Any Unix/Linux users in the house?

[Pixel_Outlaw]

I've recently added a Ubuntu box to my computers. I'm just curious who here also uses some flavor of Linux. I might be making Linux shmups in the future...

[njiska]

I used Debian Etch/Lenny as a desktop OS for a couple of years. Also setup a few Apache boxes with Debian, Cent OS and Ubuntu, but I haven't had a running distro in a little while.

[cools]

My X40 runs Ubuntu successfully, but I've recently switched my desktop from Debian to Windows 7, which is a rather nice OS as it turns out.

I use whatever will run the software I want to, and sadly a cheap Windows license was the way to go.

Adore Debian as a distro and an idea though.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

I'm learning Linux commands right now for classes at the university. And I might keep a dedicated Linux machine...

Hopefully this thread can stay calm.
Everyone, please remember to respect others' OS choices.

[brentsg]

I've used Unix for a long time, and I've spent a decent bit of time with the major distros. I compiled my own Gentoo setup once, and that was worthwhile.

These days I'm using OSX for home and work, and interfacing with Solaris mostly for work.

[Stormwatch]

I use Mac OS X (which is Unix), and dad's PC runs Linux Mint.

[Ex-Cyber]

Currently running Fedora 14 on my desktop and netbook. Have run a bunch of other distros over the past ~13 years. It can be frustrating sometimes (mostly because of hardware vendors selling "Windows hardware" instead of "PC hardware", and some distros occasionally pulling in new features/components before the edges are smooth), but in many ways it's a much cleaner experience than Windows, especially in the past few years, and especially when it comes to installation and software updates. Live installer CDs are just awesome; having Google at hand beats the "help" button on an installer wizard any day.

[Dave_K.]

Ubuntu 10.10 with VirtualBox for doujins

[louisg]

I used to, but now I'm on a Mac. BUT, I would be happy to recompile anything you need for Mac It's a posix system just like Linux and uses a lot of the same libraries.

[PainAmplifier]

I used to be a lot better at Unix/Linux, but life got in the way and I've fallen pretty far out of it for now.

At the moment, my second machine has Fedora 13 installed, which I put on after trying Ubuntu. Originally I had installed Linux to setup a game server for some personal testing. I decided to try Ubuntu since that seems to be the 'hot' reccommendation these days, But after trying to struggle through several software installation issues, I pretty much gave up. I had used Red Hat/Fedora before so I went back to that. And other than not quite clearing up the SELinux alerts thing, the Fedora install went pretty smooth overall. Although honestly, it's just about to the point I may as well go back and refresh/relearn everything Linux as too much of it is forgotten or long outdated these days.

For the most part, my main machine is Win XP, as I use it to play a lot of older games up through the DOS era. Everything else could be done on the Linux box, but it's not worth the trouble to try and emulate or virtualize or whatever to play all the old games. Plus I do some programming as a bit of a side project for things and it's simpler to go with Visual Studio for most of the very little I do.

[kernow]

Got a debian fileserver and an ubuntu 10.10 box upstairs which I just installed it on and then had a poke about. But I'm a single booting XP laptop user who just gave up on desktop linux and uses it for file and web services, as well as SSH access for a bit of geeking out now and then.

[BPzeBanshee]

I have a Mac which dualboots Windows for which I do everything. My old legacy machine had Ubuntu and then Lubuntu (for better speed) but I broke it when I did something to XP and had to overwrite it's bootloader. Still havent gotten round to fixing it back yet.

[elvis]

I've been using Linux for 13 years now. It's been my permanent desktop since 2002.

I'm a Linux and UNIX sysadmin by trade, so I work with it quite a bit too. I build lots of things out of Linux, from complex network routing systems to VPN and security endpoints to Asterisk VoiP systems and PABX replacements to file and print servers to render farms for film and visual effects studios (a studio I helped build recently won an AFI award!) to giant financial processing systems for big bastard corporates to thin client setups for small businesses to my MAME cabinets and home theatre PCs.

I love the versatility of Linux, and I struggle with other systems that lock me down. Although I understand why other people find the vast array of choice too daunting. It's definitely not for everyone (although Canonical/Ubuntu are doing a great job so far of trying).

[njiska]

These days I'm using OSX for home and work, and interfacing with Solaris mostly for work.

