubts but I decided to give it a try anyway, see if f I could and what the results would be.
The conclusion: I’d recommend anyone who has some linux experience to do what I did. With the appropriate optimisations, and taking care to install the base packages according to instructions, it’s not that difficult.
Best of all, the speed gains are just amazing. Booting takes about 1/3 of the time compared to any large distro, and the responsiveness… eg. Konqueror starts up immediately (and I mean immediately, not after 3 seconds like in SuSE or Madnrake)
Lightweight and Loaded.
http://www.ibiblio.org/peanut/
linuxwives.com?
To the writer of this article. You should be careful that you don’t go around sayig Redhat is a good distro. You could annoy a lot of peope and I am sure you do not want to do that.
Redhat has been flagrantly violating the GPL, and doing all this other stuff to ’embrace and extend’ other OSS projects. They included a non suported version of XFT in their distro that broke KDE. And they made a number of modifications to KDE/QT that render the desktop utterly impossible to work with and to develop for.
Well, if you believe this you might actually be sad, but the above nearly made me never look at Redhat. I could not resist it when it cam to a mirror near me after I had purchased a CD Writer. 2 minutes into the install all I could say was ‘WOW’. Who said Mandrake had a nice installer. It looked eons old in comparison. Redhat 8.0 is the first iteration for what should be an exciting 8.x series. Bluecurve is not the most beautiful desktop in the world, but it is probably IMHO by far the most professional and well thought out desktop in Linux land. It seems to me that after the really bad press Redhat got when it intro’d 8.0, more people are actualy coming to their senses, (or less afraid to come out), and admitting that Redhat is a very good distro.
It has some very useful inoovation. What blew me away the most for its simplicity was the /.fonts directory. Other have all these systems that require you to get this little app which pulls fonts from somewhere on your HD or the internet, and put the fonts somewhere you dont know. With 8.0, just create a .fonts directory on your /home/user directory and copy some fonts there and lo and behold, all your compliant apps (read, KDE, GNOME) can see and use them. Suddenly having all these funny apps doesn’t look like a good idea after all. Someone hould submit this to the freedesktop.org spec. (But this is probably one of the ways in which they broke KDE anyways). So I figure some people might not be too happy with it.
Redhat seems to understand that adding layer upon layer of tools to do this and that overloads the user and is user-unfriendly. That being said, I do miss some of the programs that I was quite used to. This little thing called xf86cfg that I used, on Mandrake, to fix modelines in the XF86config is gone and I cannot find a way to remove the offset of the picture on my monitor. I dual boot so it is a pain to have to move the picture every time. Please include this functionality in the Monitor configuration module in the next version. And include a GUI utility to uninstall rpms that do not come with the Rehat cd’s. Or jus texpand the functionality of your beautiful Package manager. Other than that, I think Redhat has a successul and even more profitable future ahead.
better to just pick redhat or suse, then try and to as much from the command line as possible.
i know that sounds backwards, but it works.
going with one of the two main distros guarantees that you will find more answers and suggestions and howtos via groups.google.com or http://www.google.com
doing things from the command line will build up skills you will need later.
give yourself some tasks to accomplish and stick it out.
when you feel comfortable with suse/redhat then move to gentoo or debian, slack whatever.
Nice summary. I took the same rout of testing all the recent distros, although I’ve always been a Red Hat user since version 3.0 (who else can say that?).
Its nice to have this Linux diehard as a friend who always has the latest distros installed (often 3 at the same time). The outcome: also Red Hat 8. Its just the most professional distro.
“Lycoris – Her – not many programs, installing new ones is hard – I didn’t like the dumbed down distro”
Is that really her comment, or yours?
Lycoris is the only linux my wife will use. There’s plenty enough programs for what she wants to do…type documents, surf, email, chat occaisionally. My wife is a newb in the most complete sense. She doesn’t want to install anything or fiddle at all. She doesn’t like the other distros because there’s too much stuff, and she has a hard time figuring out where programs are in the menus.
Lycoris is easy, but certainly not “dumbed” down. Please explain the “dumbed” down comment? Lycoris has all the power any ***desktop*** linux does. Sure, it lacks the gnome stuff, but I don’t care. I don’t use any gnome programs…and I have no need for either gnucsh or evoloution.
If ease of use and preconfigured software is “dumbed down”……well so be it. It works for me, and my newbie wife.
