Post Your Linux Screen Shot

[hitest]

Here's my screenshot of my desktop running Mandrake 10.

[Aaronjk]

Here's mine

[hitest]

Here's mine

Cool.

[Matt]

wow, these are time i wish I had linux....

[hitest]

wow, these are time i wish I had linux.... 

If you're curious about Linux you could try out Knoppix Linux. It is a Live Linux CD. This version of Linux boots completely from your CD ROM drive without the need to install anything on your hard drive.

So you can try out Linux without messing with your Windows install. If you want to take the plunge and install Linux I'd go with Mandrake, Fedora, or Suse.

[Nerelda]

I still don't have my linux back up and running yet, but I found this through google and thought you'd like to see it. It's someone else's linux screen shot... Linux Screen Shot

[jcl]

GNOME 2.6.2 on Gentoo. Everything is tiny because I was too lazy to resize my desktop :-)

[hitest]

GNOME 2.6.2 on Gentoo.  Everything is tiny because I was too lazy to resize my desktop :-)

Sweet! It's great to have a source based expert on the board like you, jcl

[jcl]

Want to keep this board a bit active but don't have anything useful to say, so here's a another screenshot, this time of Fluxbox on my DragonFly machine (style is slightly hacked version of Shade).

GVIM and Moz are running on my Linux box. The GVIM menubar font's slightly enormous because of some inconsistency between the display settings on the two machines that I don't care enough about to investigate.

[hitest]

Took a different snapshot of my desktop, Mandrake 10, kernel 2.6.3. This is on my old junker Plll 500 MHz Dell Optiplex GX1. I'm using Fire Fox 9.1, Mozilla 1.7, Kmail and Thunder Bird.

[jcl]

Heh, we really need to get some more people in here. Or change the name of the board to "Linux/Unix Screenshots"

[hitest]

Heh, we really need to get some more people in here. Or change the name of the board to "Linux/Unix Screenshots"

Yeah, I hear that, man! I've invited a few users over from other boards, but, so far not much movement

[Dan]

If you're curious about Linux you could try out Knoppix Linux. It is a Live Linux CD. This version of Linux boots completely from your CD ROM drive without the need to install anything on your hard drive.

So you can try out Linux without messing with your Windows install. If you want to take the plunge and install Linux I'd go with Mandrake, Fedora, or Suse.

How and where do you get the knoppix boot cd??? do you have to download it?? also, what is the lowest file size for linux??

thanks,

danny

[jcl]

How and where do you get the knoppix boot cd???

Good place to start.

do you have to download it??

You can order CDs from... somewhere.

also, what is the lowest file size for linux??

What do you mean by "file size"?

[hitest]

If you're curious about Linux you could try out Knoppix Linux.  It is a Live Linux CD.  This version of Linux boots completely from your CD ROM drive without the need to install anything on your hard drive.

So you can try out Linux without messing with your Windows install.  If you want to take the plunge and install Linux I'd go with Mandrake, Fedora, or Suse.

How and where do you get the knoppix boot cd??? do you have to download it?? also, what is the lowest file size for linux??

thanks,

danny

You can download it from the link jcl gave you or you can buy Knoppix from:

Discount Linux CDs

I've used this company to buy my copy of Knoppix when I didn't have access to a CD burner. The company is reliable, they delivered my Knoppix CD quickly.

[jcl]

I come bearing eye candy from X11R6.8.

Behold, drop shadows!

Behold, transparency!

Behold, the X server exploded!

login:

[hitest]

I like the drop shadow thing, very cool, jcl. How did your X server crash? Too many processes running?

[jcl]

How did your X server crash?  Too many processes running?

The Composite extension, which is responsible for the eye-candy, is extremely unstable. It crashed twice for me while I was fiddling with transparency. The first time resulted in spectacular video corruption and complete loss of response to input; I had to do a remote login to bring the system down to single-user and then pound on the Magic SysRq key until I got a console. The second crash just kicked me out to a console.

It's also slow as molasses, produces artifacts, the drop-shadow fade effect makes menus disappear, and occasionally all the windows except for the root window will vanish entirely.

Not surprisingly, Composite is still marked experimental and is disabled by default.

[hitest]

Very cool, jcl.

I'm running lame-a$$ KDE 3.2 right now on my Linux box. I ran Gnome and Black Box before on my old distro Red Hat 9. Gnome and Black Box would run fine for a time then I'd get really strange video artifacts on my monitor. However, now on Mandrake 10 my unit is stable with no video artifacts. KDE works, I'm not messing with success:-)

Is that screen shot your BSD unit or Gentoo?

[jcl]

Is that screen shot your BSD unit or Gentoo?

Gentoo. X11 doesn't build out of the box on DragonFly, and probably won't until X11R6.9 or R7. Even if it did, between the meager memory in the machine (128MiB) and the trouble I've had getting hardware acceleration to work, I won't be running anything complex on it.

[hitest]

Cool.

Compiling on that unit must be a bear. I flirted with Gentoo, made a half-hearted effort to install using Knoppix, but, became discouraged because my sound card, NIC wasn't properly identified by Gentoo. Kind of a cop-out, I know. In the future I may take another run at Gentoo. I'm glad I was able to migrate away from RH 9. Mandrake 10 likes all of the hardware on my unit, runs well.

