Fedora is a solid well made distro. I set my father up with 7 and he has had no problems with it. I would also recommend Mandriva. I have read good things about Puppy for older systems and have good luck with PC Linux OS on older hardware.

The only problem I had with Fedora was because I have two sound cards. I kept trying to get the sound to work. But then I just took the speaker plug in cord and hook it up to the other sound card. I have an old aureal sound pci card and then I have the built in sound card. Fedora 10 is now using the aureal for my midis and the built in on motherboard Intel sound device for all my other sounds. With the latest updates Fedora 10 even got my ATI Radeon 7400 video pci card working good. I have a dual video setup with the Radeon pci card and the built in Nvidia on the motherboard. From the different Linux setups I have done so far I have found that Fedora can handle Real Player 10 for Linux. I liked Red Hat 9 CDS that I had in college but they just got too scratched up. I just bought a 15 pack of Maxell DVD R-W 4.7 GB DVDS and I just noticed on the Fedora site that it is 8 more days till Leonidas. I think I will try downloading the Mandiva. I have the itch to burn something on these DVD RW.

A couple actually. Most of them are 3D apps like "Poser", "Carrara 5 Pro", and TrueSpace. Running them in WINE won't work as they just don't play nice with it, so running them natively would be my only option.

I can see where that would be problem. I'd say unless you want to run a VM, just keep checking the Wine app database for compatibility. http://appdb.winehq.org/

Just checked and version 7.1 is listed as a Platinum rating with Wine Version 1.1.19http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=7598&iTestingId=39476

Carrara Studio 5 is listed as a gold rating, but hasn't been tested in over two years, so it likely will have improved over that time. http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=4245

TrueSpace 7.6 isn't quite as compatible it appears (bronze rating), but hasn't been tested since Oct, so it may have improved some. http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=14061

Wine is being heavily worked on to improve functionality and supported apps, so a near future release may fix your issue. Also it can't hurt to check the status of it from time to time. The winehq is also a good source of info on how get the most out wine for the app's you want to install. From the looks of things it might be worth a try if you haven't done so recently. Good luck.

I know there is a way to set the default sound adapter. I can research it for you. It is not a problem that I have had to deal with as my machines have only one card, but I don't recall setting one as a default to be too difficult of a task, pretty easy as I recall, just a matter of finding the right place to do it. Let me know which distro you settle on and if it is still a problem and I will find the process of doing that.

I finally ran into a serious impass with Ubuntu 9.04 I am having a witch of a time getting around. The situation, ATI all in wonder AGP video card with dual heads (two monitor support). I cannot get the second monitor to work and have tried a slew of stuff to get it to work and the worst insult is I cannot get the ATI catalyst suite to open from a bin file. I tried the SUDO command in terminal, I tried to get the application manager to open it. I even tried to configure it in XORG but nothing so far. The second monitor is a 800 X 600 while the other is a 1280 X 768 (the primary monitor). I did manage to crash the OS good once trying to get it to work. Everything else works flawlessly at least but I want my dual monitors again. I loved watching movies on the 36" screen. I also have a 150" projection system hooked up to the same computer with a resolution of 1280 X 768.


I am not giving up yet!

No Fn' way!

Try
sudo chmod +x filename
then
sudo ./filename

I'll take a stab at it tomorrow!

I know there is a way to set the default sound adapter. I can research it for you. It is not a problem that I have had to deal with as my machines have only one card, but I don't recall setting one as a default to be too difficult of a task, pretty easy as I recall, just a matter of finding the right place to do it. Let me know which distro you settle on and if it is still a problem and I will find the process of doing that.


I think I have fell in love with Fedora 10. It is my favourite so far. I want to try the Mandriva but just can't seem to locate a I386 version. The sound is working great now. I thought I screwed up when I read in the release pages about Fedora have trouble with Adobe flashplayer and it having an effect on sound. But the latest update even took care of that. I guess this is where I show my ignorance because my system is I386 and I think that is why the openSuse didn't work because the download was for a 686. The Mandriva version I downloaded was a 586 version. One thing I have learned the hard way was to stay away from 3rd party stuff.

I think I have fell in love with Fedora 10. It is my favourite so far. I want to try the Mandriva but just can't seem to locate a I386 version. The sound is working great now. I thought I screwed up when I read in the release pages about Fedora have trouble with Adobe flashplayer and it having an effect on sound. But the latest update even took care of that. I guess this is where I show my ignorance because my system is I386 and I think that is why the openSuse didn't work because the download was for a 686. The Mandriva version I downloaded was a 586 version. One thing I have learned the hard way was to stay away from 3rd party stuff.

i586 is the default non 64bit version and is the one you should be using. i386 is a very old PC like over 25 years old, so I assume that is not what you have.

It isn't that old and when I burned Fedora 10 as I look back it read F10-i686-Live.iso . It is either my burner rom or K3b I am having trouble with.

K3b stalled but now is burning the ISO9660 Mandriva-linux-one-2009-GNOME-europe-americas-cdrom-iso. It might just do it this time.

K3b's little trumpet blew the success wav sound. Kewl.

What's wrong with Linux for me? I have tried many distributions, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva, Knoppix. Here are a few of the many reasons that I still don't get along with linux:

1. Every distro installer laughs at my raid controller and exits.

2. If I install on another hard drive then the installation usually hangs; this is especially true of Ubuntu.

3. No wireless drivers for my wireless n card. Yes I can use ndiswrapper but how many run of the mill end users can figure that out?

4. My Line6 Toneport GX has no drivers. There is an open source project but it is far from completion. I require it to work flawlessly.

5. I have to jump through hoops using a console to get 3D working on my video card.

6. I have to jump through hoops using a console for most linux activities.

7. Updates usually don't work right (automatic and manual updates) usually choking on some missing dependency. The last time I ran the updater on Ubuntu it would not boot after.

8. Software is compiled for individual distributions and finding the right software is not easy. Yes I can compile the source code myself but again how many regular computer users will know how to do this?

9. There is no standard across distributions. Every distro is different; different file systems, different software installation procedures (emerge, apt-get, rpm), different window managers and so on. We all know that the choice of multiple different editions of Vista is confusing to the end user; imagine how confusing thousands of different Linux distributions is to most people.

All of this and more conspires to keep the average everyday user away from Linux and with Windows which they are more familiar with using and troubleshooting.

Linux has its place in the market. It is an excellent, reliable, scalable choice in operating systems for almost any type of server. To crack the end user market it needs to be easier to use and have a more consistent end user experience across distributions.

Drivers can be tough in Linux, but it is not all the fault of Linux. The HW manufacturers will not create drivers for anything but windows and won't share the info on how to easily create a driver with those would take the time to write one. Which leaves Linux folk who want to write a driver for that HW to reverse engineer it to create a driver, which is a tedious and difficult process often times.

Correct. This is because Linux is being developed by the computer professionals. They do not speak normal language and do not understand normal concerns of an average man. Some are actually aroused by command line.

Bill Gates was a salesman first, a college dropout second, a billionaire third, and a computer specialist forth.