Wow still working with Solaris. I haven't touched that OS in ages, but i have a pair of Sparc Ultra 5's on my desk. One running Net BSD, the other running Solaris 9 and has a pentium pro all-in-one add-in card. Great, albeit heavy and outdated systems.

[brentsg]

These days I'm using OSX for home and work, and interfacing with Solaris mostly for work.

Wow still working with Solaris. I haven't touched that OS in ages, but i have a pair of Sparc Ultra 5's on my desk. One running Net BSD, the other running Solaris 9 and has a pentium pro all-in-one add-in card. Great, albeit heavy and outdated systems.

Yeah, there are still a lot of solaris boxes in the telecom sector at least.. which is where I mostly reside. All the ones I'm working on are sparc, good percentage are running oracle dbs.

I've deployed a couple dozen "new" ones over the past year too. My favorite is when I get to replace a failed box in a platform of several. Then I "get" to deploy an ancient version of Solaris with matching ancient platform code so everything is in sync.

[njiska]

Yeah, there are still a lot of solaris boxes in the telecom sector at least.. which is where I mostly reside. All the ones I'm working on are sparc, good percentage are running oracle dbs.

I've deployed a couple dozen "new" ones over the past year too. My favorite is when I get to replace a failed box in a platform of several. Then I "get" to deploy an ancient version of Solaris with matching ancient platform code so everything is in sync.

How ancient are we talking? Please tell me they've at least moved past the Sun OS 5/Solaris 2.x days

[GaijinPunch]

Gentoo, mother fucka!!!

At home:
2 Gentoo boxes (1 dead, 1 a RAID1 file serverw/ no X)
1 Macbook Pro (and yeah, I use the terminal on that too)

I'm in my office now, and I have a Sparc machine sitting next to me, only b/c I've not gotten a strong enough Intel machine to replace it.

[brentsg]

Yeah, there are still a lot of solaris boxes in the telecom sector at least.. which is where I mostly reside. All the ones I'm working on are sparc, good percentage are running oracle dbs.

I've deployed a couple dozen "new" ones over the past year too. My favorite is when I get to replace a failed box in a platform of several. Then I "get" to deploy an ancient version of Solaris with matching ancient platform code so everything is in sync.

How ancient are we talking? Please tell me they've at least moved past the Sun OS 5/Solaris 2.x days

Heh, ok well not that ancient. These were on Solaris 8 I think (nearly 11 years old now).

[brentsg]

I'm in my office now, and I have a Sparc machine sitting next to me, only b/c I've not gotten a strong enough Intel machine to replace it.

Home office or work office? Plus 10 geek points if you have a sparc machine in the home office.

My biggest Linux failure was Gentoo. I compiled the entire desktop from scratch and had everything just perfect. We had a brownout and the box wasn't on a UPS. It wouldn't boot and I couldn't fix it. That's when I jumped to OSX permanently, on a 12" PowerBook G4. (well permanently for Unix anyways)

[antron]

about 8 years on linux. I eventually got my wife to just use windows in a virtual machine, an then eventually to just use Ubuntu. The stuff I get to work with the commandline just blows me away sometimes. I couldn't fine a program that would capture video, then I realized a command can dump it to a file, and have transcode encode it to whatever I wanted on the fly. How about tunneling a VNC remote desktop session through a reversed SSH connection.

[njiska]

Heh, ok well not that ancient. These were on Solaris 8 I think (nearly 11 years old now).

Still a pain in the ass. Have to partition with CHS information on that version right?

I'm in my office now, and I have a Sparc machine sitting next to me, only b/c I've not gotten a strong enough Intel machine to replace it.

Good man.

The stuff I get to work with the commandline just blows me away sometimes.

The stuff you can do with a simple dd command still amazes me.

[louisg]

The stuff I get to work with the commandline just blows me away sometimes.

The stuff you can do with a simple dd command still amazes me.

Seriously.. lots of great stuff you can do with Bash and assorted Linux commands. A lot of times, it's just easier to do batch file maintenance via a CLI. I hate using systems now which don't offer a full-featured terminal- everything right at your fingertips, any program, any time, with no need to dig through GUI menus.

