www-128.ibm.com — Windowssiness architect Chris Walden is your guide through a nine-part developer-Works series on moving your operational skills from a Windows? to a Linux? environment. (Note, how Chris puts down windows on multiple occasions in part one.)
Feb 20, 2007 View in Crawl 4
ordminuteFeb 22, 2007
As great as Linux is it's a terrible shame they're sending developers to <a class="user" href="http://linux.org">http://linux.org</a> to pick a distribution. That's a terrible looking site, enough to send anyone into immediate sleep out of spontaneous boredom. They should go with something a little more contemporary like the Linux Distribution Chooser: <a class="user" href="http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/">http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/</a>
ordminuteFeb 22, 2007
I'd like a guide for Linux users trying to come to terms with Windows. I haven't used Windows in many many years and now faced with XP (a work thing) 'm genuinely at a loss as to how to use the OS. A few n00b questions:Where do I get drivers from? What to do when I can't continue to install (or consequently uninstall) some software because it says it failed the first time?What's the equivalent to TAB completion in the CMD?What to do when a device cannot be found.?How can I kill a process that simply won't die in Task Manager?How can I create a task that will: rename all the AVI's once downloaded, copy them to a new directory, encode them in a DivX format, resize them and burn them to DVD while I'm asleep? Is it possible to upgrade all the free software on my machine at once?How to completely uninstall software?How to determine whether software found on a website is secure and not 'malware'?How do I determine one file is different or the same as another of the same name (equivalent of 'diff')How do I securely copy data from the Windows machine to another Linux machine (something like SCP exist or drag and drop SSH (Nautilus, Konq)?How do I go through my whole machine, find unused and/or broken software and remove it (equiv deborphan/debfoster)?How do I enable multiple desktops?What to do when I get a "Exception: Memory can't be read error and the machine wants to reboot over and over?How can I restart just the user interface (like X for example) without rebooting?How do I tell if someone else is logged into my machine remotely at the same time?How do I find out which software installed which DLL, after it's been installed?How do I write to a Linux ext3 partition from Windows?How the hell are newbies coming from Linux supposed to know the answers to all the above questions?
bariusFeb 22, 2007
@vmercI used to think that too, but I've changed my mind. I switched my mother to KUbuntu last year. About a month ago she complained that it was annoying trying to get her stock info into a spreadsheet from the multiple web sites she has signed up for (Yahoo, Google, etc). So I wrote a script that wgets her stock info from the different sites and massages it into a csv file. At first she would run it manually, but now she's set it up to run automatically on a cron schedule. She was pretty impressed by this capability that would have been much more difficult to accomplish in Windows. The best part though is that because it's a script she had to learn to use the command line to modify it when her stocks change, so she has actually become somewhat proficient with the shell and vim*.* Yes, she's using VIM!!
verifexFeb 22, 2007
Submitter obviously doesn't know about IBM being one of the larger supporters of Open Source software.
Closed AccountFeb 22, 2007
----What's the equivalent to TAB completion in the CMD?<a class="user" href="http://blogs.msdn.com/ddysart/archive/2006/08/03/687902.aspx">http://blogs.msdn.com/ddysart/archive/2006/08/03/687902.aspx</a>---How do I write to a Linux ext3 partition from Windows?<a class="user" href="http://www.fs-driver.org/">http://www.fs-driver.org/</a>Im running Linux now, Windows does suck ass but it has its place in the world like everything including elephant s**t.
qualishFeb 22, 2007
I hate iTunes. Is there a non-Apple program that will let me manage my iPod?
clp727Feb 23, 2007
Windows is meant for the masses. It's that simple. I am on an XP box now. But when it counts, I use my BSD system. Linux/Unix Rules!! Best of all, most distributions are free. Since Unix is used in many mission critical systems in the corporate world Unix Admins usually get paid more. We have many IBM servers at work, all of them are running AIX Unix. They are rock solid. Unfortunately I don't get paid to maintain them. I have to manage the Windows servers. :(
fleabagFeb 23, 2007
LOOK HOW F**KING OLD THIS ARTICLE IS.
schoate09Feb 24, 2007
Yea, you're right about a lot of that. I just wanted to respond about open source. That's not what Im neccisarily saying. Perhaps something like portage... You can even dl .tar.gz, and have somethign that installs it, and places the icon in the menu. That would be perfect.