I think alot of people have “virtual” wives they like to talk about……Lycoris is simply the easiest distro to get up and running
I have also tried just about every linux distro there is, and all the .x releases of them in the last 4 years, and heres my opinion’s.
I have found SuSE to be a great distro for a noob or a Pro. The author said it didn’t include “gaim”, not by default, but you can choose it from the list of extra software you want to install. A full blown SuSE install is some were around 6GB of software, it should work for just about anyone.
On just the Pro or power user side, I would use Gentoo. I have SuSE installed on a desktop at work, but my main box’s and laptop run Gentoo. The power of portage, it’s optimized to my system. No dependency problems, PLUS, you will learn a lot about Linux.
Like others have mentioned, RH just broke to many things for me, as a power user, I like to select KDE, GNOME, Fluxbox and I want them to look and feel different. RH 8.x IMHO is horrible, sorry! It might be good for noob’s, but I would recommend SuSE to them.
I run a lot of *nix at work, I have a HP-UX 11i workstation, A Sun e250 running Solaris 9, and a small intel box running FreeBSD 5.0. All that and I find my self on my Gentoo Laptop the most.
Last but not least, someone mentioned MS. MOney, I totally agree, some Linux nut needs to make a Finance program like it and I will never need Winblows. BTW, I use VmWare on my Gentoo laptop to run windows for my MONEY! I have no need for windows to be my primary OS, unless my work figures it out and makes me put it on my laptop. However, I do need windows for ms. money, so I can’t get away from it. ;(
Have fun!
Of the big distros, I agree, Red Hat BlueCurve is da bomb!
Lycoris – I agree with Lycoris-User, it’s not really dumbed down, but has a different focus and they do things in their own way and in their own time, which I like.
Seems like it.
I would suggest OSNews to have some new icon for these Linux newbie reviews – a penguin with a bib or something like this. Interviews are OK but everything else published here about Linux is so highschool-ish. Or housewife-ish.
No, Eugenia – this is not a stone in your garden, I think of you as a pro ( although more of web designer pro than OS developer or journalist), not a housewife. Don’t take this comment personally.
I sent this link to the author as well.
He mentioned having a bit of trouble getting his samba stuff the way he wanted it. I too was initially frustrated at the lack of a good newbie tool for samba sharing. But…
Here it is.
http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/rawhide/1.0/s390/RedHat/RPMS/redhat-co…
Yes, it does not have the true depth of options that swat has but it is very good for a desktop user.
>> Oh, I just wish there would be a wysiwyg html editor for us webdesigners who want to switch to linux. Could someone please start coding one asap?
Element.
The Quanta Plus team plan to incorporate a WYSIWYG editor at some point.
Redhat has been flagrantly violating the GPL, and doing all this other stuff to ’embrace and extend’ other OSS projects.
Where is Redhat violating the GPL? I hear this but I have not seen an example.
Wow… lots of commetns while I was sleeping. I’ll try to answer a few of the responses.
pnghd: I will have to try Libranet, I’m not familiar with it. I looked into Xandros some and may try it too. I don’t think the Xandros literature was convincing and I’m not a huge Corel fan to be honest. Can Xandros be downloaded free?
MxCL: The version I’ve been using is 8.0. I am however downloading at this new moment the beta for 8.1. If it improves the speed even more, I’ll be very impressed.
balor: Irc has been a source of some support. Often however, I find that the people on there are pretty ornery–not always the case though. My first line of support is a friend who’s been using it longer than I have (and who’s ditched Windows all together) and Linux message boards.
f-r-e-d: Slackware I believe is one I’ll try when I have a little more experience.
Charlie: Next time I get the itch to try a new distro, it will probably be Gentoo. (How many does that make on my list.. Xandros, Libranet, Slackware, Gentoo…)
Peter: I have found Bluefish and Quanta to be alright for web design on Linux, however I usually end up just using KEdit. I happen to really like Dreamweaver MX on a PC. Gimp isn’t bad, I wish it had a specific “save for web” feature. In my mind that’s it’s biggest downside as compared to Photoshop.
Buckeye: From all I could gather on Yoper.com (which was strangely down the first two days I tried to access it a week or so ago), it was optimized for the 686 architecture. Don’t Pentium II’s fall in that category? I could be wrong.