[jcl]

Compiling on that unit must be a bear.

If you mean the Gentoo machine, then yes, major builds are pretty painful.

If you mean the DragonFly machine (it's a laptop, incidentally), you'd be surprised. BSD builds are extremely fast. In part that's because the BSDs discourage optimization, which speeds up GCC considerably, but they also seem to have some kind of BSD magic that makes them far faster than they have any right to be.

Indeed, one of the first things I noticed when I switched to Gentoo was how slow the builds were. I was used to cranking out full world rebuilds in the evening under FreeBSD, and all of sudden I was waiting the whole night for the Gentoo base system to rebuild itself. That's partially my fault for using insane compiler flags, but even with my now more moderate settings it's still slow. I'm considering dropping down to BSD-level optimization to see if it makes any difference, even though minimal optimization is contrary to the Gentoo philosophy.

I flirted with Gentoo, made a half-hearted effort to install using Knoppix, but, became discouraged because my sound card, NIC wasn't properly identified by Gentoo.  Kind of a cop-out, I know.

Not at all, the only reason I'm using DragonFly on the laptop is because the NIC doesn't work with ACPI enabled under Linux. I had Gentoo installed on it for a while, but I got fed up with having to choose between networking and knowing how much juice I had left. I'm not real big on fighting the system just to get it to do its job.

(The NIC doesn't actually work that well with ACPI enabled in any system, because of firmware issue. (Did I mention this already?) All of the BSDs have incorporated semi-functional workarounds. In contrast, on the Linux side there were bug reports at least as far back as the 2.5 days and last I checked no progress had been made.)

[hitest]

Thank you for your generous reply, jcl.

It's refreshing to talk to an advanced person who doesn't bristle with indignation when someone is using a lowly rpm distro. Some gurus will ridicule you if you're not running a source based distro.

Quote

"I'm not real big on fighting the system just to get it to do its job."

I like your pragmatic philosophy about distro use. I agree, I'm not a slave to any one distro, and will use what ever runs well on my system.

As you know I ran Red Hat 9 for a year then had to migrate to another distro when Red Hat pulled the plug on RH 9. Over a six month period I tried a variety of distros. I got Free BSD 5.2 installed and X windows running, but, it wouldn't identify my video card so I had to use a generic vesa driver, sound card wasn't recognized, networking was a problem. With Slackware 9.1 my CD ROM drive wasn't identified by the install CD and I couldn't swap in another CD ROM drive as my BIOS wouldn't allow that. With Gentoo, my NIC and sound card were both issues, also the install procedure was a bit beyond me. But, with Mandrake 10 in ten minutes it was up and running perfectly the first time. I just had to do a command line config to get my sound card working.

Very cool about the super fast build speeds with BSD. From what I saw BSD is very fast. My desktop was never as fast as when BSD was running on it, I had most of my RAM free when X windows was running. I like the idea that BSD has more flexible work arounds to solve problems.

I may take another run at Slack at some point on my other old IBM PC which I'll inherit from my daughter when I buy her a new shiny XP box (ick).

later,

[jcl]

Thank you for your generous reply, jcl.

It's refreshing to talk to an advanced person who doesn't bristle with indignation when someone is using a lowly rpm distro.  Some gurus will ridicule you if you're not running a source based distro.

Never had a problem with RPMs or with binary-based systems. There are more important things in life than how you install your software. Like picking lint out of your navel, or watching paint dry.

I like your pragmatic philosophy about distro use.  I agree, I'm not a slave to any one distro, and will use what ever runs well on my system.

Actually, I was lying :-) Well, not lying exactly, but I do end up fighting most of the systems I use. It's not something I look for in an operating system, but it's not something that drives me away either.

I got Free BSD 5.2 installed and X windows running, but, it wouldn't identify my video card so I had to use a generic vesa driver, sound card wasn't recognized, networking was a problem.

Heh, yeah, FreeBSD isn't real big on autoconfiguration.

With Gentoo, my NIC and sound card were both issues, also the install procedure was a bit beyond me.

Installing Gentoo is pretty simple if you can turn your brain off. Open the installation guide and let the text go in your eyes and come out your fingers. It's when you try to understand what you're doing that you run into problems.

I like the idea that BSD has more flexible work arounds to solve problems.

The thing that bugs me about that is that Linux could work around the problem too. The workaround is known (read the BSD drivers), and cause of the problem in Linux is known (ACPI changes in 2.5 that were backported to 2.4), but for some reason no one will put in the time. Reading the discussion of the bug I kinda got the feeling that since it's a hardware or firmware problem, it's Not Our Problem.

I can understand the desire to prevent the kernel from turning into a tangled mess of workarounds for broken hardware -- there is a lot of broken hardware out there, and Windows is an example of what happens when you try to make it all work -- but aesthetics has to give way to reality sometime. The BSDs incorporate workarounds like this, though grudgingly and sometimes impolitely (e.g., boot messages that amount to "your hardware is broken, replace it").

Whoops, should have dropped anchor back in the Gentoo discussion, it looks like I've got a little thread-drift to deal with :-)

[murtu52]

For the people who want to try out linux, go for knoppix, Click here, and the core of knoppix is around 700MB, so for dial up user, order the disc. It may cost some money, but if you are determined to get it, order it or ask a broadband friend to download it for you.