OT: So How Would You Suggest a Confirmed Windows User Convert to Linux?

True, but for example anything USB I have tried works in this situation. Because linux only has to know about the USB port itself (which is standardized), the specialised device drivers are the windows ones in the windows VM. So something like a USB EPROM programmer with some proprietary windows front end works fine IME. I gather VirtualBox now has PCI pass-through, and I would expect that the parallel port can be similarly tamed.

Caveat: It is possible that security dongled software will not work, it has been specifically designed to break if the slightest thing looks "wrong".

Even *windows* runs better under linux! :)

E.g. Virtualbox only exposes a limited subset of hardware to Windows (plus devices you choose). So there are only a standardized, well tested drivers to load. You only use it occasionally for a few specific programs. So you don't need a virus scanner, continual java updates, two dozen useless tray icons also asking to be updated. This in itself means windows runs more smoothly for most things.

Yes this is fun. I also like to offer to buy a $10k program if they will sell it without a dongle.

Well, I think in reality you will spend at least as much time on it, maybe more. YMMV. But personally I find I don't *mind* so much with linux. I often end up sorting out laptops for people, I spend the day removing crapware, rootkits, doing endless virus scans. At the end I have a sore jaw because I realise I have been grinding my teeth all day...

Same crap under a different name.

Why is virtualization a time sink? If you have a CPU which supports it, it should work excellent. On my Linux machine Windows runs perfectly through Virtualbox. Copying text between Linux and Windows also works like a charm. Having two computers still requires switching between the two unless you use Xming to use the Linux computer through the Windows desktop.

I'm a big fan of Putty for that job.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Putty IS the de facto std now.

Text only is a bit of a problem when working on video or images.

I hate "image" with a passion. Direct,exact COPY is so much faster, much less complicated, and

Took me a couple of weeks, fifteen years ago.

Never looked back.

I want a 'box' (read virtual) to 'run' my Geo based fractal software on.

Otherwise, I have to break out a pretty old piece of hardware.

I have it working, but the dang emulators do not have decent graphics emulation to "give the appearance of" to the application being run.

So I get a lower res window than I ever had back when I actually ran it.

I beg to differ. I was doing cloning and dd disk copies to a 2nd drive for many years and had many problems.

1. Copying to a larger drive will work, but not to a smaller drive.
2. Copying to a larger drive creates a partition equal in size to the original source partition. In order to use the rest, I needed to us Gparted to resize the partition.
3. Most dd type utilities will trip over bad sectors during a copy. The only one that comes close is GNU ddrescue. Using various Windoze disk cloning programs has worked well for Linux because these know how to deal with bad sectors.
4. Cloning the drive gives you exactly one chance to recover from a problem on your original drive. If you make the same dumb mistake on the cloned drive, you have nothing to fall back upon if the cloned drive ends up equally trashed.
5. Many drives have unwanted partitions that really don't need to be backed up. For example, I don't really need a copy of the swap partition.
6. My guess(tm) is that keep about 150 machines of assorted denomination alive for customers. I make it a practice of backing up their machines before and after I clean up their mess. This is strictly to cover my posterior in case of a problem. The ability to reuse the backup for a 2nd try, even if it's full of malware and junkware, has made the effort worthwhile. Average speed is about 1GB per minute, so it's not much of a timer burner.
7. With 150 machines, I don't want 150 backup drives floating around the office. Well, maybe I'm already there: At this time, I have a small assortment of 500GB and 1TB USB and NAS drives reserved for such image backups.

If you insist on making cloned duplicates of your drive, I strongly suggest you make more than one, just in case your hopefully verified backup fails to function.

It isn't text only. You need an X server, which you get from Cygwin/X, but it's much easier to make it work from Putty IME.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

a lot of stuff is subtly different. The command line operates on an entirely different principle, and almost all the commands have different names.

XP running in virtualbox or vmware can access USB devices directly

probably.

Some vendor supplied drivers are junk. I encountered a UPS last week where the vendor driver required an ISA serial (which I didn't have) port (and an X86 processor which I did).

