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Linux/BSD replacements for XPians

I'm currently trying out "AV Linux" (based on Debian, with the Xfce desktop UI), and I noticed a couple of problems right away:

Well, that's more than a couple.... :)

* When I first boot up, it offers to connect me to my wireless network, but does not do so automatically, and if I ignore or dismiss that pop-up, I could not find any obvious button or drop-down menu icon (such as the universal "radio waves" symbol) in the task bar to get back to the WiFi settings later....

While I am using AVLinux 5.0.3 (I know 6.0.3 is out.....) for a church to do recording, it doesn't have a network connection, so I can't help you there. Have you asked in the AVLinux forums?

...snip....

On the SD card and the Open File dialog, I haven't had issues, but that's again with the older LXDE-based 5.0.3.

* Double-clicking the control menu does not close a window, and double-clicking the title bar does not maximize or restore a window. Maybe most people don't use these tricks, but I do, and it's annoying to not have them work in a modern PC GUI.

I don't know if XFCE can do that at all, and I've never used those tricks. But you could ask the XFCE developers and see if they would support it.

* Files I saved to the desktop were lost after rebooting. Maybe that's because I was running the "live DVD" version, but I did run it from a bootable SD card, so I assumed that it would be able to retain saved data, or at least warn me upon shutting down or restarting if it wouldn't.

You have to install it to a drive in order to get saving. Even when used as a USB stick or SD or whatever it's set to read-only as long as it's on LIVE media. This is typical behavior from a Live system, and remastersys' created Live media is no exception. I can build a USB stick or other flash media using specific tools that will create the overlay filesystems that some Live media can use, but not with the straight Live media made by remastersys.

As Ole Juul says below your post, AVLinux is a very specialized distribution, hand-tuned and especially made for multimedia content creation. It is not a general-purpose Linux, but it is a great example of just how specialized things can be. There are better general purpose XFCE-base distributions out there; but very few support the easy low-latency audio setup that AVLinux does, when you need that specific type of setup.

As I mentioned, I set up a church with a recording/playback PC using AVLinux 5.0.3. The audio device is an Maudio Delta 1010LT, not your typical sound card. I have Audacity set up to automatically record and play back from two channels on the 1010LT, but the default LXDE playback device is two different channels, and I have the various ins and outs wired to separate channels on the mixing console; if I tried to do this with any other Linux distribution I would be pulling my hair out. But AVLinux just did what I told it to do, and it's been doing that for this church for nearly two years now.

If doing this type of work with XP, AVLinux would be a great replacement. But it's not general purpose.
 
An old guy has specifically asked me for a Linux replacement, ...
I've never tried Abiword before, but it looks a lot like anything else, and I see it can save as a .pdf, so it's probably all one needs for office work which my friend does a lot of.

Abiword is pretty good, and I support a client who has used it to write several books that have been published. This is hard, by the way, as publishers really really want you to use Microsoft Word so that they can use their preferred workflow with edits marked up; this particular lady was able to convince them to send her marked up PDF's from their import of the RTF that she sent to them. It definitely uses less resources than LibreOffice Writer.

He'll want a spreadsheet too, and I didn't check that yet.

See https://wiki.xfce.org/recommendedapps

The recommended 'lightweight' spreadsheet is GNUmeric, and I've used it before. Much lighter weight than LibreOffice Calc, but fewer features and less compatibility, too.

You could of course pull in LibreOffice, but it's anything but lightweight, but a D915 with 3GB probably has the horsepower to run it reasonably well. I'm running some Pentium M laptops with 2GB of RAM and a 2GHz processor, and they can pull LibreOffice up pretty quickly.


Anyway, the test will be if I can convince this old long time XP user that it's fine. ...

Good luck with it.

However, if a D915 with 3GB is what you have, Windows 7 will run reasonably well on that hardware. The oldest box I've run 7 on is a P4 with a D915 chipset and 2GB of RAM, and it's running as a telescope controller and running well (but the video is pretty clunky, and there's no Aero). I've also run 7 on Dell Latitude D610 laptops with 2GB of RAM and 2GHz Pentium M processors; the ATI video on those is supported with an update from Microsoft, and they run pretty smoothly. Also, 7 ran pretty well on a Netburst-era 32-bit Xeon, 1.6GHz, in a Dell Precision 650 here, with an AGP ATI Radeon 9700 video card. The 9700 got a score of over 3 on the 'Windows Experience' index, and Aero was enabled. It was about the same speed as XP on that platform, which is to say that it wasn't really fast by today's standards, but it was usable.

I ran Fedora 12 on one of those Dell D610's, and it was very usable. As CentOS 6 is based on that particular Fedora (with backported security fixes, of course, and a much newer Firefox and Thunderbird) I would expect CentOS to run well, with a non-PAE kernel on certain processors. XFCE-based distributions run even better.

Just a few more data points.
 
PCBSD 32 bit 9.1---my reaction is "forget it". I downloaded the DVD ISO, plugged it into the test machine and the bootloader screen came up, the little twirly (the "/|\" display) and the display froze with the floppy LED on. The DVD is fine; the machine still boots into PCBSD 10.1--nothing has changed in the hardware setup.

Good grief, if the installer can't even boot, why should anyone even bother?
 
FreeBSD seems not to have drivers for the Linksys/Broadcom WIFI NIC--I could locate inquiries on the Web, but reports of a successful installation. OTOH, the Linuces ran the Linksys card just fine, once you downloaded the firmware for it.

Completely distribution-agnostic (heck, OS-agnostic) comment:

If you're looking at converting an XP/Vista-era laptop to Linux and you have the option a small favor you can do for yourself is to swap out the all-too-common Broadcom-based 802.11 wireless for an Atheros-based Mini-PCI/PCIe card.

Most of the Atheros cards don't require a firmware wad and the driver/hardware is at least in my experience far superior. (Early 802.11g Broadcom cards seem to have problems under every OS, including XP.) I'll grant the "non-free firmware" thing isn't as much of a problem as it used to be, as most of the friendly desktop-oriented *nixes either come with the firmware on the disk or make it reasonably easy to download it as part of the installation (although there's still the obvious chicken-and-the-egg problem if you want to do the initial setup over wireless) but it's one less headache. The Atheros card in my Dell D600 came out of a discarded Netgear WAP but similar cards can be had on eBay for $10 or less, and even plain-old "we really don't like blobs, if you want them you have to make the effort" Debian works wirelessly out of the box with it.

(I also know the FreeBSD developers for the longest time heavily favored the Atheros cards; I used to work with one around the time the current wireless/WPA supplicant subsystem was under construction.)
 
Yes, but now you're talking about buying hardware. I've got a Linksys USB Wifi NIC and there is no BSD support for it either.

The point is that part of this exercise is to see how well the various *nix versions will fit in with earlier minimal hardware that's most likely to be indicative of someone holding onto hardware rather than contributing to e-waste needlessly. (Heck, I still have old Linksys Wireless-B cards. To be perfectly frank, my internet connection (the only one available to me) wouldn't even tax a 10Base2 network's capacity).
 
As Ole Juul says below your post, AVLinux is a very specialized distribution, hand-tuned and especially made for multimedia content creation.

I chose AV Linux because I wanted to see just how bad Linux is for video editing. :) I tried the OpenShot video editor, which claims to be "just as easy to use as Windows Movie Maker". It is indeed simple and functional, but also severely limited; it has no support for deinterlacing or aspect ratio scaling, making it useless for most of my video cameras. And when you save a video file, it has no pre-defined formats, forcing you to manually choose the video and audio codecs from a bewildering array of choices, some of which are only identified by incomprehensible alphanumeric strings (such as "WV32b4A1X" or something equally unintelligible to humans). On the positive side, it at least tried to work with any kind of video file I threw at it (even if the aspect ratio came out wrong or it had interlacing artifacts, at least it didn't reject the file), and it never crashed on me.

Next to try is Kdenlive, which I hear crashes a lot, so I shall see if it lives up to its reputation...
 
The point is that part of this exercise is to see how well the various *nix versions will fit in with earlier minimal hardware that's most likely to be indicative of someone holding onto hardware rather than contributing to e-waste needlessly.

Yeah, I totally understand that. I was just tossing it out there as a cheap (or possibly free, depending on your pack-rat-ery) fix to an annoying problem; those Broadcom wifi cards seriously need to die. (It's sort of like having an ugly wart on your foot: you can live with it by cutting a hole in the insole of every pair of shoes you own, or you can burn that sucker off.)

Alas, I'll totally acknowledge you can run into *far* worse problems that don't have such easy fixes. I eventually gave up on Linux on my HP 2133 Mini-Note, which ironically shipped with a specially hacked-up version of SUSE on it, because the drivers for the various Via chipset devices are such a steaming mess. Perhaps the situation has improved in the last three years (I dunno, since giving up I only use the machine rarely under XP to play with microcontroller boards) but at the time there were no less than three different ways to drive the video card and each one had its own set of annoying limitations. Luckily most laptops have no where near the problems of this particular unit but there is some hardware out there that is just so Linux unfriendly that your best option might be to cut your losses and give up on it.

(That particularly applies in cases where replacing said hardware with something that is fully supported and very likely superior in performance costs somewhere between "free" and "still less than a Windows license". Granted opinions can reasonably differ on that, it depends what your time is worth.)
 
Alas, I'll totally acknowledge you can run into *far* worse problems that don't have such easy fixes. I eventually gave up on Linux on my HP 2133 Mini-Note, which ironically shipped with a specially hacked-up version of SUSE on it, because the drivers for the various Via chipset devices are such a steaming mess. Perhaps the situation has improved in the last three years

I think that you'll find that most Linuces don't even support the VIA chipset anymore--at least the IDE controller. I made that rather unpleasant discovery when upgrading Debian versions a couple of years ago. They just flippin' dropped support--since most Linuces now use the standard Torvald-approved kernel, you're pretty much left with the BSDs. Edit--I think that some of the more obscure and less-up-to-date distros of Linux still do--DSL maybe?
 
I'll have to try booting the 2133 with my lxde Debian "livecd" USB key and see what it makes of it. I think the SATA controller was about the only thing that *didn't* require excessive fiddling to make work properly. (There's also a couple of those C3/Eden Mini-ITX boards out in the garage, I'm curious about them as well. If they've really been orphaned by mainstream Debian that's pretty sad. Good thing the only use I was pondering for one of them was as a DOS box for running an old EPROM burner that needs a parallel port.)
 
I don't know if XFCE can do that at all, and I've never used those tricks. But you could ask the XFCE developers and see if they would support it.

Sure it can. Look in Settings.
General comment: you know, if you want to try out a new system (no matter what the system might be), you really should spend more than five minutes on it before screaming "it doesn't work the way I want, I give up!". Be bold, explore a little.
 
Sure it can. Look in Settings.
General comment: you know, if you want to try out a new system (no matter what the system might be), you really should spend more than five minutes on it before screaming "it doesn't work the way I want, I give up!". Be bold, explore a little.

Blaming the user is never a good way to get them to like an operating system.

If I wasn't bold and willing to explore, I never would've tried Linux in the first place. I gave my candid first impressions, and I appreciate constructive feedback, but your response is not constructive.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, if a GUI purposely makes its window title bar and controls look like Windows, then those features should act like Windows, too. I don't expect the title bar and window controls in Mac OS or BeOS or AmigaOS to act like Windows, because they look totally different; but XFCE's window controls are a virtual carbon copy of the Windows 95-2000 controls, so it was only natural for me to expect them to act the same way.

And if an operating system requires users to dig into the control panel -- or worse yet, break out to a command prompt -- just to get the WiFi working, then it is a failure.
 
Yeah I thought your review was quite accurate for an 'average user' and pointed out some failings that others didn't see. With all the progress made in the last decades, we shouldn't need to read a manual to work out how to accomplish basic tasks. I work out the intuitive nature of an OS by how many times I need to go to google. For me Windows 8.1 failed, but Mac OS X passed (can't compare Win7 because I use it all the time, not really fair).

Might be worth trying out a proper disk install of more popular distributions like Ubuntu or Linux Mint to test for an XP replacement.
I'd hope they're more user experience focused (I haven't actually done a GUI install with the latest stuff). For games it might be worth checking out Steam for Linux as well.

I have a potential machine next to me, but it's not mine, need to dig up a spare P4 or Core2 Duo I can take home and abuse.
 
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Blaming the user is never a good way to get them to like an operating system.

If I wasn't bold and willing to explore, I never would've tried Linux in the first place. I gave my candid first impressions, and I appreciate constructive feedback, but your response is not constructive.
Having read and participated in this and two other similar threads recently I have come to believe that there is an inner circle of Linux defenders (Knights of the Circular Buffer?) who have had to swear an oath of allegiance along these lines:

In response to any public criticism of any aspect of the many versions of Linux, Unix and 'nix workalikes, I swear to:

1 - Never offer constructive feedback because that might lend legitimacy to the original criticism and person doing the criticizing.
2 - Divert the thread by criticizing an irrelevant flaw in Windows.
3 - Refute the criticism by citing a (possibly apocryphal) case where a non-techie (perhaps even with only half a brain) did not have the problem.
4 - Turn the criticism of a (perceived) OS flaw into an ad hominem criticism of the person who dared to criticize; favorite tools are:
a - Impugn their intelligence (i.e. anyone claiming to have computer skills who has this difficulty is being disingenuous).
b - Hyperbole: use lots of exaggerating words like 'screaming', 'hysterical' etc.
c - Purposely misquoting and distorting; e.g. turn a phrase like "could not be bothered to" (a valid choice) into "could not" (dummy; see 4a)

Appendix: Of course if the original criticism came from Linus Torvalds or another member of this clique, it is to be ignored and glossed over.
That's all I've been able to work out so far; if anyone has actually seen a copy of this document I'd love to see it, but I expect the penalties for divulging any part of it are probably severe.

Still, once you know that they're only doing their sacred duty it makes the BS easier to deal with.

:rofl:
 
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Following Tingo's rather sharp-tongued advice, I did look in Settings -> Window Manager -> Advanced, and it turns out that "Double click action" is already set to "Maximize window" by default; however, it is a known bug in XFCE that this does not work unless you slow down the mouse's double-click timing:

http://bugs.launchpad.net/xfwm4/+bug/393672

I changed the double-click timing from 250 ms to 400 ms, and now double-clicking on the title bar and control menu works.

I also found the task bar menu for the wireless; its icon is a nealy invisible black-on-dark-gray "unplugged cable" symbol when the WiFi is not connected -- and even when connected, the signal strength bars are also nearly invisible due to the horrible color scheme. I could not find any kind of network settings in the main settings menu, so appears that this task bar icon is the only way to get to it. So it works fine, but the task bar icon needs major improvement in visibility.

I wanted to post a screen shot to show just how invisible that WiFi icon is, but it turns out that I would need to type "sudo apt-get install xfce4-screenshooter-plugin" at the command prompt to get the hit-PrtSc-to-take-a-screen-shot feature to work. Why is this not enabled by default, and why is there no way to enable it from within the GUI? It has only been a standard feature of Windows since, oh, 1990 or so...
 
Gee, it's good to know that this thread is managing to steer well clear of having nasty unhelpful stereotypes that don't contribute to the conversation whatsoever being thrown around.
 
Gee, it's good to know that this thread is managing to steer well clear of having nasty unhelpful stereotypes that don't contribute to the conversation whatsoever being thrown around.
Ah yes, welcome! Forgot the part about "don't display the slightest trace of a sense of humor!" and the "Guide to the most effective use of sarcasm"; thanks! Well done, especially bringing in a word like "nasty".

IMO by definition it's actually certain parts of the Linux community who are the basis of any stereotypes...

EOF
 
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You did read your own post, right? Eh, whatever. Don't worry, personally I think it's absolutely hilarious. ;)

(Still wondering exactly how it contributes to the discussion as it seems like for the most part this thread has included at least one mostly on-topic and relevant fact, observation, or opinion per post, but there's nothing like a little random trolling to break the monotony I guess.)
 
Good news: Changing SD cards is now working; the contents of the new card are now properly recognized. I don't know why it wasn't the first time around; I didn't change any settings.

Bad news: There is no way to set the time and date from within the GUI! :confused: For some reason, Linux changed my time zone, so now the clock is 4 hours ahead (set to UTC, it seems). Double-clicking on the clock in the task bar does nothing, and right-clicking on it and choosing Properties only brings up settings regarding the appearance of the clock, not its current setting. And typing "man date" into the terminal to figure out how to set the date just makes me chuckle. :)
 
You did read your own post, right? Eh, whatever. Don't worry, personally I think it's absolutely hilarious. ;)
That was my objective, including ironic fight sarcasm with sarcasm.

(Still wondering exactly how it contributes to the discussion as it seems like for the most part this thread has included at least one mostly on-topic and relevant fact, observation, or opinion per post, but there's nothing like a little random trolling to break the monotony I guess.)
I was just commenting on the fact that almost every thread like this sooner or later turns personal; it's an operating system for goodness' sake.

And what are you contributing aside from maintaining and escalating the ridiculous interpersonal tension? If you really must continue the personal insults, whatever, why not meet me off-forum; PMs always welcome.
 
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