Camarade_Tux

So you installed Linux and want to become a l33t g33k now? This is for you! But first, pay attention: if you want to become a \/\/4RRI0r then you musn't use linux but bsd! I won't write everything I plan to now so there'll be some empty sections. Don't hesitate to contribute; the goal is not to create a wifi or 3D-acceleration thread nor to write exhaustive things but to help people set their linux to get a friendly OS, sometimes by simply giving links. Copy&Paste with your mouse: WARNING: have something to check gpm is daemon that automatically copies what you select with your mouse and lets you paste it later; provides a nice and easily accessible second clipboard. It is installed on most distributions and ran on startup so you can use it without bothering more. However, it is rarely correctly set to handle the touchpad on a laptop. Add "-2" to command-line starting gmp; remove "-3" if present. /usr/sbin/gpm -m /dev/mouse -t ps2 -2 WiFi with ndiswrapper and DriverPacks: ndiswrapper lets you use windows drivers for wifi under linux. The problem is then to find drivers for windows. Just get DriverPacks-LAN; it's less than 7MB, you'll find all the drivers you need. Extract with p7zip and use grep to get your driver. Put the .inf and corresponding .sys int the same folder. Finally install it with ndiswrapper -i your_driver.inf You can now access your card with "wifi0". note: ndiswrapper is tagged as buggy and root of kernel panics. DO NOT use precompiled packages: download the source and compile it by yourself (./configure && make && make install is perfect); remember it ships a kernel module. Extend your laptop's battery life: Eye-candy: translucency and 3D support: nlite kde: Basic shell tricks: Recompile your kernel: Vim regex multi-line search&replace:

DDR3 is useful for power consumption: up to DDR2, memories would see 0 and 1 as if voltage is below or over certain threshold. DDR3 understands "if voltage varies enough" and this helps lower voltages. Plus, However, it's true DDR3 won't give you any performance boost atm, or at too high price.

This section really lacks stickies so why not start with a topic to index some linux distributions? Many people don't know which distribution to install just because there are too much choice, I think we can help there. Don't make it as long as the story as your life; the goal is too give an *idea* on which distribution will fit someone better. Slackware: Latest stable version: 12 (see this topic) Latest developpment version: 12; updates approximately twice a year Philosophy: Keep It Simple, Stupid; packages without dependancy checking Pros: lightweight and fast up-to-date configuration does not rely on graphical tools; useful when your graphical server is dead... ultra-stable 110% customizable Cons: installer lacks good repartionning tools (but has good partionning ones) OpenSuSe: Latest stable version: 10.2 Latest developpment version: 10.3alpha5, 10.3 stable planned for 04/10/07 Pros: up-to-date yast2, the easiest and most featured linux installation and configuration tool nearly perfect hardware support, including tv output, bluetooth, infrared, laptop power-management (better then XP's) all imaginable softwares have suse packages Cons: a bit heavy too many dependancies sometimes

Ubuntu7 should find it unless its kernel doesn't support serial mice (I configured and recompiled my kernel so many times I know nearly all* options). Do you have its .config? *OK, maybe not the 2000 options but at least a big part of them.

Newest available! Xorg7.2, KDE 3.5.7, apache has its new name (httpd), kernel 2.6.21.5 (latest), vim 7.002, udev, hal, xfce 4.4.1, gcc 4.2, pidgin. All of them are the latest available.

Slackware 12 has just been released. You can read the changelog and download the beast. Now, let's do some propaganda. You're not sure why you should download Slackware. It has the reputation of being harsh; configuration is text-based. Installer is said to be unfriendly and text based too. It's a distribution for hackers. Its package manager doesn't have dependancy support. It is too spartiate. It only has old packages. First, it's not harder to install Slackware than any other distribution and in fact, it's probably faster and easier. The only annoying thing is you don't have tools to easily resize an NTFS partition. But then? We all have such tools and for those who don't, just use those from another linux distribution. Installation is text-based. And what's the problem with that? Move with direction keys, select/unselect with space, validate with Enter. I've used (k)ubuntu, opensuse, gentoo and they all have graphical installers and all of them are laggy and choppy. Ever tried playing an action game with 3frames per second? It feels pretty the same. Slackware doesn't have this problem and you get in the real installation within seconds (opensuse first needs to load 72MB of data). Installation is quicker: boot, select your keymap, select the root partition, select the swap partition, select other partitions to be automatically mounted, tell which group of software you want, come back 10 minutes later (yes, that fast) and answer three or four questions. In expert mode which is really longer, I'm done with the installation in less than 20 minutes. Everything is text-based. Wrong. Many things are dialog-based which is text but has a good layout and never involves typing command lines. But it's true configuration also uses text files. Harder? Just thik about it: what's the difference between opening /etc/foo.conf in a text editor, modify the foobar line and opening kde/gnome control panel, go to foo configuration and modify the foobar box? Nothing except one is much faster to code so the coder can concentrate on other things. Its package manager does not handle dependancies. True. But do you really care? Did you know nearly every app has support for spell checkers so they are marked dependant on these spell checkers and that there are half a dozen of different spell checker available? Did you know in opensuse X is marked dependant on Firefox? If you install an application which has a dependancy which is not met, you will get an error message telling which program is needed so just install it. That easy, no need for dependancy checking which often lead to installing applications which will never serve. Packages are all up-to-date. From the kernel (2.6.21.5) to Xorg (7.2) and kde (3.5.7), everything is latest. And it is fast. 40 seconds to boot kde, on a *laptop*, with a really big kernel. Memory consumption is low. Networking is good. Hardware support is excellent.

