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Zorin os

CLI shouldn't bother the computer-literate, should it?

After all, the big advantage of UNIX originally was the ability to hook little utilities together and create whatever functionality you needed.
 
Well, truth be told most of the Linux distros are mostly a matter of the GUI. Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu.... are all the same under the hood, but for the desktop.

The Debian kernel is under most distros. Which is why if you have a problem with a driver under Mint, you'll probably have it under Debian.
 
vwestlife said:
I also managed to break Linux Mint by switching from a proprietary ATI/AMD graphics driver to the "recommended" open-source driver. That totally bombed the graphics hardware, locking the GUI into software rendering mode and 800x600 resolution, with no option to revert to or reinstall a functioning graphics driver. As far as the OS was concerned, I had "manually installed" a faulty graphics driver (even though all I did was attempt to use the "recommended" driver) and it offered absolutely no logical way of getting myself out of that mess. Here was my video rant documenting that disaster:


At the very least, Linux shouldn't blindly recommend open-source drivers just because they're open-source. That is putting ideology ahead of usability, sometimes with disastrous results.
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Agree 100%, this should not have happened. And actually with NVidia cards Ubuntu always recommends the binary driver. So it's curious why the open source is recommended for ATI...

Stuff like this used to happen ALL the time for me and its why I didn't use Linux much before 2010 or so. I do think it has gotten better overall though.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I've never had much problem with Linux.
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I've run into that problem a hundred times or more with Solaris. It's a simple filesystem error. It's usually due to improper shutdown, which usually means power supply failure or operator error. I doubt Linux is much different.

I never had the freeze-up-no-keyboard-working thing happen though. I fully suspect he has a hardware issue there; the machine isn't locked up.

In other words, he's an idiot. He doesn't have to reinstall. He has to plug in a working recognisable keyboard, and follow the on-screen directions.
 
Last Zorin OS-9 Update

Attempted to load Zorin OS-9 on my PIII/1.4 GB/512 MB/GeForce 620/Intel 815. It saw the CD, loaded the intro page, selected 'English' and 'run from CD'. After a considerable wait (@ 20 min), the boot process died and left me with a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Since I not a big fan of the Linux genre anyway, that's all she wrote. Maybe someone else will have better luck.
 
512MB might not be enough RAM to run the LiveCD; those often require allocating a pretty big chunk of RAM to a temporary RAM disk. If the CD offers the option of jumping straight to the installer you might be able to get it on there successfully. (The low-system-requirement versions of Ubuntu mention this problem in their installation documentation.)

I would probably agree with the previously expressed sentiment that your machine might just be a notch or two below what "fully caffeinated" GUI Linux needs these days. I run Lubuntu on a Thinkpad T43 (Pentium M/1.83/1GB/ATI Mobility something-or-other) and it surprises me how almost entirely competent it is at "hard" tasks like web surfing the modern internet (with an ad blocker) but I wouldn't want to make do with much less.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
I would probably agree with the previously expressed sentiment that your machine might just be a notch or two below what "fully caffeinated" GUI Linux needs these days.
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So there goes the popular selling point that Linux "breathes new life into old machines"...?
 
I can remember around the late eighties in a National Weather Service Office where an 80286 (clone) was simultaneously running six to eight tasks. This was a Unix machine and it wasn't showing any signs of stress whatsoever. :) IIRC, it was running a DOS task or two among the six to eight. :)
 
Here's the deal - they advertised the thing as a replacement for XP. My PIII runs XP with no problems. They need to get back to the drawing board with that one.
 
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Did they say the LiveCD was a replacement? The LiveCDs can have a lot of system demands. Try running XP from CD. Can that even be done?

Get a junk hard drive and install it.
 
I found Ubuntu 14.04 (fully installed onto the hard drive) to be noticeably slower than Windows XP, but slightly faster than Windows 7. That was just my guestimate, not stopwatch-timed, but even on a Quad Core i5 I could notice the difference.
 
Attracted to this thread by mention of Zorin OS which I happen to use as my main Linux distro on a Dell 1011 netbook and a pretty old self-built desktop based on a 1.6Ghz Duron. In view of the relative age of these machines, especially the desktop, I'm using Zorin OS 6, based (I think) on Ubuntu 12.04LTS.