MGD: The media box projects are one’s I’ve been following rather closely. I think it’s one of the most promising things linux has to offer the home user.
fm – ALBANIA: Good point. I probably should have gone into more detail as to why I wanted to use Linux. The principal reason was not to make my life as a web designer eaiser–Linux has not. It was more because I found the open source ‘movement’ exciting and contagious. I’ve been a long time /. reader and it’s hard not to be curious about all the passion.
ark: I’ll try JAMD. I hadn’t even heard of it. Hopefully Big Blue has produced some little known miracle
M.T.: Hmm, I’ve found apt-get very useful. I’ll have to delve in to setting up cron jobs a little more to automate the process.
Maynard: Quote: “To the writer of this article. You should be careful that you don’t go around sayig Redhat is a good distro. You could annoy a lot of peope and I am sure you do not want to do that. [i]
Then you yourself go on to rather lavishly praise RedHat? Sould I take that first comment as sarcasm or a joke
?
Anonymous: I actually have enjoyed learning things from the command line. It’s made my interactions with the server in my web design work much more friendly. I would have never believed I’d say this a couple months back, but doing [i]some things from the command line is very efficient. Vi and grep are great. I love apt though more often than not, I find myself using it in GUI form–Synaptic.
Justin: MS Money is also a reason I’m sticking with Windows on the laptop. There are notable others–Dreamweaver XP, Premier, TaxCUT–no more TurboTax for me after the recent controversies. I’m considering trying to switch to GNUCash. Do those of you who have used both consider it to be a viable replacement for MS Money?
Apostata: Try to remember waaaay back to when you began using Linux…
nonamenobody: I’ll also add Element to my WYSIWYG editors-to-try list. I haven’t seen or tried that one yet.
I meant to do that cool trick with italics and… the mispellings are to add variety to the response.
A really good tool for admining samba is webmin. Its great for a lot of administrating tasks. I don’t know if there are RPMs of it for RH though.
Good article and good spin on Linux. I’ve been using Linux for a long time now. Started out on Slackware, moved to Red Hat, then SUSE, Mandrake and Debian. All are pretty good for starters. Only complaint I have is the amout of CD’s it takes to install. To my knowledge, only SuSE has a DVD version. I still remember using Linux when it was only one CD-ROM. I still have active Red Hat 6.2 and Mandrake 7.0 systems running all new packages.
lol
Mandrake offers their distro in a DVD also. It’s not just SUSE.
I haven’t tried GNUCash since very early on, I didn’t care for it, but after looking at the screen shoots and some functions. I’m “emerge gnucash” with GENTOO and I’ll give it a whirle.
http://www.gnucash.org/
The only thing I would bet it can do is import my money file. After using money for 4-5 years, can’t remember any more. Importing it by hand will absolutly SUCK! Does anyone know if you can?
Marcus: thinks for reminding me. I need windows for TaxCut too. Were would we be with out the IRS??? I could think of a couple of things. But I imagine we don’t want to bring in politics in this article too. Oh, BTW good article Marcus!
For those of you who don’t have the power of Gentoo and Portage, I’m sorry. “emerge gnucash” wont work for you, you might need to install 4 or 5 other rpms in some wierd fashion. Or you could do it from source.
I have been using GNU/Linux as my secondary OS for over two years now. Only in recent months that my dual boot machine has seen less of Windows XP and more of Linux.
I have tried over 30 distros so far (I am not kidding!); which included versions of the same distro (RH 6.2 thro’ 8.0; Mandrake 7.2 thro’ 9.1; etc); as well as distro A based on distro B.
The ones I liked most to my needs ( don’t want to go into details; I am just an above-average computer user–>not fully a power user yet) are Slackware 8.1 and Libranet 2.0.
And, of course, Mandrake 8.1 onwards.
I debated for a long time as to which distro I should use as the ONLY OS on my machine. I cannot do that anymore (my job needs me to use AutoCAD), so I changed the objective to Primary OS.
Debian won, actually, Libranet
There actually is one included in the phoebe beta, just click the hat and then “network servers” to browse windows networks. It somehow “just works”, across workgroups and domains
It also has great (and i do mean great) samba server config tool.
…you just like it because it’s the only one you tried that has xft out-of-the-box.
…at least you didn’t use full-caps AS IF YOU WERE SCREAMING AT PEOPLE UNINTENTIONALLY (as opposed to Eugenia, who sometimes intentionally screams at people without them). Spelling mistakes?…hey, it’s the web!