[Davey]

My biggest Linux failure was Gentoo. I compiled the entire desktop from scratch and had everything just perfect. We had a brownout and the box wasn't on a UPS. It wouldn't boot and I couldn't fix it. That's when I jumped to OSX permanently, on a 12" PowerBook G4. (well permanently for Unix anyways)

Not exactly the same thing, but this reminds me of a lot of posts I've read on Slashdot. Some people enjoy tinkering with Linux when they're younger, but then they get older and have less spare time (job, family, whatever) or simply lose interest in getting things working. They adopt the "screw it, I just want something that works" mentality and move to something else. Sometimes it's moving from something like Gentoo or Slackware to Ubuntu, or moving from Linux to OSX, or sometimes even Linux to Windows (gasp! But apparently it doesn't suck so much anymore for most people's purposes).

I ran Linux for a while, but not being a Unix guy, it was more of a novelty than anything. Most of my home computer usage is just web browsing, with the occasional gaming, and maybe a spreadsheet here and there. Linux offers no advantages for that kind of basic usage, so I'm still on Windows XP.

[Vexorg]

I'm probably going to have to pick up some Linux again in the near future since the systems I'm working on now have a number of Apache Tomcat/MySQL boxes in them. I've never been particularly inclined to use Linux as a desktop OS though, mostly because I find the arrogance of the open source community so off-putting.

[njiska]

I'm probably going to have to pick up some Linux again in the near future since the systems I'm working on now have a number of Apache Tomcat/MySQL boxes in them. I've never been particularly inclined to use Linux as a desktop OS though, mostly because I find the arrogance of the open source community so off-putting.

In my case it was more of a "I don't feel like paying for windows" moment. Not some moral stance. However I learned a great deal from my experience with it. I just wish like yourself that the community was more helpful and less a pack of arrogant wankers.

[null1024]

Use Ubuntu for everything here, but I have a Win 7 partition too [not like it gets used, and killing crashed tasks is even worse here [end process sometimes doesn't work, which should never happen, but apparently Win 7 ASKS THE PROCESS NICELY to go die in a fire, never gets a response, and just waits] than in Vista, so I try not to use it].

I love Ubuntu. Wine isn't purest shit anymore [and reinstalling a fucked Wine config is easier than reinstalling Windows], Compiz looks prettier than Aero [namely because you can get the Aero effects if you wanted, and then can customize them much more than you could in Windows], etc.

If I need to compile something, it's easy, "./configure;make;make install", and I rarely do because for the most part, packages are available.

The only bit I've found is that performance is a bit slower, and I think it's because of graphics driver support [Intel graphics are the bottleneck on my machine, period, however, worse drivers on the Linux side make it even slower].

I can't stand using Windows much anymore, gotten used to loads of little things on the Ubuntu interface, and even when using OSX, I feel a bit more comfy than Windows [except that Wine/OSX sucks a bit, and a quite large amount of my setup involves Windows applications ].


Also, never gave a damn about anything being FOSS, and so there's gobs of proprietary stuff+drivers on here [for example, using Photoshop CS5 in Wine instead of Gimp, especially because I'm trained in Photoshop, and the different positions of things in Gimp annoys the hell out or me, and the lack of features that I've come to love and use [so even Gimpshop can't help]]

[gct]

Both my primary desktop and laptop _were_ Ubuntu/XP/Win7 tri-boots. I've since gotten rid of Ubuntu from my desktop (and possibly even XP on my next round of upgrades), and next time I upgrade my laptop's hard drive I'll be ditching Ubuntu from that one too, although XP absolutely must stay on my laptop. I so rarely have a need to use Linux that I feel it might be *more* convenient in my daily use not to have a Linux partition, and just swap in a physical hard drive on the occasions that I actually need to use Linux :\

[njiska]

Both my primary desktop and laptop _were_ Ubuntu/XP/Win7 tri-boots. I've since gotten rid of Ubuntu from my desktop (and possibly even XP on my next round of upgrades), and next time I upgrade my laptop's hard drive I'll be ditching Ubuntu from that one too, although XP absolutely must stay on my laptop. I so rarely have a need to use Linux that I feel it might be *more* convenient in my daily use not to have a Linux partition, and just swap in a physical hard drive on the occasions that I actually need to use Linux :\

Hell for what Linux is you could probably do with a VM or a Live CD.

[gct]

Hell for what Linux is you could probably do with a VM or a Live CD.

That's actually a great suggestion, I wonder why I never thought of that, considering I have Live CDs kicking around anyway. Thanks!