A Confession
-
I also use Gentoo ... a great distro. It has my main development OS at work for four years, and even longer at home. The only real reason I still have windows is because of games.
-
I have been using it as my main os for about 6 months now...I only launch Win7 in a virtual for programming in Visual Studio. My virtual Win7 takes 14.54GB of disk space (no office, only Visual Studio), and a virtual Ubuntu takes 4.64GB and includes eclipse and open office installs. I would imagine that a server build with no graphical ui would be around 1GB.
Scott Serl wrote:
I would imagine that a server build with no graphical ui would be around 1GB.
On Debian Stable 64-bit, it's around 650MB. That includes apache2 and postgresql, and not even trying to be small. I'm not sure about other distributions.
--Stuart
-
Well, not the ones branded "Games for Windows Live". There are quite a few games available on the linux platform, but some of the games I own are tied to the window OS because I bought them through the GFWL client. I may be able to use wine or some similar software, but that is a hassle. I guess it is kind of like having an xbox 360 game ... if you want to play it, you need the console. If I want to play a GFWL title, I need the OS.
-
Once you get used to it, you'll find vim to be quite useful :) Give FreeBSD a whirl. I find it less cluttered. I've gone to Linux/FreeBSD about 6 months ago now. Don't regret it whatsoever. If you do decide to look at FreeBSD, look at PC-BSD.
If the post was helpful, please vote, eh! Current activities: Book: Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
-
Using Linux reminds me of the feeling I got as a child in my grandfather's garage. It was old and a bit intimidating, packed to the rafters (and above...) with boxes, machinery, tool cabinets, and strange bits of wood and metal that might be scrap or might be some special-purpose tool he'd built himself at one time... It could be overwhelming, and often difficult to navigate, but there was never any doubt that no matter what I might need to do, there were tools that would let me do it well... once I learned to use them. Right now, I'm setting up a computer for a friend of mine who is blind. He'd been using Windows 98 with JAWS installed, and I've often watched him frustratedly navigate through irrelevant menus or deal with poorly-captioned pop-ups or badly-configured keyboard support. Once done, he'll be able to boot up and use the machine for his primary tasks - listening to music, scanning and reading mail - with nothing else to get in his way... Linux is perfect for this sort of thing.
Let me begin by saying - hats off to you for stepping up and making an effort to help out your blind friend. Good job, man! :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: I, too, have a blind friend whom I've seen struggle with JAWS plenty of times, and I am VERY curious about the custom environment you are building for your friend. Any information you could provide about it would be very, very much appreciated by both me and him! It would probably be too much to post on this thread, especially once I start asking questions and stuff, so let me know if you want to start a new thread, go offline, or whatever, OK? On a side note, isn't it wild to see (well, "hear", really...) these guys run JAWS at super-high speed!?!? Blows my mind every time, man... Again, good job, dude. Stuff like this is important, and we, as a community, should do more of it. Thank you.
---"Don't tase me, bro!"
-
Yeah, I just tried installing Ubuntu 9.04 on a computer I'm getting rid of. I played around with it for a while just for the heck of it. It's pretty nice. The install I had gave tons of install options (alongside Windows, run from disc without install, install on partition, wipe all partitions and install with single new partition). And there were tons of apps included (games, OpenOffice, a syntax highlighting text editor, GIMP, a DVD and CD burner, Firefox, and so on). I don't usually play computer games, but it came with a version of snake that I had to try. I wouldn't use it as my main environment, but I am thinking of installing it on one of my partitions on my main computer so I can play with it more.
I have Ubuntu as partition on my home computer. I use it when surfing the net and for most tasks but I still have to use windows XP for my visual studios and SQL and other support functions. I love when I am surfing and those Windows boxes pop telling me my computer is compromised and I should down load this software. And this on knitting pattern sites!
-
Let me begin by saying - hats off to you for stepping up and making an effort to help out your blind friend. Good job, man! :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: I, too, have a blind friend whom I've seen struggle with JAWS plenty of times, and I am VERY curious about the custom environment you are building for your friend. Any information you could provide about it would be very, very much appreciated by both me and him! It would probably be too much to post on this thread, especially once I start asking questions and stuff, so let me know if you want to start a new thread, go offline, or whatever, OK? On a side note, isn't it wild to see (well, "hear", really...) these guys run JAWS at super-high speed!?!? Blows my mind every time, man... Again, good job, dude. Stuff like this is important, and we, as a community, should do more of it. Thank you.
---"Don't tase me, bro!"