It’s great article, but there’s something is missing. At the begin article, he explains about he’s a web designer. But, he never explains how it goes in Linux as web designer by use the different tools. Well, now he answered in the comment thought, but keep in mind for the next article if you are planning to write. 🙂
I used to make a life by as web designer. I must say, I would rather to stick either Windows or MacOS, because of lack graphic apps in *nix. Photoshop is much more powerful than Gimp, which Gimp is 10x sucks. But, I have no problem to use *nix to write html, css, asp, perl, php, mysql and etc by use (g)vim. I always use UltraEdit on Windows to write them too, so only missing feature is tab windows. It’s no big deal, thought.
For those of you who don’t have the power of Gentoo and Portage, I’m sorry. “emerge gnucash” wont work for you, you might need to install 4 or 5 other rpms in some wierd fashion. Or you could do it from source.
So? Gentoo Linux isn’t only one Linux distro that can do that, which Debian, CRUX, Arch and etc can do that. Also, BSD already can do that for age. Therefore, open your mind to the different *nix and find what they can do. There’s no limit.
I was really happy to see this kind of article. I’ve done much the same thing, downloading distros and evaluating them. On my desk right now I’ve got Slackware 8.1 and Gentoo Basic for x86. At home I’ve got one of the newer Mandrake RCs, Redhat 7.1, and Knoppix.
Part of what attracts me to Linux is the idea of learning what it’s really doing. The other side of that is that if something goes wrong, I have to know how to fix it, or I have to start reinstalling from scratch. The best balance between these has been Gentoo, all the way. Watching Gentoo go out and grab dependencies, then install them, has been very educational. And once it’s done, it works. Groovy!
It’s like watching a machanic build a car from scratch to your specs, then letting you drive away with it. I don’t have to understand every little widget, but I get to see where it fits in none the less.
In fact, the only thing that’s keeping me from Gentoo is the fact that I *do* have to download a huge amount of sources.
At home I’ve only got a 56k modem, so even getting started takes hours of connection time. I know that there are LiveCDs in different stages, but I really want to go from zero to Gentoo all the way, watching every step of building an OS that fits my computer like a glove.
As I understand it, the stage 2 and 3 CDs are precompiled for particular archetectures. Is there a pre-gathered Gentoo ISO out there that starts at stage one but includes the source packages and dependencies for major applications on it? I’m thinking a kernel, some modules for networking and sound, OpenOffice, KDE and/or Gnome, X, and a handful of other apps like Gimp. Just something to get you up and running if you can download at work, but have to install on a computer that’s basically connectionless.
In fact, any source-based distro that doesn’t depend on downloads to get to a desktop would be a boon. Any takers? (I’m looking at LinuxFromScratch right now to see if that’s a possibility, btw)
And just a general word: Thanks all you developers and distributors! Your hard work is much appreciated.
GMFTatsujin
What would be wise for Gentoo would be to make a workstation-in-a-box cd. Pick the “essential” workstation apps, do an emerge fetch for all of them, and burn the /usr/portage/distfiles directoy, along with a simple script to emerge all the packages when you get to the other machine. You still get all the customization, but you don’t have to download for each machine.
What would be wise for Gentoo would be to make a workstation-in-a-box cd. Pick the “essential” workstation apps, do an emerge fetch for all of them, and burn the /usr/portage/distfiles directoy, along with a simple script to emerge all the packages when you get to the other machine. You still get all the customization, but you don’t have to download for each machine.
It’s a lot easier if you create NFS server for portage, which like I did with FreeBSD for source and ports. Whole machines are sharing the same source and ports on one NFS server to save my time and save the bandwidths for freebsd.org..
bsdrocks: So? Gentoo Linux isn’t only one Linux distro that can do that, which Debian, CRUX, Arch and etc can do that. Also, BSD already can do that for age. Therefore, open your mind to the different *nix and find what they can do. There’s no limit.
If you read what I wrote early on, you would see that I run a FreeBSD 5.0 box, & I also stated that I have just about tried every distro out there. With a statement like that, I don’t believe I could have passed up Debian. I have tried 2.2 and 3, Debian lacks an up-to-date .iso even when they put out a new one.
FreeBSD just doesn’t do it for me on the desktop. Yes, web-server, file-server, that’s about it for me when it come’s to freebsd.
Thinking about this a little more, you should really read my post from before, I currently run:
Gentoo
SuSE 8.1
Solaris 8 & 9 Sparc, and 9×86 intel
HP-UX 11i
FreeBsd 5.0
That’s just what’s at my desk here at work. So I think I’m pretty open to different *nix, wouldn’t you agree?
