Re: I Want to identify best Linux approach, and any pitfalls.

Dances With Crows wrote: 
On Mon, 30 Jan 2006 18:09:40 +0000, The Natural Philosopher staggered
into the Black Sun and said:

The machine will be run as a wired networked machine with one MAC OS9
and one PC Win 98SE on a local network, behind a NAT router [attached]
to the Internet. I am happy with nearly all of the networking issues -
atalk and samba etc.


MacOS 9?  Glutton for punishment, eh?


No, married. Oh. Yes, Its the same isn't it?

Printers will be an ageing Laserjet 6P (already networked: Talks
LPR)and a HP designjet 650C large format inkjet...parallel only that
one..be mice if [the] Mac [could] talk to it though..ghostscript?


There's nothing in the atalkd manuals about printing from OS 9 clients.
I've never tried that, since I rarely print stuff anyway.  If the old
Mac can talk to a Samba printer, no problem.  Check your MacOS software,
since that's probably where the problems will show up.

Printing is fine - MAC OS9 understands LPR/LPD. Well almost anyway - and will spit out a postcript stream over it.



I will need some form of CD-ROM or DVD burning for backups and data
exchange.

k3b, works well for CD-R(W) and DVD+-R(W) AFAICT. 

Thx.


I'd like to play DVD's as well, but I understand there are issues. 

xine or vlc or ogle.  No problems using xine here.  You'll have to
install libdvdcss, but the RIAA aren't going to go after you for that.
For video that isn't on DVD, mplayer/gmplayer works well.

Ok..so there is ripped libraries around that dare not be sold or openly given away..?


Ideally I'd like to use an integrated cheap motherboard with Intel
graphics chips. Built in sound and networking etc.


"Cheap" is the *LAST* thing you should look for in a motherboard.  In
x86 machines, the motherboard is the thing that's the most difficult to
diagnose problems with, and the thing that's the most difficult to
replace.  Also, Intel's graphics chips suck.  If you want hardware
accelerated 3D (for playing games, mostly), you want an nVidia card.
Most NICs work without a problem.  Many onboard sound chips work, but I
always see people reporting funny problems with the latest Intel 8x0
whatever that's just slightly different from the 33 previous versions
and won't be fully supported until the next stable kernel release.


Cheap as in inexpensive,not cheap as in utter crap. I don't want to play games: At best I want to watch video, and do slow high res still graphics work.


What I need is a desktop that is as near Win98 as I can get, without
[excessive] configuration.


?  Linux is not Windows and never will be.  KDE behaves fairly similarly
to Windows by default, and it can be made to look a lot like Windows,
but there are and will always be differences at low levels.  The sooner
you get that, the happier you'll be with your Linux system.


Thats no problem..what I mean is that mouse actions are not as hugely arcane as they can be with X..like moving a cursor over a window makes it active - Yuk. I want to click to make it active - stuff like that.

Firefox NEARLY works, but some sites I use daily require IE6 rendering
engine and Java implementation.  What else is there?  Mozilla with IE6
rendering?


I.Exploder rendering is only available via I.Exploder, which doesn't
exist for Linux.  If this is a deal-breaker for you, you will not be
happy with Linux.

No, its available on Mozilla (Nestcape 8?)..not sure if that is operable on Linux platform. No..seems not.



I want to scan in stuff on my HP Scanjet 4100C...it LOOKS like there
is support for this at least.


xsane, probably.  It'll be on your distro CDs, and sane-project.org says
the 4100C is completely supported.  Anything that has a SANE backend
should be controllable from Gimp as well.


Thats all I ned. Definite tick there then.


I have a Nikon Coolpix camera with USB interface...I'd really like to
be able to pull images off that and delete them on it


Most USB cameras behave as Mass Storage Devices.  Just plug the camera
in, mount it, and treat it like a disk.  Some cameras have alternative
interfaces, and those alternative interfaces are supported by the
gphoto2 library and/or GUI frontends like digikam.

Ok there are low level drivers that recognise a USB device as 'storage' then? one can define a device as a USB storage device..?


Any discussion on CAD and 'artistic' drawing programs that run native
would be of extreme use. I will pay for the [right] software here as
this is something I use a fair bit.

No idea about CAD. What do you mean by "artistic" here? Vector-based?

Not especially..no. there is a huge overlap, but in general CAD cares more about exact dimensions and very little about appearance of the drawings..whereas artistic stuff will have a lot of features for e.g. textures and shadings..and some moves that disturb and distort things - like wrapping text round a circle for example..if you like its the difference between a graph done on graph paper and a pie chart...:-)


Apart from that of course a decent C, C++ and maybe Java development
[environment] is needed.


vim/emacs, make, ctags.  eclipse or kdevelop if you think you need a
GUI.

What I am hoping that you can help me with is deciding which hardware
NOT to get (more than identifying the correct best spec units) and
identifying anything that WON'T work.


Avoid anything made by PCChips.  I've had good luck with Abit and Asus
motherboards.  Athlon64 is the way to go for best bang/buck.  Integrated
video cards are usually terrible.  Integrated sound can be a crapshoot.

Mmm. I had hoped that sticking to a generic Intel board would be good..

Specifically this one..

http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d845gvsr/index.htm

I am leaning towards SUSE Linux, but have no particular religion -
used Debian and Redhat in the past.


I've heard that SuSE's documentation has gone downhill a great deal.  If
you're feeling confident and you have a decent Net drop (> ISDN), try
the Debian netinst CD--the installation process has improved
tremendously with the ncurses-menu-driven thing they're using.

Mmm. I don't have a problem either downloading or getting Linux up..nothing could be worse than Interactive Unix 386....however I don't have a ROM burner so getting the download on will require assistance from friends :-) Only the NEW machine will have that.



Plus any extra software that would be needed to get functionality up
to roughly what I have here, without crashing...


?  Was the list in your first message a complete list of your
requirements?  If it wasn't complete, complete it.  If it was complete,
I commented on everything that I had knowledge about.  HTH anyway,


Pretty much a full list - thanks for responding. I'd appreciate a comment on that motherboard. As I said, this is less a games machine than a working home office desktop, and I'm on a limited budget. I'd prefer to use a board from my local supplier, simply because we have a 15 year relationship of no questions asked top quality support..he doesn't do AMD..

If I do go for an outboard video card..I have heard that ATI are not hugely compatible..he does XFX cards as well...and one thing I might want to do is go for a 3 meter video cable using digital video (DVI) to an LCD...so I could build the machine into a 19" rack rtather than have it on or under the desk? Pie in the sky?


.

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