I have been neglecting my w*ndows

[nishtya]

Yeah, two going on three months and all I am using that drive for (besides extra storage/backup for linux ) is gaming and a couple of graphics apps I have to use for my work. I try and update its antivirus so it doesn't get sick and am thinking about a w*ndows critical update even, so it doesn't pine for Uncle Billy.

You know, I really wish I could switch over completely. Right now my main linux is kanotix as my lilo default on the new spare harddrive, knoppix is on another partition on that drive and I boot it with a floppy to look at the differences between the two distros and try and work out solutions to my various probs Would be nice when knoppix 3.4 comes out to put it on the other harddrive and go byebye w*ndows. I know I can't yet.

For those of you still dual booting, what's holding you back? And what percentage of your nonwork time do you still spend in that "other" OS? I am easily 90% of my nonwork time in linux. I can't give up my games though eventually I believe linux graphics apps will catch up enough. As long as I have one stable enough linux distro I think I can manage now even though I am still a newbie. But I am able to use linux just fine for almost I need. Might be a different story if I upgrade my hardware.

Not really a point to this post except to ask do any of you others ever feel bad that your w*ndows stuff and expensive software is gathering dust? Even if I could get these games in linux versions, I would feel well, terribly wasteful. Dumb, huh

[Cuddles]

Nishtya,

Yeah, I really feel bad about it... My "main" system runs only Knoppix, my "older" system, has Win98 on it, along with $500 worth of M$ specific software, like Visual Basic... Shame actually, I just don't "need" it anymore, I don't develope any Windows utilities anymore, and with Knoppix, I don't have to either, the system is only running Win98 becuase the "significant other" (SO) likes to play neopets on it (its a virtual pet site, you adopt a virtual pet, care for it, and have lots of MacroMedia games) to play. (kind of like pango, I think thats the name of it?)

I don't really feel like I'm going through any "withdrawl" symtoms, either, I just run Knoppix. In fact, I'd love to take my "backup" system, running Win98, and just throw Knoppix on it, maybe v3.4, hmmmmmmmmm, maybe the SO shouldn't leave me alone for too long? [giggle]

Oh well, I guess its evolution
Cuddles

[garyng]

What is holding me back ? mainly, ACPI or power management.

I have two machines one as a server, one a notebook. Both gives me very reliable suspend/resume when running XP, not so for linux(cumbersome at the very least).

Then there is Office 2003 as I received those file from time to time that just doesn't look right under Openoffice 1.1.

I do some .NET development as well so I need Visual.NET

Then there is one specific application that use java but can only run under Windows(Mozilla and Konqueror both have problems for that particular stuff, pretty complicated).

Luckily, I am now running both at the same time, no more dual boot. So no more work/nonwork but have to say the booting OS is now 100% XP but linux is also 100% of the time running, constant task switching

[Cuddles]

Gary,

Isn't it funny, I kind of have the same issues, Office2000, though for me...

If I get some "seriously" dependant image laiden Word document, OpenOffice just doesn't seem to load everything, images missing, etc... Take the exact same email attachment, and open it in Windows Office2000 Word, and everything just "works"... (could this have anything to do with Bill?)

oh well, Win98 might have to stay, but only on my "older" system, it isn't gettin to boot on my new system - period.

Cuddles

[nishtya]

well, Cuddles, for me the sad waste is the games (ok, that is supposed to be disposable income lol). I have spent probably a couple of hundred in a year or so on windows games, nice stuff, and here I sit playing Frozen Bubble (love the frozen bubble, I do) and occasionally Tux Racer (love tux, but am not very good at it)

And sorrier, the graphics apps, most notably Photoshop (mine's too old - PS4 doesn't work worth a hoot with wine) and some other graphics apps that I am sorry I spent the money on this past year since I now hardly ever boot windows otherwise. I really admire you to be able to use linux professionally.

At work, geesh, there is a web app we use that their development team programing in cold fusion has been totally wiped by a problem with windows 2000 users. My solution is to use mozilla - long story short, they don't support any browser but MSIE but at the moment any browser BUT IE will do reporting with their web app...lol.

oh, Gary - mistakenly answered you in another post. Anyhow, I found the power mgmt in Kanotix BH4 (2.4.25 I believe) to be quite nice. Everything goes down, comes back up on cue though we are talking older desktops here. My only question which I know you can answer, how the heck is it pulling this hat trick off:

Local APIC disabled by BIOS -- reenabling.
Found and enabled local APIC!

I installed this with acpi support (could someone please give us noobs a nice definition/differences on apic and acpi? They are related I know but not the same thing)

[garyng]

linux's power management is getting better(everything else is BTW) but still far from satisfactory for my usage.

APIC is the source of many trouble, it is related to how the IRQ and IO address stuff is being allocated on the machine, ACPI is mostly about power management like what power state the machine support. You are right, they are related but different. I need to disable APIC on my server or else the network card just don't work but on yet another machine, disabling it can make it not bootable. Complicated, isn't it ? This is also why I said that linux is still far behind in this area. The other area is USB devices. Technically speaking, many of them are the fault of the vendor, bug in their interpretation of the spec, but for end users, anything that works under Windows works. Sad, but it is a reality.

Basically, anything that is hardware related, XP wins(which is quite understandable) and anything that is software only(networking, file system etc. well should say everything else), linux wins.

[nmcphillips]

garyng wrote:

Luckily, I am now running both at the same time, no more dual boot. So no more work/nonwork but have to say the booting OS is now 100% XP but linux is also 100% of the time running, constant task switching

I saw Unix running in a window on a NT machine several years ago, I believe the window was serving as a virtual machine. Is this what you are doing garyng and if so can you explain how are you doing this?

[garyng]

http://www.colinux.org

This thing is very stable so far. It is not virtual machine style like VMWARE but UML style so one needs hardware drivers implemented for each class of hardware. It currently has block device and network, the two most needed.

That said, one cannot use USB device like webcam etc. as there is no driver for it.

But then, I was able to rip a DVD from within colinux using mencoder, then play that under XP using the DivX player through a samba mount, pretty geek.

It can be installed as a service so I can have it started when my XP started, I can make full use of XP's power management(suspend to RAM, wake-on-lan).

three thumb up.