The only thing I haven’t got my hands on that I want is a 17″ powerbook.
As I see it, Knoppix should get a good installer. There is an Xdialog based install script, but this still uses cfdisk for manual partitioning. It is a very user-friendly distribution, so the installer should have an “easy mode”, where you have a “slice” where you can drag how many free space for windows and Linux you want, and after clicking “install” the rest of the installation should be done, perhaps asking if “webserver” or “mailserver” should be started. If it finds an existing partition, it could use the old /home files.
IMO, then you have an user-friendly distribution like the Apple MacOS cd’s: insert CD, reboot computer, click the installer, select free space, wait a while and done. You may say that every distribution is suitable for this, well, it is not, for example, you can not install a full SuSE system from the LiveEval cd.
There are other advantages of Knoppix. First: perfect hardware detection, it is the only distribution that made my soundcard work without having to configure anything by hand. And second: it is based on Debian; you can install all software from the Debian repository, according to a tutorial on the internet. Just “apt-get install gnucash”…
Oh, I forgot after I “installed” gnucash, I went to the Import section and it said it could import Money files. So, I will make a backup of my money file and see if it will work tonight when ever I get home to see how it works.
Has anyone ever used gnucash, I hardly hear anyone talking about it. Is it that bad?
In fact, any source-based distro that doesn’t depend on downloads to get to a desktop would be a boon. Any takers? (I’m looking at LinuxFromScratch right now to see if that’s a possibility, btw)
there is something called lrs-linux that promises to do just that. Obviously you have to download the image (over 600mb) but once you’ve done that it builds the whole system right before your eyes. It’s based on LFS, it includes KDE3.1 and Gnome2.2… Mind you, that’s just what I read on their website – I haven’t tried it myself. You’ll find them at http://www.lrs-linux.co.uk
In fact, any source-based distro that doesn’t depend on downloads to get to a desktop would be a boon. Any takers?
Gentoo should try doing this on a CD-set the way FreeBSD releases a set with ports on it. Access to a fat pipe becomes much less of an issue under such circumstances.
justin: I have been using guncash for two years now. As far as I am concerned, it is a wonderful finance program. I do have the benifit of not having a long past with either Money or Quicken. I have no complaints for my personal finances, at least not after some of the additions in 1.8.1.
he has not tried Xandros. It is by far the most underestimated distribution and apart from looks it delivers better than any other distribution and I too ahve tried at least 10 distributions.
“‘m an old-hack at this Linux stuff (Gentoo and Debian user). When I started I liked the online support that people gave, from google to IRC Linux was the best supported OS.
Is it still the same for a noob (read: newbie)?”
No. Linux community is plagued with too many self-appointed gurus. “RTFM n00b!” is very common.
No. Linux community is plagued with too many self-appointed gurus. “RTFM n00b!” is very common.
I am so tired of this. Where are you asking for help man?
The redhat-list never saw anyone except in high jest on an obvious question covered two posts ago ever say RTFM and then they prefaced the comment with the answer the newbie sought and made sure to mention they were joking while pointing them to the FAQs.
The same goes for the wonderful folks at the SuSE-en list. They really helped me out with an issue with a Broadcom gigabit card on a Dual Athlon.
IRC should never be mentioned. To all the old hacks, do not refer a poor noob to IRC. Never had a good experience lately with anything besides a very basic question and the people hanging out in the linux-help chats nowadays were all vicious on noobs.
Google out the question and look for FAQ first. Then ask the question on the mailing list of your distro. If it is a desktop issue there is always gnomesupport.org for the gnome folks and I am sure KDE has its version of this.
I appreciate that this is mainly Linux based, but has anyone thought of trying FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD?
I’m a strong user of FreeBSD; I went about trying various Linux distros until a work friend pointed me to http://www.freebsd.org – and I’ve never gone back since!
Considering that FreeBSD is used to run http://www.yahoo.com (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?mode_u=on&mode_w=on&site=www.y…) and other sites, it could be useful for a webdesigner to have a look and try. It has proven its stability over the years – and remains open-sourced!!
Give it a try!
Having loaded and used many distributions since ’92.( I always keep a spare partition handy for a new distro ), I agree that RH8 has the best GUI around today. It works fine on a PII 400MHz with 190MB. On the otherhand if you like the command line and setting up routers, firewalls, and other networking machines Slackware is still the king. But, I have to say RedHat recognises more hardware than Slackware.
