I Want to identify best Linux approach, and any pitfalls. 298

On Mon, 30 Jan 2006 18:09:40 +0000, The Natural Philosopher staggered into the Black Sun and said:

MacOS 9? Glutton for punishment, eh?

There's nothing in the atalkd manuals about printing from OS 9 clients. I've never tried that, since I rarely print stuff anyway. If the old Mac can talk to a Samba printer, no problem. Check your MacOS software, since that's probably where the problems will show up.

k3b, works well for CD-R(W) and DVD+-R(W) AFAICT.

xine or vlc or ogle. No problems using xine here. You'll have to install libdvdcss, but the RIAA aren't going to go after you for that. For video that isn't on DVD, mplayer-gmplayer works well.

"Cheap" is the *LAST* thing you should look for in a motherboard. In x86 machines, the motherboard is the thing that's the most difficult to diagnose problems with, and the thing that's the most difficult to replace. Also, Intel's graphics chips suck. If you want hardware accelerated 3D (for playing games, mostly), you want an nVidia card. Most NICs work without a problem. Many onboard sound chips work, but I always see people reporting funny problems with the latest Intel 8x0 whatever that's just slightly different from the 33 previous versions and won't be fully supported until the next stable kernel release.

? Linux is not Windows and never will be. KDE behaves fairly similarly to Windows by default, and it can be made to look a lot like Windows, but there are and will always be differences at low levels. The sooner you get that, the happier you'll be with your Linux system.

I.Exploder rendering is only available via I.Exploder, which doesn't exist for Linux. If this is a deal-breaker for you, you will not be happy with Linux.

xsane, probably. It'll be on your distro CDs, and sane-project.org says the 4100C is completely supported. Anything that has a SANE backend should be controllable from Gimp as well.

Most USB cameras behave as Mbutt Storage Devices. Just plug the camera in, mount it, and treat it like a disk. Some cameras have alternative interfaces, and those alternative interfaces are supported by the gphoto2 library and-or GUI frontends like digikam.

No idea about CAD. What do you mean by "artistic" here? Vector-based?

vim-emacs, make, ctags. eclipse or kdevelop if you think you need a GUI.

Avoid anything made by PCChips. I've had good luck with Abit and Asus motherboards. Athlon64 is the way to go for best bang-buck. Integrated video cards are usually terrible. Integrated sound can be a crapshoot.

I've heard that SuSE's documentation has gone downhill a great deal. If the Debian netinst CD--the installation process has improved tremendously with the ncurses-menu-driven thing they're using.

? Was the list in your first message a complete list of your requirements? If it wasn't complete, complete it. If it was complete, I commented on everything that I had knowledge about. HTH anyway,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL