The Linux Distro Thread (maybe)

[ej-solutions]

Thought I'd start this one off, rather than continue on another thread.

As a quick catch up for others:

Have a look at Unetbootin, as a means to try out different versions of Linux, without producing numerous coasters (unwanted CDs).
I haven't tried the method of installing to hard drive, only the USB flash drive method (so far).

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Just skimming the surface

Opinions/guidance expressed are intended to benefit the reader (mostly) but no responsibility should be assumed for the accuracy and no warranty is implied/expressed or given - so eBay may pull this post

[oxieman]

Thanks OE - off also.

If the "Change-over" runs more for days and days, it will run into me hols - so see ya 'as and when' - thanks again.

Oxie...

[otherego]

(Hopes oxie's enjoying his hols...)

Most Linux distros come with GIMP for graphic cleverness. I only use very simple functions, but recently found myself in a position where it was convenient to resize a whole lot of photos at once.

GIMP seems to be designed with clever script-writers in mind, and I'd no idea how to make it do this. The problem was easily solved:

sudo apt-get-install gimp-plugin-registry

Then, in GIMP,  Filters > Batch > Batch Process

and mess about with it. Worked a treat. More here - lots of other gen on the internet, too:

http://linuxforums.org.uk/index.php?topic=862.0

[otherego]

Having just sung the praises (and otherwise) of a recent Windows 8 preview, I thought I should also mention that I've installed Mint 15 on one of the eBay laptops. (1.5 GHz dual-core CPU and 2Gb of RAM. One of my powerhouses. You may stop sniggering at the back.)

It's delightful. Fast, stable, light on resources and pretty intuitive.

I honestly suspect that anyone using Windows XP (or probably even Windows 7) would find it easier to switch to Mint 15 (or any current version) than to W8 or W 8.1.

A shame that the "intermediate" distros have such a short support period, but at least enthusiast will always have the latest and greatest. Let's face it, it costs next to nothing to upgrade come end of support and most of the time, installing the system on / and data on /home means that one doesn't lose data or settings with an upgrade. (I know - still sensible to back up first...)

And the long term support versions now last five years, which is great. I'm very happy with Mint 13 Cinnamon on the marginally less ancient P$ desktop, and Mint 13 MATE on the even  older one.

But - I bet people continue to use Windows, regardless of the recently introduced complexities, just because.

[otherego]

P$ = P4, of course.

I blame the beer.

[otherego]

It's probably easy to become a little too complacent about the security of Linux. I see there's now a banking trojan written specifically for Linux.

Looks as if it's most likely to be introduced to a machine via e-mail or some form of social engineering. Considering how good the baddies have become at tricking computer-literate Windows users into compromising their machines, this is a bit of a worry

Having said that, I assume it's written for Ubuntu-based systems (which I use, darn it.) Not much point developing anything for the "rarer" distros, presumably.

Given how rare it is for anything to demand to be installed on Linux machines, any attempt is probably more likely to be noticed and treated for what it is than would be the case on a Windows computer. You'd also have to provide your password. A useful extra stage to make one stop and think.

More here, together with some interesting comments:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/08/linux_banking_trojan/

[oxieman]

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@otherego wrote:

(Hopes oxie's enjoying his hols...)

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I certainly did; Quite a bit to catch up on OE.

Things have changed dramatically sinc dissapearing

Oxie...

[grumpy-cook]

Interesting article here on the HoT Linux trojan.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/hand-of-thief-malware-could-be-dangerous-if-y...

[otherego]

Interesting that there seem to be enough Linux desktops around to justify this sort of effort on the part of the baddies. Bit of a pain. One of my personal sins is a tendency to add PPAs for things I find useful (Remastersys, which I noticed the other day is on the way out, and suchlike.) Not always easy to be sure what is safe. At least there's some effort involved to install the wretched thing, but Android seems to have shown that if you offer the happy users lots of "apps," they will happily "Click Here." This must help grow the malware beasties for non-Windows machines. (I know Android isn't always considered proper Linux, but I think its kernel is still essentially the Linux one.) Interesting times. Looks as if we need to think before acting. How depressing.

