Journalist installs Linux in 30 minutes... and it works

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38799

Apparently, if you choose Linux-compatible hardware, things pretty much just work. The issues come when you use Windows-specific hardware. Imagine that.

And as an aside, I have Kubuntu 7.04 x86_64 installed on my laptop, running, all video codecs (except WMV9) without any fuss, and 32bit Flash installed and running seamlessly with the nswrapper plugin, as well as Beryl. 64bit on the Linux desktop is finally fully featured and here

 

My digital camera also works as soon as I pluged the usb in. Same with my HP printer/scanner, and even my old Vision Onetouch 7600 scanner(a pain to find and setup driver for on windows).

But of course he forgot to mention Webcam.

 

Can't say that I'm surprised in the least. My latest install of Ubuntu Fesity beta worked out of the box with everything (even graphics). I haven't tested the media card reader as I don't have any media cards around, but it shows up in the device manager as a Ricoh media reader (which is what it is). The only thing I can't get working is DVDs, and I really don't understand why.

 

Did you try installing the libdvdcss2 libraries for decrypting DVD movies? This proprietary software that is not included with (K)ubuntu for legal reasons.

 

Yup. I've got a 64bit version of libdvdcss2 on my machine (I had to google around for an appropriate 64bit .deb. Good thing CSS hasn't changed since at least 2004). I'm breaking the law to watch my legally-acquired DVD's! Goooo me! notebook_ftw, here's your fix: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2374085

 

I had x86_64 on my desktop and 32bit on my laptop. I still have no idea what advantage of 64 vs. 32 on linux. I hope Fesity 64 doesn't need me to grab lot of drivers to play WMV9, and RMVBs.

Turely, what is the real difference for 64 beat 32?

 

It sounds like I'm bragging, but I've been using 64-bit Linux seamlessly with 32-bit Linux since about 2004. I just wanted to point out that the ability to do so has been around a lot longer than just recently.

When I initially got my Athlon64 laptop, I wanted to use the 64-bit version of Debian, the distro I had been using, but it was still in "alpha" mode under the codename/website Alioth. That's when I discovered Gentoo, and ever since I've had the joys of running 64-bit and 32-bit side-by-side without using a chroot! So things like openoffice, mplayer/wincodecs, and netscape-flash all are 32-bit binaries on my system, but run just like any 'normal' application. Back in those times, Debian required a chroot, which worked just fine but was quite cumbersome. The Gentoo solution worked then like it does today...

Of course in the last year or two [K/X/ ]Ubuntu has come along and finally made some of the binary distributions "amd64" profile-ready, and that really helps the Linux community as a whole. Better stuff for everybody!

[ FWIW, I have gone back and looked at Kubuntu (I favor KDE) at times, but can't seem to switch back from Gentoo - the flexibility and knowledge of my system is just that much greater than even with a Debian-based distro. ]

 

For most things there isn't a whole lot of difference. 64-bit does give you greater addressing space, more and larger registers, and some extra instructions. So usually you'll only see things like 'transcode' and computationally-intensive things gain much speed. I have Oracle installed on my system, which gains some performance in specific areas as well.

For a while, past Nvidia drivers (never had an ATI card) would run faster in 32-bit kernels because of their previous experience with Windows (32-bit), but I'm not sure what the difference, if any, is today.

 

You could always use 64bit on the desktop. But you suffered from reduced media functionality when you did so, unless you really hacked at it. I had it on my old Athlon64 M6805 laptop, but it was just too much of a pain to do what I wanted to do with it. I primarily want to use my computer, I only secondarily want to configure it to do what I want.

As for performance, some things in 64bit will run faster, some things slower, but overall it's about at parity. Check the benchmarks

 

If only the inquirer was more reputable. As it stands now people will think they lied and everything is difficult

Hooray for Linux though. All us real users know how easy it can be

 

I guess that's why I never had a problem before; I always used Automatix before Feisty, so it installed automatically. But now I'm trying to do things in the more "supported' way so I'm going back to installing all this stuff by hand... my first Linux machine didn't have a DVD drive so libdvdcss wasn't required.

 

Ubuntu Feisty Beta took me < 15 mins to install (not counting the time it took to download and burn the CD from ISO)...so I'm not at all surprised that it was done for someone else in < 30 mins...

It came with some eye candy ready to go "Desktop Effects" via Compiz. All drivers were good to go without any work on my end.

 

Well, that guy did include the time needed to assemble the computer from parts he just got. Thats pretty damn good!