Nut (generic posix UPS driver) could probably handle it but I didn't have time to reverse engineer the hardware interface, so left it uninstalled.

wine runs ltspice really well. well enough that I've not investigated the two native schematic capture and spice packages that I know of.

but yeah some things don't work well at all.

Easiest way is to just buy it and try it... often the vendors don't know. and like the aforementioned UPS sometimes the support isn't. (I guess the UPS driver would be fine on a 486 with an ISA serial port)

well, I've had firefox decide to use 110% of the ram a couple of times and turn the GUI to molasses, probably my fault for not disabling flash.

yeah, two machines with file-sharing and vnc set up both ways is probably a good start

Don't think it hs a terminal. install putty, it does telnet too (also missing from win7) and ssh (very useful around linux).

yeah, I don't use it unless someone sends me an office document. gnumeric is a better spreadsheet

You don't need a video card at all for either method, there are better solutions, but VNC is the easiest to deploy.

that even Nautilus (the rough Linux equivalent of Windows Explorer) seems to be a better file copier than Windows Explorer itself...

That's the way it's often used but not what it is. you don't need special software to do disk image copies on linux, eg. you can use cp (rough equivaqlent of copy/xcopy) or cat (rough equivalent of type), anything that can pump bytes from one place to another can do it.

Phil or anyone else, Can't seem to get onto tangbu or xx, would you mind posting a reference?

Yep, if you're interacting with large corporations, then being able to talk native Windoze is a must. The few times I've foolishly done stuff on open office and emailed it off to big corporate clients it's bitten me in the bum. Simple stuff works OK, but you don't have to dig very deep to encounter snags, such as diagrams that don't show up in the target environment.

Phil scrambled things up a bit there, but I found:

reverse engineer

I'm amazed at how casually linux users make statements like the above. When I'm in the market for a driver, or any application software, the term "reverse engineer" never enters my mind. ANYTHING that is not "click to install and it just works" is grounds for immediate dismissal.

That's my pet peeve with the linux desktop computing environment. Anybody can make a distro and put in anything they want. Apps get written by someone who has a need. Somebody else tweaks it to meet THEIR need. Then somebody else...again and again and again. Maybe it works in YOUR installation, maybe it meets YOUR need, maybe not...nobody really cares. Instead of making stuff that is fully compatible across the board, the developers put the burden on the poor user to figure out how to make something work.

And it's different on the next distro or the next release of your current distro. Don't like the window manager or the editor or the music player or...just wait...it'll be different at the next release.

Developers fix it once. OR Users fix it a zillion times. Chaos OR Compatibility? Which would you rather have?

Most computer users are interested in performing a task. They don't have the skills or desire to go on a scavenger hunt to fix their linux.

The business model, free, is flawed when applied to the desktop computer. Why would anybody expend the effort to make something work to give it away when they can make 70-cents a pop at the app store? As more developers reach that conclusion, it's gonna be harder to find linux desktop apps.

The signal for linux being ready for general desktop use is when you can go into Best Buy and find "linux compatible" on the label for most every box of hardware and software...where "linux compatible" means you can stick it on ANY recent version of ANY linux distro and it just works. You don't have to charge money for the service, but you do have to organize linux like a business with users to satisfy and attention to cooperation, compatibility, consistency and ease of use. Users and developers need a fixed target. With the current environment, hardware vendors just can't afford the support costs associated with that label, even if the hardware would work, most of the time.

I don't see that changing.

Having said that, I do find linux to be an interesting hobby. Whenever I'm bored and it's raining outside and there's nothing on TV, I put on a helmet to protect my head when I bang it on the wall and fire up the linux box. Yes, there's lots of stuff I could do with my linux box, just no motivation to rewrite all my programs and waste a hundred watts of power.

Nothing on TV, so I think I'll go take another stab at making GAMBAS3 talk to GPIB. Good Times.

the hardware interface, so left it uninstalled.