[otherego]

Mint 13 Cinnamon 32-bit.

I installed a program ("Moodle," via Synaptic).

Both Synaptic and the "software manager" say it's installed, but there's no sign of it when I look for it. Typing "Moodle" - or "moodle" - in the search window produces nothing; searching "all applications" likewise.

Trying to launch it via the terminal just tells me that the command doesn't make sense.

I've logged out and back in, and restarted a couple of times.

Any suggestions? I'm sure I've had a similar experience before, but can't remember the details, nor how I sorted it out.

[otherego]

Sorry - Mint 13 32-bit.

[grumpy-cook]

"Moodle - A free, open-source PHP web application for producing modular internet-based courses that support a modern social constructionist pedagogy."

It's a CMS, so you need a server. I imagine it's accessed through a web interface. I'm not really sure what it would have installed where via synaptic though.

[otherego]

I really should make the effort to find out more about networking at all levels. I don't even have my own computers talking to each other.

Moodle is supposedly usable on a machine it's installed on, just to mess around and try it out. Looking at my installation scribbles, it should be accessible, as you say, via the browser. The default URL is http://localhost/moodle/admin - I'd vaguely hoped that might do something, but it didn't.

(I think the truly clever/fanatical can set up an old computer to run it as a server and share with others - not quite ready for that, yet.)

I'll mess about some more this evening. More googling/searrchpaging required...

And one of these days I'l actually get somewhere on an on-line course.

Cheers, g-c. I'll persevere a little longer.

[ej-solutions]

To run Moodle on a PC/laptop you will need a LAMP stack (Google-it). There is not a standalone application version, AFAIK. I wrote a brief outline on setting up a LAMP (http://wiki.oscdox.com/v2.5/lamp) but there are many guides. The VirtualBox Turnkey LAMP 'appliance' is quick to setup and run. You'll need to learn a whole new skill-set though. 😉

[otherego]

Thanks for that, ej. I'll certainly look more closely.

I'm currently playing around with Moodle via a course they're offering on-line - no qualifications or anything; just a chance to have a look at how it works.

http://learn.moodle.net/

should anyone fancy a look. (Moodle's a "Virtual Learning Environment" - not Linux, but respectably open source.)

And remembering how I felt as a student three and a half decades ago when I kept missing deadlines.

Once that's past, I'll have another go at installing it.

You'll need to learn a whole new skill-set though. I might be mistaken, but I'm sure that wasn't a big deal twenty years ago...

[otherego]

A bit more on that Linux banking trojan (Hand of Thief):

http://www.zdnet.com/linux-hot-bank-trojan-failed-malware-7000020436/

and Linux's degree of vulnerability generally:

http://www.zdnet.com/linux-windows-and-security-fud-7000011417/

I suspect that online security involves being  increasingly suspicious about clicking on anything - and accepting that the bad guys are getting better and better at getting us to hand over the gen.

Still feel safer among the penguins, though.

[grumpy-cook]

An interesting article on Linux in schools here -

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/elibrary/case/british-school-switches-students-computers-linux-reducing-...

[blackburn_stevie]

Dear Lads & Lasses,

I'm looking to update the OS on an Acer laptop that currently runs Windows XP Pro.

As I see it, I have 2 choices. I can install Windows 7 Ultimate (I have all the software, instructions etc) or I can install the latest flavour of Linux. 

I don't play games on this laptop and my only use for it is as a web browser, using either Chrome or Firefox and using "Word" to create and edit documents. Now, here's where it gets tricky. To do that last bit, I want to use voice recognition software so that I can dictate messages, short bits of text and longer bits of text. To do this on a desktop PC I currently use Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking v6 but it is now a bit old so I have just bought IBM ViaVoice 10 (One version for the PC and another for my Mac Mini.