Think how nice it is to have choices… Some people (the confused and befuddled masses) don’t have the options and arguments that we have avialable to us. I’m a Mandrake user (and yes the update function has not been getting better since 7.2)
I have been tempted at times by other distros, but have remained faithful (Although I flirted with an older version of Red Hat before I hooked up with Mandrake).
What ever distro it is… it is still better here than as a slave to the Masters of Redmond.
Hey, give the Xandros Tech Preview version a shot… it’s very debian-based (the TP version is Xandros w/out all their quirks), and easily upgradeable to KDE 3.1… runs fast, mounts Windows shares, and you can setup networking without a problem by following some simple instructions at the xandros forums…
The ‘slow’ rpmdrake response was from 8.2 – 9.0 fixed that.
I have tried RH 8.0 ( as also previous rh distros) and found it to be an experiment in labotomy- I’d rather use Lycoris.
I’ve no problem with ‘bluecurve’ but they killed the KDE desktop environment by supplanting interworking components of KDE with disjoint s/w like mozilla, evolution etc ( mozilla is not even the xft version!).
For a power user wanting some automation, my order of pref would be mandrake, suse, debian. Period.
Just FYI, Mandrake 9.1 will be released reasonably soon. rpmdrake was rewritten from the ground up for it, so you might like to try again and see if you get better luck. I don’t get the “tiny taskbar” comment…Mandrake uses quite a large panel in KDE, and the standard GNOME setup (two small panels, one top of screen and one bottom). Neither setup looks much like Windows…
The article is nice in overall but author complain that SuSE didn’t have all the software he found in RedHat and get accustomed to is a bit weird.
SuSE was known for years for it’s most complete set of software. Instead of trying their FTP install – go and lend from a friend (or buy) SuSE 8.1 Pro distro – it even comes with DVD full of the linux software. It includes nearly everything yout could imagine and the full installation will occupy more than 6 GB on your harddrive.
BTW – I haven’t noticed any significant speed differences between RH 8 and SuSE 8.1.
Now I’ve gone touting it, I should probably mention the version of rpmdrake in 9.1 release candidate 1 is buggy as hell. So, er, wait for the next one to avoid disappointment. =)
I had some minor problems with Updating MDK the first time, changed the Update server, and haven’t had any trouble sence, runs great, and no matter how hard I try, I just don’t like Red Hat in the least!!!
Run
$ sudo /usr/local/bin/knx-hdinstall
I couldn’t agree more with the author. I have gone through pretty much the same process, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, you name it, and I always came back to RedHat. I am running a 20 machine network for a reseach laboratory at a University and RedHat is simply the most appropriate both from a maintenance and functionality point of few. With the release of the new KDE 3.1 and a functioning kde-multimedia package, this team is simply unbeatable. I just hope that the RedHat will start adopting a more KDE friendly policy – that has been my primary critique about RedHat. RPM dependency problems can often be solved by rebuilding the source package and a bit of hand editing the dependencies in the spec file.
At home, I am running Gentoo on one machine, which is beautiful, but utterly impractical for administrating a large number of machines. Building from scratch is simply too time-consuming and stability is not the greatest.
I like that the article was written from the view of a new convert. I too have come back to RH 8.0. Only I have been installing all the new distros for about 2 years. I still always seem to come back to Redhat. Bluecurve is by far the most polished and professional look and feel on any distro I’ve tried.
Unfortunately, political reasons will keep me from ever using Mandrake (and likely SuSE as well) again. The U.S. so called “friends” have become soft and cowardly in standing with us against world wide terrorism. The worlds terrorist nations are laughing at the words of NATO. So, they can continue without my support. I hope the French don’t need our help anytime in the near future. Although, I’m sure our government will be more forgiving than I, and would rush to support our allies as we have always done.
Sorry for the political spin, but it’s been on my mind and I just needed a way to get it off.
I’ve been running Redhat for years. At home we run RH7.3 with all updates. When Redhat comes out with 8.1 I will likely upgrade.
My non-geek wife and kids do fine with Redhat 7.3 for the standard stuff, browsing the web, email, printing, openoffice.org, etc.
The other day my wife called and told me that a neighbor bought a new pc but was complaining about all the popup ads. What could the neighbor do? My wife did not realize that we were not getting the annoying popups because we were using mozilla configured to block popups.
