10 Major Reasons To Switch To Linux

[scorp123]

http://aditya-shirodkar.blogspot.com/20 ... linux.html

[quickstart]

Nice one I've spent 30 mins trying to download and set up Spy Bot on my mother's XP pc this morning: download software, install, download updates, screen freezes, switch off, put on coat, go to Christmas dinner.

Alan.

[rlozano]

nice run down of reasons... im sure that alot of linux users will agree to that...

[rfruth]

Good list, thanks !

((Microsoft gives you Windows... Linux gives you the whole house))

[Uncle Bob]

Sounds good enough, but as a new convert I'm not too impressed with the display driver quality compared to Windows machines. The laptop I have is a Compaq EVO N600c and with Win XP the display resolution could be set to 1280x1024, but now that I've installed Linux, I cannot get larger than 1024x768, also I tried to install on a AMD K6-2 500mHz box, and XP had a faster response compared to Ubuntu. Linux ran a lot slower on this pc compared to windows.

[scorp123]

Sounds good enough, but as a new convert I'm not too impressed with the display driver quality compared to Windows machines. The laptop I have is a Compaq EVO N600c and with Win XP the display resolution could be set to 1280x1024, but now that I've installed Linux, I cannot get larger than 1024x768,

I have a Compaq Evo N610c here, and with Linux I can go as far up as 1400 x 1050. It all depends on the configuration I guess.

[Uncle Bob]

scorp123, you are right! Let me tell you what happened to me since my last post above and this one. Quite a scary experience for me...

As I was not happy with the screen resolution of 1024x768, I wanted it much larger but the that was the max. What made it worse for me was the fact that I'm using an external 17 inch LCD display. A lot of Googling and trawling of forums later I found a suggestion of sorts to install a display driver, and this is where the **** hit the fan.

I did this:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo depmod -a
sudo aticonfig --initial
sudo aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv

Then I edited thexorg.conf file by changing the display driver from "ati" to "fglrx" - BIG MISTAKE, but I did not know it yet!

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility M6 LY [Radeon Mobility 9000]"
Driver "ati"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Then a bit lower down the form I noticed there was some entries listing display resolutions looking like this:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility M6 LY [Radeon Mobility 9000]"
Monitor "Generic Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 1
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection

Here I decided to add the next larger resolution of 1280x1024 so it looked like this:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility M6 LY [Radeon Mobility 9000]"
Monitor "Generic Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 1
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection

I did this with all 6 depths. I then saved and closed all files and then I rebooted. Naturally I got this blue and white with red bordering screen telling me about the X-something not loading and thus no fancy desktop; just a flashing cursor on a black screen. By then i was so annoyed because then it would mean that i have to rebuild the machine again - for the 3rd time in 2 days.

Ah, stuff it; i went downstairs and watched Top Gear on TV and afterwards I came back to see what I can do to salvage what I can as i did not like rebuilding again. (rebuilding a machine is nothing and its fairly quick, its the customisation afterwards that take for ever - loading bookmarks and all the other nitty-gritty things. Anyway, back to Google and forum trawling, until I found something. I know I did 2 changes in total; the driver name and the resolution entries, so I'll correct one at a time and see how it goes.

I then found this line from somewhere:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

but I just got this error 27 (I think) bad command, so I typed reboot and the machine rebooted. Then I pressed escape at to see the boot menu and chose the "safe mode" option (sorry for the Windows terminology )

This time I was able to get to the xorg.conf file, so I changed "fglrx" back to "ati", pressed the correct keys to save and exit and then rebooted.

If this did not work, then I was going to do the same but delete the extra resolution lines and if that fails - rebuild.

However, this was not the case as the machine booted up and I got the logon screen. What a relief!!!, but it gets better as I now also had a proper screen resolution that I wanted!

Looking back at it all, it would appear that by adding those extra screen resolution entries only, was enough to fix my problem; or something like that...

Well that's my story. Hopefully this might help someone sometime.

To get back to the original post, check out this link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6288119.stm

[scorp123]

By then i was so annoyed because then it would mean that i have to rebuild the machine again - for the 3rd time in 2 days.

Duuuuude, this ain't Windoze you know ... You never ever do that (except in really rare cases, e.g. when your hardware is totally fu**ed up ... I am talking fried harddisk controllers, defective disks, fried CPU's, burning RAM banks and molten plastic flying around, smoke, fire and nuclear explosions ... ).

In Linux there is a realistic chance that you can fix (almost) any config error. You never reinstall or rebuild your machine just because of that. Never. You will soon notice that this is one of the things that sets Linux apart from Microsoft's BS operating systems. Windoze breaks for no apparent reasons. Or it gets a virus somehow, or it gets owned by some worm and then does weird things.

If Linux behaves strange then either because of flaky or broken hardware or because you told it so If you reinstall it chances are that you will just repeat your mistake over and over again So it's better to accept the fact that you misconfigured something, ask for help and then fix the real cause of any problem.
Voila: Linux gets fixed, you save yourself a lot of frustration and even expand your knowledge ...