And from the very beginning of the boot procedure. Btw, you probably know how painful wifi can be under linux. Ndiswrapper lets you use your windows driver under linux but you need to have a driver which is rarely the cases when you use live distros. ... Driverpacks anyone?

Why does nobody want to trust me? Linux has fast no drivers to download from a vendor's website. Not that it doesn't need; they're simply not available. Everything is stored either directly in the kernel, or in .(m)o files which are modules the kernel loads on demand (.o is for <kernel 2.4; .mo is for >kernel 2.6; don't ask me what happened to the 2.5 ) One problem with this is you may be unable to load a module needed to continue with booting. For example, you have linux installed on an ext2 partition and the ext2 support for your kernel is configured to be in a module. The module is located inside your ext2 partition. The problem is you can't read the module before you load ext2 support and you can't load ext2 support before you read the module. My point is missing modules (drivers are usually modules) happens quite often under linux and it won't cause the computer to crash. Could you please try to boot on slackware 12? You may be scared but I'm not telling you to install it; just to boot on it (type hugesmp.s at the prompt and if it doesn't work, try with huge.s).

Post ratings can be handy because many msfn threads are dozens of pages long (and that's already with a high number of posts per page). I think we (the most active posters) should make an effort and massively rate. The first example which comes to my mind is nlite: many people quote their lastsession.ini and therefore their posts contain all the possible keywords and this pollutes search a lot. But I'm not sure how ratings should be interpreted. I don't like the idea of giving a score to a post; it just feels like giving a score to the poster. :/ However I do like the idea of being able to help with searches so it comes down to "Do we simply rate posts or do we rate posts to help other people find information?". It seems Martin L and xper are for the second answer but most people, including me, don't and for me, it's not volontary. It's clear we're not used to this; it's really too manichean atm. We should maybe agree on some standards: -1: should be excluded from search -2: not very useful -3: may help, may not; average -4: good post, helps a lot; should be seen -5: excellent post, make it frontpage! Also, there might be a problem because rates will appear after only one vote. Could this be delayed? I mean, hide it until a second (not more) member votes. And would it be possible to have some ponderation: give more weight to rates by big posters (something like one per thousand posts)? Last, I think there's no point for this outside tech sections so could it be disabled there? In some sections, we will of course argue (without killing anybody) and post ratings will only deserve such arguments. Rating should not be seen as a Ditto/+1/plussoyer* post; it's not how much you agree with the post, it's how much the post helps. Hope this helps. *we (French people) made "+" a verb. PS: btw, I can't give any rating in Konqueror (don't tell me to use Firefox or Opera): when I try, the dropdown list appears and I can chose how many blue stars I want to give but then clicking is effectless and if I move my cursor, the number of blue stars still changes. (Konqueror and Safari use the same rendering engine: KHTML; IIRC, Konqueror is very strict on valid javascripts/html/css)

Well, you've never met me, I suppose. I have about a 4.2 GPA. On a 0-4 scale, thanks to having some classes with weighted grades. Also, though I don't know everything about computers, I know a lot more than most people (people on this board do not count as "most people" ). Good at reading and the registry . Now most people I hang out with are either somewhat good at school and ok at computers or ok at computers and real good at school. But I do know several who are good at both. So nerd could be either, I suppose. I smell a poll coming... nerd or geek? What do they mean to you? Oh, and my school isn't technology-focused. Hardly any tech-related classes. Intro to Microsoft Office! Yipee... all stuff I knew long ago. And besides, who uses office 2000 any more? Not speaking about myself but I know at least two persons in this case. And probably even worse. First, a friend of mine, really good at school and at computer science and who has an immense SF/heroic fantasy culture. Second, my physics teacher. Same thing but can also sing Lord Of The Rings sings (and pretty well ;p). ROFL

I see. For the compilation thing, I just thought it would be a bit cleaner and whether gcc size optimizations were efficient. Moreover, I wanted to see how much work had to be done to port a basic app to mingw. Quick but it seems gcc compiled ASCII C while the code contains non-ASCII things so it could have been quicker. Btw, my binary is 3354o, no matter the level of optimization I use (-O2 [level2], -Os , or even -O3 [level 3] which is said to be space hungry). Now, let's go back to my package manager for windows.