We have been Microsoft free at home for a couple of years. However, my wife recently purchased a computerized sewing machine. The sewing machine uses windows only software and proprietary file formats. So that is a problem I’ll have to figure out.
While not exactly a Linux targeted for beginners I’d like to put in a good word for Vector Linux. Compred to the other small Linux distros Peanut and Gentoo Vector is much more polished. For me Peanut wouldn’t run on most of the PC’s I tried to install it on and Gentoo ran but took a week of compiling for me to get everything I wanted then there were still a few little things that just wouldn’t work right. I’ve actually had fewer problems with Vector’s install than I have from RH. I’ve never been a fan of KDE or Gnome and Vector’s standard Xfce is just right for me. Small, functional, and fast.
It’s not often you get to read a non biased review of dists from n00bs(in a good way) that are not afraid to try, and hopefully learn. I did something similar when I started out, trying the different dists at the time. I ended up with the one that gave me the least problems and it also happened to be Redhat. Learning as I went along I eventually got tired of searching and manually installing stuff to try so naturally I tried Debian. If other dists had user friendliness the pointy klicky kind of way Debian was the best at installing and keeping software up to date. Things have certainly changed for the better since the days of RH5.x and Linux 2.0.x and this article gave me some inspiration to give other dists a try. Hell I haven’t even tried KDE since 1.x, ran E on Gnome for a while then moved on to BB/Flux and no GUI filemanager whatsoever, and I who used to be the most desktop oriented gamer there was
I currently use Mandrake 9.0, Redhat 8.0, and Yoper 3.2.1rc4. I do not consider myself a guru but on a 600 mhz Celeron, Yoper was the fastest for me. I use Mandrake on my main box currently (the best multimedia distribution — thanks to th Penguin Liberation Front) and on my secondary box I dual boot RH and Yoper. The only reason I really keep RH is to study for my RHCE. Yoper is a wonderfully customizable version of Linux, and is very fast for me. To also defend Andreas and all the work he has done on Yoper I would like to point out that on the site where you go to download Yoper, they have written in bold letters the information detailing that you should type ‘yoper’ at the bash prompt.
My $0.02
So quit trying to use OSNews.com as your political soapbox.
Eugenia told you people to take your political agendas somewhere else, and there’s no shortage of places (Kuro5hin, ‘Free’ Republic, LibertyForum, Democratic Underground, Usenet) for you to vent.
Thanks for the links, I will take my soapbox to some of those sites.
One question, who is Eugenia? I must not be on his/her mailing list, because I never got word on that.
its amazing to hear people say they wont use this distro or that
one because of political reasons. on the other hand they speak,
or so they say for freedom. red hat is attempting to break Linux
into something that they can manage. because its a u s distro
the people jump on the bandwagon. i am not complaining and
of course u have your right to your thoughts, but what is amazing
is that so many people scream about they have left the mean
monopolist and moved to Linux only to jump on the bandwagon
of the distro that attempts to break part of Linux for their own
reasons. and now they inject politics into their ranting.
very interesting behavior.
keep posting people. i am learning all about u. maybe some day
u will wake up and realiaze that freedom must be watched over
and cared for. u dont win freedom by deceit.
simply amazing.
I just downloaded isos for mandrake and rh. I built a linux partition on my hard drive using partion magic in hopes that it would facilitate the install process. RH didn’t see the partition and wanted to either take over the hard drive or buil d it’s own partition (at least I think that’s what it wanted to do). abort….
mandrake found the partion and installed itself quite nicely into the space.
Knoppix is way cool since you don’t need to actually install it. It also seems, per information at their user forum, you can install it, I just haven’t taken the plunge.
Big problem? My usb wireless connector is invisible to Linux, no way out to the web.. Guess it’s time to head to the store and hope I can find something that works with linux.
Just loaded RH myself and it seems to me a big improvement over other distros. I was able to make the system a little more responsive by turning off some services (why on earth do they turn on sendmail when I checked off “client”?) It used to be a real chore to pick and choose the services that were running. It also looks more attractive. In the past, the screen fonts made it impossible to work.
