Linux is not windows (2 Viewers)

[pete]

Does it run at decent speeds? The only app i really need from windows is photoshop. Other than that i'm open to making the switch, or at least giving it a boot partition.

I've not had any speed issues, but then i'm not doing any serious, CPU intensive stuff. All i can suggest is downloading VMWare server and trying it for yourself - it's free!

Ditto, I'm running a dual-core 1.66ghz laptop with a meg of RAM, that oughta do it if I don't go have a millun things open at once shouldn't it?

From my own limited experience, VMWare likes memory so 1GB (i presume you meant GB not MB, right?) might be a bit tight. It'll still work, mind, just not as fast as you might like.

 

[Rogue]

(i presume you meant GB not MB, right?) .

Oh yeah, oops.

What was that bill gates said in 1981 or thereabouts, '160kb of memory should be more than enough for anyone's needs...'.

Thanks, boss.

 

[flashback]

Any ideas if Ubuntu's any good for music apps, conventional wisdom I've heard is that red-hat and fedoracore are best for audio but I haven't tried them out (need a computer first).

More importantly, is there much of an issue running software on various linux flavours? If the software says linux it should run on any unix environment shouldn't it? (except mac, that's almost unix isn't it...)

Is this more like it?
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/features

just thought i would give you a look anyway.

 

[Rogue]

Thanks

 

[Wayne]

There are a few distros out there that are built just for multimedia and contain
a lot of audio\visual apps. Here's a few of them. From www.distrowatch.com :

1. 64 Studio
64 Studio is a collection of software for digital content creation on x86_64 hardware (that's AMD's 64-bit CPUs and Intel's EM64T chips). It's based on the pure 64 port of Debian GNU/Linux, but with a specialised package selection and lots of other customisations. It will be marketed to hardware OEMs in the creative workstation and laptop markets as an alternative to the 64-bit version of Windows XP, or OS X on Apple hardware.

2. APODIO
APODIO is a Linux live and installation CD with a large collection of open source audio software, as well as graphical utilities for making system administration as simple and intuitive as possible. It is based on Mandriva Linux.

3. dyne:bolic
dyne:bolic is a GNU/Linux distribution running from a CD and able to recognise most of your devices and peripherals: sound, video, TV, network cards, firewire, USB devices and more. It is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creative individuals, a practical tool for multimedia production. You can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, all using free software!

4. GeeXboX
GeeXboX is a full operating system, running under Linux and based on the excellent MPlayer. No need of hard drive, you just have to put the GeeXboX bootable CD into the CD-Drive of any pentium-class computer to boot it. Moreover, GeeXboX is a free software, created thanks to many open-source software. This means that everyone can modify it and build his own release of the GeeXboX. You may wonder why you could have to boot on another operating system to play your media files, but just think about the Mini-ITX plateforms like VIA Epia/Eden or Shuttle barebones. It's now affordable to bring DivX to your home cinema, pluging this kind of computers directly to your TV. At the time of the first development release (December 2002), it was only able to play DivX movies, but for now, nearly every kind of media files can be played from GeeXboX.

5. Mediainlinux
Mediainlinux is a Knoppix-based multimedia Debian distribution on a bootable live CD. It includes nearly 200 audio, graphics and video software. All packages are up from unstable/experimental versions and updated often.

6. MoviX, MoviX², eMoviX
MoviX is a package that allows you to create bootable CDs able to boot & autoplay your multimedia files. It is intended mainly to play video files but if you want it can be used to play also audio files. I plan to release eventually a distro similar to MoviX but aimed at audio only, so stay tuned! The philosophy behind MoviX is to make possible to generate video/audio CDs that are self-sufficient, i.e. that you can play on every PC regardless of what is installed on it: just insert the MoviX CD inside a CD/DVD-ROM and boot the PC from there!
MoviX2 is a small Linux distro on CD aimed at playing multimedia: when you boot your PC with the MoviX2 CD the distro should be able to start X-Window and launch gmplayer, the GUI interface to mplayer, so that you are left with a nice user-friendly interface you can control by your mouse. At that point you can safely remove the MoviX2 CD and play all multimedia files you want: DVD [no zone constraint], VCD, DivX, avi, mpg, mp3, ogg etc.

7. Musix GNU+Linux
Musix GNU+Linux is a KNOPPIX-based live and installation CD with a large collection of free audio software.

8. StartCom Linux
StartCom Enterprise Linux, which is based on the Red Hat AS source code, is the ultimate solution for middle-size servers to large data centres. The current version supports the largest commodity-architecture servers with up to 16 CPUs and 64GB (on x86 systems) of main memory, Global File System - for highly scalable, high performance data sharing in multi-system configurations. Included in this distribution is a comprehensive collection of open source server applications like mail, file (SMB/NFS), DNS, web, FTP, and a complete desktop environment.

9. Turbolinux
Turbolinux distributions are designed from the ground-up specifically for enterprise computing. Turbolinux 7 Server was the first-ever to conform to Internationalization standards to help simplify development of applications that require multiple language support - a critical requirement for software distributed globally. Turbolinux 7 Server also supports the Large File Support (LFS) standard for working with applications that manage or handle up to four terabytes of data - a common requirement for infrastructures serving Fortune 500 and larger companies. Such industrial-strength environments provide the basis upon which PowerCockpit and other Turbolinux innovations were created.

10. VideoLinux
VideoLinux is a PCLinuxOS-based distribution with focus on DVD backups, video encoding and transcoding, DVD authoring, format conversion and pretty much anything else you want to do with video.

11. WOMP!
WOMP! is a micro Linux distribution focused on multimedia. It takes only 13 to 30MB depending on the selected options on a bootable CD, and allows playing a wide range of multimedia files (video/audio/image) without installing any software on the computer's hard drive. Additionally, WOMP! can also be installed on the hard drive - either to run in memory just like a bootable CD, or to run from a read-only loopback file which is interesting for machines with low memory. It can then be booted either by a floppy boot disk or by a bootable CD. WOMP! uses FrameBuffer for playing videos and X for interacting with the user. Hardware acceleration is provided by vidix. Cards that support vidix include nearly all ATI and Matrox cards, and more recent NVIDIA cards.

 

[Rogue]

That's excellent, thanks wayne. I'm going to try dyne:bolic

 

[Donkey OJ]

open office

i'm an advocate of open source and use an open source OS and loads of open source tools and apps daily. i've been using and supporting open office for the past 6 months and i have to say i've been really unimpressed. speshly with the writer application when creating or editing large documents. it crashes regularly, memory leaks like a motherfucker, and is pretty counter intutuitive to use. some of the basic functionality you're used to in MS Office isn't even an option (TOC navigation for example). when you're in a position where you have to force users to move from sparkling office 2003 (unlicensed) to open office to clean up licensing it gets really ugly. so yeah. open office - mleh. to me Microsoft Office (and to a lesser legacy extent Exchange / Outlook) is still the killer app which will keep people purchasing windows (and office) licenses well into the future. i honestly think googleOS with their productivity apps will get there quicker than openoffice on linux. when you think about it 90% of office workers spend 90% of their day with their head stuck in a spreadsheet / word document. so getting linux onto the desktop is mostly a factor of getting people comfortable in their productive/collaborative environment rather than getting them comfortable with the nitty gritty of the OS (although that's still important). email and web use to a lesser extent (except for thumpeders) but there's not nearly as big a gulf in usability between linux and windows in those respects.