Too bad you haven't actually tried to install a recent distribution. RH7.1
is what, four or five years old? You'd find that modern Linux
distributions are indeed simple to install and MUCH more robust than
anything MS has ever offered. I find that the included software,
OpenOffice, AbiWord, Gnumeric, Gnucash, GIMP - provide me with all the
capability I need. Only thing outstanding is a greeting card program. Will
be setting up WINE to run an MS version this week (this is my wife's big
thing, not mine).
Hi,
'Linuxly', I started off with Mandrake Linux 6.0, and have used
Linux-Mandrake 9.0, 10.0, 10.1 and, currently, 10.2 (somewhere in there it
changed to Mandriva). But now I'm thinking of throwing in the towel and
switching to Windows XP. Although Linux is great for quite a few things
(with respect to the normal home user) for 'funky' stuff, like streaming
your webcam, it's a no-no (all software of which is incredibly involved,
99% of instances lacks a GUI, and doesn't work after you have spent hours
trying to understand and configure it). No, for fun stuff (wait a minute,
though, a webcam can be used for serious monitoring in a security
situation) it's got to be Windows. Or a Mac.
Yours,
Gary Hayward.
Linux is just a kernel, the rest of the distro is the packaged programs.
Those packaged programs are basically all the same, bar a few config
utils.
I advise you get a small distro that has everything on tap such as
debian.
Linux is not known for it's games, but instead of more for professional
use in an organisation where people actually have to do things.
Tell us what it is exactly that sucks about it and we'll try and help
you out.
--
Regards, Ed :: http://www.s5h.net
:%s/\t/ /g :: proud unix system person
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
> Although Linux is great for quite a few things
> (with respect to the normal home user) for 'funky' stuff, like streaming
> your webcam, it's a no-no (all software of which is incredibly involved,
> 99% of instances lacks a GUI, and doesn't work after you have spent hours
> trying to understand and configure it). No, for fun stuff (wait a minute,
> though, a webcam can be used for serious monitoring in a security
> situation) it's got to be Windows. Or a Mac.
I have a Creative Webcam Pro Ex running on SuSE 10.0, though the image is
160 x 120. Now that xvidcap has been improved, it might be possible to
record output from an IP Web Cam; I'm going to try this.
--
Robert T. Kopp
http://analytic.tripod.com
For security camera stuff, Linux actually has two excellent packages,
Motion (http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome) and
ZoneMinder (http://www.zoneminder.com/) The latter we use a work, and it
rivals some of the commercial offerings that have 4 figure pricetags.
The former is a simpler program but still very effective.