I'm not sure that Zorin OS ever really claimed that it was a direct Windows replacement, only that it:-

a) Has a Windows XP / Windows 7 - like desktop environment complete with a 'start button' and a 'start menu' so that people forced off XP by the end of XP support would find a more comfortably familiar user interface than the only alternative being offered to them by Microsoft (Windows 8, 8.1). Why not just run Ubuntu? Because the standard 'fitted' user interface on Ubuntu (Unity) is as weird in its own way as the Windows 'Modern UI'. I don't like either of them.

b) Comes, unlike some stricter Linux versions, with whatever non-free / proprietary software and codecs are needed for features the user is likely to want to work 'out of the box', like MP3 / DVD playing.

c) Comes with reasonably solid substitutes for familiar Windows / Microsoft productivity tools, ie, Libreoffice as a substitute for MS Office, GIMP as a substitute for Photoshop. I'm aware that many, perhaps most Linux distros do the same, but there was no harm in Zorin OS in particular trying to attract displaced Windows users by talking up these points. I've personally never seriously tried to use Wine - a Windows machine is, in my opinion, the most obvious and best machine to run native Windows software on. But having used the two Zorin 6 Linux machines interchangeably alongside two Windows boxes I find myself equally comfortable using both for most general tasks. There is the occasional specialised task for which Windows / Windows software is better and there a lot of things - especially on the hackery side of things, for which the Linux tools - invariably free - are better.

When I first started trying out Linux - and that was a result of my buying a Raspberry Pi and then wanting to become more generally familiar with Linux - I tried a lot of different distros but Zorin 6 was the one I kept coming back to. I can't comment on Zorin 9, as my hardware is probably too old to support it.
 
If you're running Ubuntu on an older system I would recommend using a lightweight window manager such as xfce (even Gnome2 would be better). You'll find the UI to be "snappier". (Yes, this will require typing some commands....)
 
SiriusHardware said:
Attracted to this thread by mention of Zorin OS which I happen to use as my main Linux distro on a Dell 1011 netbook and a pretty old self-built desktop based on a 1.6Ghz Duron. In view of the relative age of these machines, especially the desktop, I'm using Zorin OS 6, based (I think) on Ubuntu 12.04LTS.

I'm not sure that Zorin OS ever really claimed that it was a direct Windows replacement, only that it:-

a) Has a Windows XP / Windows 7 - like desktop environment complete with a 'start button' and a 'start menu' so that people forced off XP by the end of XP support would find a more comfortably familiar user interface than the only alternative being offered to them by Microsoft (Windows 8, 8.1). Why not just run Ubuntu? Because the standard 'fitted' user interface on Ubuntu (Unity) is as weird in its own way as the Windows 'Modern UI'. I don't like either of them.

b) Comes, unlike some stricter Linux versions, with whatever non-free / proprietary software and codecs are needed for features the user is likely to want to work 'out of the box', like MP3 / DVD playing.

c) Comes with reasonably solid substitutes for familiar Windows / Microsoft productivity tools, ie, Libreoffice as a substitute for MS Office, GIMP as a substitute for Photoshop. I'm aware that many, perhaps most Linux distros do the same, but there was no harm in Zorin OS in particular trying to attract displaced Windows users by talking up these points. I've personally never seriously tried to use Wine - a Windows machine is, in my opinion, the most obvious and best machine to run native Windows software on. But having used the two Zorin 6 Linux machines interchangeably alongside two Windows boxes I find myself equally comfortable using both for most general tasks. There is the occasional specialised task for which Windows / Windows software is better and there a lot of things - especially on the hackery side of things, for which the Linux tools - invariably free - are better.

When I first started trying out Linux - and that was a result of my buying a Raspberry Pi and then wanting to become more generally familiar with Linux - I tried a lot of different distros but Zorin 6 was the one I kept coming back to. I can't comment on Zorin 9, as my hardware is probably too old to support it.
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Please note: Zorin OS-9 was/is advertised as a replacement for XP. (That's why I got involved in the first place)
 
In fact, there are some Windows applications that don't run well under WINE, and have no corresponding Linux version. VirtualBox does an adequate job of running XP and 7 on a Linux box--and that's what I use.

On the other hand, I also have some Win9x boxes for those applications that won't run under Windows XP or Linux.

And then there are some applications that demand slower hardware, so I keep a couple of XT clones around.
 
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