But will I be able to run ViaVoice on the laptop if I install a version of Linux? Also, if it IS doable, is there a preferred version of Linux to use?

Many thanks for any advice.

Steve

[otherego]

Hi, Steve.

To be honest, the simplest thing would be to stick with W7. And goodness, it hurts to say that.

Presumably, only a tiny percentage of  people use speech recognition software. A tiny percentage still adds up to enough Windows users to justify someone coming up with this sort of specialist app. A tiny percentage of Linux users probably doesn't always tempt developers.

If it's a retail version of W7 which can be readily transferred to another computer when your old Acer pops its clogs, that really might be the quickest and simplest solution.

If it's an OEM version which expires with the first machine it's installed on, then I'd be inclined to at least look at other options.

Here's a page with a little information on the sort of things you're after:

http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20120331032730675/SpeechTools.html

My impression is that they will all take a degree of work - might be mistaken there - be interesting to hear what you find.

Another possibility (I assume you're looking at getting rid of XP as its end of life/security updates approaches) might be to run XP in a virtual machine within Linux, using it purely for your voice recognition work. If there's no limit on installing your ViaVoice to more than one machine, or to transferring it if it doesn't work, this might be an easy option. You'd need to spend a little time getting to know something like VirtualBox, which is a virtual machine readily obtainable via the Ubuntu repositories - I'd assume it's also readily available for other distros. (I run it on Mint.)

Depends to an extent on how powerful your laptop is. I think you'd really want at least 2GB of RAM, assuming this is a 32-bit computer, and ideally a dual-core CPU.

VirtualBox allows stuff copied to a "guest" system to be pasted to the main computer, but I've not yet figured this out. Probably not hard - I've just had no need of it.

Ideally, you could use something like LibreOffice on the virtual machine, since that is what is likely to be provided by default in a current popular distro - avoids formatting oopses when you copy from the virtual machine to the "real" one.

Leaving clever voice recognition stuff aside, I'm very happy with Linux Mint. I'm using version 13. I'd suggest the MATE variety (I kid you not) for someone who mostly uses Windows, but the Cinnamon version is jolly pretty - needs a little more horsepower, though.

See what others suggest - folk like g-c and ej will be better qualified to comment.

[blackburn_stevie]

Hi there, OE.

Here are the specs of my laptop. It is an Acer Aspire 5920.

Processor / Chipset

• CPUIntel Core 2 Duo T7300 / 2.0 GHz
• Number of CoresDual-Core
• CacheL2 cache - 4.0 MB
• 64-bit ComputingYes
• Front Side Bus800.0 MHz
• ChipsetMobile Intel PM965 Express
• Platform TechnologyIntel Centrino Duo

Memory

• RAM2.0 GB ( 2 x 1 GB )
• Max RAM Supported4.0 GB
• TechnologyDDR2 SDRAM
• Speed667.0 MHz
• Slots Qty2
• Empty Slots0.0

I have a few feelers out to see if ViaVoice is compatible with any version of Linux and, depending on the replies, I'll probably instal either Ubuntu or Mint and give it a go. If it all goes mammary glands up, I can always scrap that idea and install Windows 7.

Either way, I'll let you know what happens, just don't hold your breath 'cos it may take a week or so to get it all up and running.

Cheers,

Steve.

[grumpy-cook]

IBM did actually produce a version of ViaVoice for Linux at one time, but they dropped it. From what I can, running it under Wine is problematic, although some people seem to have got it working I suspect it won't be a trivial matter.

It might be better to look at a native Linux speech recognition tool instead of VV. A fairly new one, Palaver, looks promising and has attracted a lot of interest. It uses the Google speech engine and seems relatively easy to set up on Ubuntu distros - see the link below for a tutorial and video. It looks to be an interesting little project, so I might even have a go myself if I can find my microphone.

http://www.muktware.com/2013/03/how-to-install-linux-speech-recognition-in-ubuntu/4158