I'm starting with Knoppix ADRIANE[^] and customizing the menu and voice. Like Knoppix itself, it's a fine little distro packed with many essential tools, but the addition of the SBL screenreader and a light-weight menu system makes it accessible to users like my friend who would otherwise be locked out. I recommend download it and playing around - you can boot right off the CD, so no need to set up a dedicated machine 'till you have a specific purpose in mind.
-
I'm starting with Knoppix ADRIANE[^] and customizing the menu and voice. Like Knoppix itself, it's a fine little distro packed with many essential tools, but the addition of the SBL screenreader and a light-weight menu system makes it accessible to users like my friend who would otherwise be locked out. I recommend download it and playing around - you can boot right off the CD, so no need to set up a dedicated machine 'till you have a specific purpose in mind.
Awesome - thanks, Shog! If things progress and start to turn into something "real", I'll be sure to drop you a line and let you know about it.
---"Don't tase me, bro!"
-
Awesome - thanks, Shog! If things progress and start to turn into something "real", I'll be sure to drop you a line and let you know about it.
---"Don't tase me, bro!"
-
Let me begin by saying - hats off to you for stepping up and making an effort to help out your blind friend. Good job, man! :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: I, too, have a blind friend whom I've seen struggle with JAWS plenty of times, and I am VERY curious about the custom environment you are building for your friend. Any information you could provide about it would be very, very much appreciated by both me and him! It would probably be too much to post on this thread, especially once I start asking questions and stuff, so let me know if you want to start a new thread, go offline, or whatever, OK? On a side note, isn't it wild to see (well, "hear", really...) these guys run JAWS at super-high speed!?!? Blows my mind every time, man... Again, good job, dude. Stuff like this is important, and we, as a community, should do more of it. Thank you.
---"Don't tase me, bro!"
I've had Ubuntu installed on a laptop and a desk top for about a year. I did it to force myself to learn about Linux and to utilize some older hardware. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the OS, it is stable, fairly fast & since the hardware is a bit older, there are drivers for everything. The need to drop into DOS like command strings is a pain, but it's not necessary that often. However the Linux versions of applications I tend to use just don't cut it. Open Office is a pale version of MS Office. It is fine for writing a letter or calculating you check book balance, but can't handle the heavy duty engineering oriented stuff I tend to do. Linux versions of engineering applications are few and far between. Audio video players that I have found are sub standard compared to what's out there for Windoze. The applications I have tried to run using Wine invariably almost work properly, but not quite. Not surprisingly they are slow too. Linux would be great if they could convince people to write or port good applications. But without applications, IMHO it is essentially only useful for servers, web browsing and low end computing. Much as I hate to say it WinDoze still has the broadest selection and most useful applications.
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
-
I'm starting with Knoppix ADRIANE[^] and customizing the menu and voice. Like Knoppix itself, it's a fine little distro packed with many essential tools, but the addition of the SBL screenreader and a light-weight menu system makes it accessible to users like my friend who would otherwise be locked out. I recommend download it and playing around - you can boot right off the CD, so no need to set up a dedicated machine 'till you have a specific purpose in mind.
Hi Guys. Last night on ABC (Australia) Television there was an invetors program that had a young blind chap that wrote software for the blind to assis with navigation. Here is a link http://www.nvda-project.org/ Good luck. sorry very busy must get back to work. Cheers, Greg.
-
Using Linux reminds me of the feeling I got as a child in my grandfather's garage. It was old and a bit intimidating, packed to the rafters (and above...) with boxes, machinery, tool cabinets, and strange bits of wood and metal that might be scrap or might be some special-purpose tool he'd built himself at one time... It could be overwhelming, and often difficult to navigate, but there was never any doubt that no matter what I might need to do, there were tools that would let me do it well... once I learned to use them. Right now, I'm setting up a computer for a friend of mine who is blind. He'd been using Windows 98 with JAWS installed, and I've often watched him frustratedly navigate through irrelevant menus or deal with poorly-captioned pop-ups or badly-configured keyboard support. Once done, he'll be able to boot up and use the machine for his primary tasks - listening to music, scanning and reading mail - with nothing else to get in his way... Linux is perfect for this sort of thing.
Nice one. Sounds like you've got at least one person interested, maybe turn it into a CP article? FWIW the other week I was struggling with my new WD Live media player; the local USB flash drive was flakey as when accessing over the network with Windows (7). So I fired up my Ubuntu live DVD from the same PC and suddenly everything worked! Now I appreciate it's probably not Windows at fault (WD Live runs Linux), but it was nice to know a free work-around was at hand.