There’s still a long way to go before I myself could imagine switching to it. I loaded 4 OSs on this machine (dual pentium 133 w/128 MB of RAM): DOS/WFW (had it lying around), NT 4.0, Beos, & RH 8. All were useful to varying degrees, and I could browse the web and read email with all of them. RH was by far the slowest, with it taking 2-3 minutes to launch programs before optimizing and 1-2 afterwards. OpenOffice word processing was even worse. I realize that this machine isn’t exactly a speed demon, but it’s more than adequate in these other operating systems
RH pretends to support international UI but it does not. When I selected Hungarian in its login window (GDM), it gave me a disappointing mixture of English and Hungarian in both GNOME and what RH claims to be KDE. No problem, I decided to edit the menu and translate the untranslated items to Hungarian. Alas, RH either does not have a menu editor, or very well hides it! I had no such problems with Mandrake. Excellent Hungarian menu, and excellent menu editor.
Another issue I didn’t like in RH was its broken Konsole in KDE. Unless you work hard to configure it in some not obvious way, commands are hard to read because RH renders what you type as if there were spaces between your letters. Midnight Commander is simply unusable in Konsole: columns are collapsed into each other and so are the function buttons at the bottom. OK, so why not use the GNOME Terminal or XTerm in KDE? I would if they were available but you can only launch Konsole from the K Menu.
SuSE comes with a *lot* of software. And they warn you that if you install everything, it will affect performance, as your system will run a lot of services that you may not need. This is particularly true for the Professional Edition.
So it pays to be a little specific about which software packages you choose to install.
Hi
I choose RH 8 after doing some research through the web. RH 8 rocks here. I also bought some Linux books (RH 8 Bible) to help me learn about Linux.
I run three Web Sites. I use Apache 2.0.44, PHP 4.3.0. Linux provides the capability to ‘compile’ and use the newest tools right out of the box. I migrated from OS/2 4.51. OS/2 was a fine OS, but I find LINUX superb. However, I miss the OS/2 workplace shell. Hopefully, KDE 3.1 or GNOME 2.2. + RH 8.1 will be A+.
Later
Edfel
Is there a flash/SWF authoring/development app (you use) for Linux?
dogugotw: before going out and buying more stuff, you might want to wait for the next round of distros. Wireless support in Linux is actually very good, but the trouble is it’s also very new, so the distros haven’t got it all integrated very well yet. For instance, there’s loads of PCMCIA wireless cards that Linux can actually use perfectly well, but most distros haven’t updated their PCMCIA databases to include them yet. The next Mandrake has quite a lot of new hardware IDs, so it might well recognise your USB device. If not, you might want to do some research into whether it’s actually supported by the underlying drivers, using the name of the device and everyone’s best friend, Google, before going and spending cash. If it is, you ought to be able to figure out the right stuff to do to get it working properly (for instance, Mandrake doesn’t recognise my PCMCIA wireless card, but if I add the correct identifiers to /etc/pcmcia/config, it finds it and uses it just fine).
Bryan: The only programs I’ve found that will do Flash in Linux are Moho ($99) and DrawSWF. Moho (though I’ve never installed it appears to be mainly geared toward character animation and does not have much in the way of ActionScript or anything like it. Again, I have never installed it so I could be wrong. Check http://www.lostmarble.com/ for details.
DrawSWF is a very basic program similar to MS Paint, but with animation. It’s written in Java. If you want it, it’s here: http://drawswf.sourceforge.net/.
I have however gotten Flash MX working in Linux with Wine without too many problems. I didn’t experiment too much with using it once it was installed, but everything seemed to be fine. Check http://www.winehq.com for more on this.
If someone has another solution for authoring Flash in Linux, I’d be very happy to know about it.
I plan on writing (sometime in the near future) an article with more information on using Linux for web design and design in general.
I started with it (v 3.5) but don’t recommend it as a jump from windows unless you are really sick of the GUI for configuration. Seeing that /etc/rc.d/* is where you configure most everything, with a text editor (bash scripts). Nothing (pretty much) is configured with the GUI. I’ve been running it for 5+ years, it rocks, it’s fast, stable and more configurable than RedHat (which I also use on another machine). RedHat is wonderful if you don’t want to fuss a lot, I put it on my Mom’s machine and she loves it.
I just read in the latest kernel cousin wine ( http://kt.zork.net/wine/latest.html#2 ) that taxcut 2002 runs pretty much OK with wine. So that might be an avenue to explore.
Myself, I’ve been windows-free for well over 2 years now, running debian. Debian kicks ass. (Sorry for the zealotry, but the debian-chanters were way underrepresented in this thread)