h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I used to use Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 a while back. I was using it on my laptop a Lenovo 3000 N100. I remember having a lot of trouble getting the wifi card to work with custom drivers with ubuntu. (I have a Broadcom internal wifi card) The laptop was running Vista and Ubuntu at the same time. Eventually I really got sick to my stomach of vista and reformatted the hard drive and installed windows 7. Windows 7 also made me sick to my stomach and after a day I was back in Windows XP. Even though it's older Windows XP does the job and only took a few gigabytes of space and it's also faster.

The main reason I used to have Ubuntu on my older setup is because it would help me whenever windows was acting up. I don't really care about gaming I have a desktop for that. I have a 111 GB drive and it seems that a partition of 30 GB would be needed to make good use of Linux when windows breaks down as it happens from time to time and I need to rescue files lol. Yea I know the woes of windows.

Anyway what do you guys think? Is it worth trying to get the wifi card to work again? Or am I stuck with only XP and when trouble comes a knocking I'll be stuck?

P.S. If I could I'd buy a mac but I'm broke and their prices are ridiculous.

Yes.

Yes. And let me know how you get on because I'm on the verge of returning to it myself.

I forgot to mention I tried running hackingtosh for a while which is Mac OSX on my laptop it only worked for like 3 minutes and then it crashed and burned and froze. I don't recommend trying it.

Ubuntu is ok, but since the devs tend to release 'bleeding edge' apps, it also is often somewhat flaky. I suggest you look at Debian.

Some will try to tell you Debian is for experts, or geeks, but it has become much easier to install, in the last year or so, and definitely is easier to maintain/upgrade than Ubuntu.

This video illustrates how easy it is -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJuJbqxxhos

Search this forum to see if your machine is problematic -- http://forums.debian.net/index.php

For a desktop machine I recommend Debian 6 Squeeze (testing) rather than Lenny (stable)

Information on Squeeze -- http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/

Download page -- http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

Your Broadcom wireless card may now be supported automagically.

Check this list -- http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43/devices

If not, it can likely be done using madwifi, or ndiswrapper.

The forum noted previously can help with any problems, or some Linux geeks here can help

~~~

btw, hackintosh is not a good choice except for hacking around. You can build an OS X compatible desktop fairly easily, but with a lappy you have little choice in hardware -- which usually means the result will be unsatisfactory...

Thanks Taliesin, I will consider Debian. I was chatting with a guy in irc and he recommended backtrack which he says is based on ubuntu. You get loads of tools with this distro and it seems you can learn a lot. I'm downloading it and considering it also.

It's actually based on Slack

http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html

.. and it is very useful indeed, but may not be the best 'desktop' distro to actually install on a system drive. Works mainly from 'live' external media, such as cd, dvd or usb drive

I use it for setting up and testing network security

"Beware of geeks bearing distro recommendations".

Me - I'm still at the 'What's easiest?' stage. Plus point for Ubuntu? Great community support.

Or try Linux Mint which is based on Ubuntu and has some codecs already installed and seriously cool, programs with it such as Mint menu and mintinstall.

Some screenshots there of Linux Mint but they're probably not that useful really.
http://public.fotki.com/menthol-penguin/linux/

Hmm I'm a bit confused as to which way to go at this stage. It seems that people use backtrack more as a live CD then as a main OS.

Don't let them confuse you!

You were happy(ish) going with Ubuntu. All that's happened is that you've had lots more options thrown at you, which may - or may not - do some things you might occasionally want to do - or maybe won't - a tiny bit better.

C'mon, guys...admit it. He'll (she'll?) be happy enough with Ubuntu, won't s/he?

It's a nice colour, anyway. If you like brown.

Hey thanks Edward. And I'm a guy. BTW I found a site with a bunch of screenshots from different distros http://thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.php

I think I might just try different distros until I find one I like. But I'm going to start with something easy. Like Ubuntu or Fedora. I've used harder to use distros in the past and I don't know if I have the patience to keep tweaking them.

What attracts me about Ubuntu is that over the years they seem to have taken the tweaking out. I first tried it about a year before Dapper Drake (Can't recall what bird it was named after)...and it was a steeper learning curve than it ought to have been.

At this very moment I'm, wiping an old HDD in preparation for an install.

While I'm at it...I've also been doing some cleanup on an old 30GB HDD that I'm running XP off of. It's hardly got any data on it. Nothing extraordinary in the way of programmes. I've done all the usual cleanup stuff - taken off temp files, unused Windows components, old programmes...but I've still only got 5.7GB free. What - and where - the hell is all the other stuff?

That seems very weird: I just had a look on this netbook; which has two partitions, and XP home on one of them, with office 2003 my antivirus, spiware stuff, system care c cleaner and such like, plus a few other bits of software (book reader, screenreader soundcard stuff), and in totaly I've used a staggering... 7.7 GB of space (NTFS ) true, on the other partition I've filled about 40 GB with books and Mp3s and documents... but that does mean the system partition is jsut* system/OS/software.....
Would it be possible to just whipe that drive and reinstall the XP?: I cna't imagine what all the sapce being used is

Both are easy to install. Debian is easier to upgrade/maintain

>>Plus point for Ubuntu? Great community support.<<

I've found the 'buntu fora something of a double-edged thingy.

All too often someone with little or no knowledge eagerly jumps in with bizarre and basically useless 'helpful' suggestions.

This happens on the Debian and other fora, too, but the 'buntu forum is famous for it.

I _have_ found helpful and useful information on the 'buntu forum(s), but also a great deal of ridiculous cruft

Some others I've found useful, in order of preference: Debian User -- http://forums.debian.net/
Debian Linux Help -- http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/debian-linux-help/
Linux Questions -- http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/index.php
and the Gentoo wiki -- http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Main_Page

>>Would it be possible to just whipe that drive and reinstall the XP?: I cna't imagine what all the sapce being used is<<

A system restore thing, probably. Did you get an install disk with the machine?

*tries to keep up...*

>>I've used harder to use distros in the past and I don't know if I have the patience to keep tweaking them.<<

Once you set up either Ubuntu or Debian, you won't have to do much tweaking.

btw, if you're interested in Fedora, take a look at CentOS. http://www.centos.org/

Backtrack is for cracking stuff, wouldn't recommend it for everyday use (although I have it on my router - which is very handy).

I tried fedora but I'm having a really hard time with the setup of the wifi broadcom 43 card. I had made an old fix that worked in Ubuntu Gutsy see: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=722873

Do you guys think this might work with fedora 11 or should i switch Ubuntu 9.04 and try to see if my fix works there too?