sherpya, do you know the origin of that file? I know unshield comes from the SynCE project (I've looked at it many times), but I've never found a native version of it before that doesn't require cygwin. This is a really good find, and I'd like to make sure I credit both the original author(s) at the SynCE product as well as the porter. And yeah, I know it's been a while since you posted that. Hopefully you're still following this thread. :-) Maybe he's not but I think I can answer: there are two main ways to run linux/unix apps under windows. The first one is cygwin which aims at providing full support for unix apps, no matter the speed. The other one is mingw32 which iirc is a fork from cygwin which focuses on performance first. Both produce native apps but mingw-compiled apps do not need any dll file. I have a working mingw environnement here; just give me a sourcecode and I can compile it for you. =) edit: I downloaded the source; there's a compilation problem but it seems minimal. I'll see if I can optimize it for size. And before I forget: which file could I test it on?

Yes I know and am aware of your benchmarks. This just makes windows's registry cleaner. Plus it lets you configure some tweaks that historically had problems. It also has to do with the "a penny is a penny" philosophy (directly translated from French) and in OSes it has already proven to be efficient (XP in 130MB on CD and 370MB installed; slackware on 580MB with all media and 3D stuff...). Oh, forgot to say: fun.

What I meant was mostly we can write such a word in a post without trying to insult anybody, including yourself, but just by not paying crucial attention to every single word you write. Anyway, you're the boss so you're right.

I also use RocketDock. It's up-to-date, maintained, fast, configurable and beautiful. The only drawback is it's free. What, it's not a drawback? From the performance point of view, under the most demanding conditions I could create, it used 1GHz of CPU power. This was really under the most demanding conditions. For normal use, it is less than 300MHz (and this seems to be during less than 1/3s). It's really light.

Added kwikpiks.com to host images.

Isn't filtering id*** a bit abusive? As far as I'm concerned, it's nearly a synonym for stupid and why wouldn't I say I made something stupid?

They use PAE: memory addresses are stored on 64-bit instead of 32-bit, just like on 64bits systems. Btw, there's a drawback of using PAE/64-bit: memory addresses use more space, i.e. more memory so in the end, you lose some memory. Theorically and experimentally, you lose around 30%. And windows is very bad on this point: as I have 2GB ram, pagefile is 3GB by default so I get 5GB of memory and therefore, windows switchs to PAE (there's another kernel for that :ntkrnlpa(mp).exe). Then I reduce swap so I go under 3GB but PAE is still enabled and I lose the 30%. But, you can still specify another kernel to use instead of ntkrnlpa(mp).exe; ntkrnlos.exe or ntkrnlmp.exe for instance. Conclusion: 3GB ram on 32bits systems is equivalent to 4GB on 64-bits/PAE systems.

Arghhh, (k/x)ubuntu. It's evil. Just get slackware current: light, fast, stable, customizable to the bone and no silly dependency checking. You should try audacious. It's light and plays a lot of formats. Pretty much the spirit of foobar2000 on windows. It depends on libglade and libxml2 (plus gtk2). Also, vlc/mplayer are excellent media players. PS: ever tried aaxine? (depends on libaa)

I'm updating the softwares and will send it to two friend of mine to beta test this weekend or at the beginning of next week. I'll also reinstall windows on two of my computers and then I can publish everything.

T-12, T-13 are times in windows installation. See msfn's unattended guide.

This is a general problem with Version 1.5. Version 1.4.2 worked perfectly. And sorry, I can't give you the links to the new hotfixes, because I requested them from support for some special problems. Can you tell us what TrID returns?

I haven't continued. School has eaten most of my free time. I don't know if I'll be able to do this during these holidays but I'll try.

Yup. Real holidays have just started this morning at 11:50. Everything seems to be stable since I, and not only I, have been running this happily for several months now. I've been terribly busy and in fact I could have released the files back in February but I wouldn't have been able to provide support, therefore I decided to postpone the release. So I only have to do some updates (softwares and MS updates), add one or two app and tweak a bit before release. Also, I've decided to create a package manager as many can be found under unix systems. Right now, I mostly have applications in 7z files and then at the end of install, a script to finish everything (shortcuts, settings...). Having things in two different places (if not three) is somehow unhandy. I won't create this before the first beta release of my project because I don't want to delay the release any more. But then, the package manager will feature installation, removal (7z files don't normally appear in "Add/Removes applications", they will), update (keeps personnal settings) and reinstallation of packages, some kind of dependency checking (mainly for .net apps but also for applications plugins), retrieval from a network repository (mainly web-repository in fact)... Btw, the license will probably be creative common's cc-by-nc(-sa) [Creative Common, by $author, Non Commercial, Share Alike] a bit modified to be able to get some money if an OEM would like to use it (who knows ) and to be precise about ads (*I* would be the only one to decide and there could only be ads on the website, during installation and in the package manager but there shouldn't be any unless this project costs me too much). So, stay tune.

But there may be some fixes. Moreover if it has no use for XP tweaks, it may have some for Vista.