I beleive mplayer has some limited wmv capabilities, and quicktime emulation as well.

mplayerhq.nu

Well, tradition for most Linux vendors and the OSS community in general is to fix security holes as soon as they are found. This usually means you see updates roll out quite often. In contrast, microsoft lets their security fixes wait till their next scheduled update. I think they are finally getting better about this, but they havnt regained my trust yet. I used to work for Red Hat so I might be biased;)

I dont know the procedures that ubuntu sets up by default to keep your system updated, but it is based on debian, wich has the apt-get system for managing installs and updates. Keeping your system updated is as simple as running one command (sudo apt-get -u upgradel, i beleive).. and if they are smart, it does this in the background once or twice a day. Can anyone confirm that?

Fedora and Red Hat both come out of the box by default with up2date (yum for fedora) scheduled to check for security updates etc, and install the quietly in the background while you use your computer so you dont have to ever think about it.

How can you play battlefield 2 if you give up XP..

microsoft has nothing to worry about, a few geeks install linux doesn't hurt there market. everyone said Linux will cause the end of Win NT didn't happen. most fortune 500 companies perfer Win NT over linux, the top 5 sites on the net are running NT servers

What top 5 sites are you talking about..

1. Yahoo - BSD

2. MSN - Obvious

3. Google - Proprietary Custom OS

great you just increased the amount of people not using windows by .0000001%

and even better one less person now knowing how to use windows without fucking it up.

:) what kind of work do you do on your pc besides posting on the board?

so is linux a good substitute for XP or are you very limited? for example editing movies, photoshoping, downloading files from torrents, playing new games, voice and video chatting over skype/ICQ/msn/ventrilo etc.. ? and other various stuff ppl do? Is it like a mac, you can do everything but you'll feel like a retard the first couple of weeks? :P what's the downsides?

I've used GIMP before and it's nothing like photoshop unfortunatly.

If you're still experimenting and getting used to it, you should also take a look at Mandriva. http://www.mandriva.com/en/download

You can get a "live" version as well as full installs there. Very easy installation and 90% of what you need to do webmaster work is already there. Also extremely easy to install and update with their RPM system, just like running windows update.

Congrats!

Editing movies

Not a whole lot out there for linux in that area (that i know of, i dont know anything about editing movies).


Photoshop equivilant

The GIMP. If you love photoshop you'll probably hate the gimp, but its a lot more powerful than photoshop guru's like to give it credit for. It is good for a casual photo editors needs


Torrents

Yes, lots of options.


Games

You can use use codeweavers, but its more trouble than its worth IMHO. Few games support linux out of the box, but it seems to be changing slowly. Id releases all their games for linux (quake series, doom series etc). Off the top of my head World of Warcraft runs on linux, the Unreal series games, and Neverwinter nights. People have gotten Half-life 2 and the orignal running with codeweavers. I'm sure there are more, but dont count on most games being linux compatible.


Skype/ICQ/AIM etc

Yes, yes, yes and yes. The trickiest part is buying a web cam that has linux drivers.

hmm

the other pages all have download links except this one...

yeah, i like it, it was good, but i had to switch back to windows on this system... but i installed it on my new laptop, i do my main work ont his computer and as good as mplayer is and shit, it wasn't supporting wmv very well... 70% of the videos i opened were just sound, and its hard to do my job if i can't see the picture

Not this shit again. Microsoft may have the home PC market cornered, but they are shit as far as servers are concerned; most of the world's servers run Apache on a Linux or UNIX distribution:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/we...er_survey.html

this is some experiment? i you sure you like it?

I am running Ubuntu 6.06LTS with Win2000 Professional on VMWare server (free) for Photoshop and Dreamweaver and EditPad Pro ...

With VMWare Tools installed, my Photoshop CS2 is much faster and responsive than it was on dedicated XP ...

I can open Win2000 fullscreen on one virtual desktop, and have my main linux desktop on another ... and toggling from Windows to Linux is easy as shit .... CRTL + ALT :thumbsup

One of the COOLEST features is the ability to SUSPEND the Windows Virtual Machine ... even when you power down your PC, once you reboot into linux, your Windows VM reloads with all your previous settings in about 4 seconds!

For all you XP users who are afraid to make the leap to Linux because of certain windows only apps, FUCK WINE OR CROSSOVER OFFICE - running a full Windows install in VMWare Server is SO FUCKING MUCH BETTER than even a dual boot !!!!!!!! :thumbsup :pimp :thumbsup

i always wanted to get rid of windows for linux, got around to it once, i guess for what i do now online i could [very little adult now]

agreed and agreed!

Seriously...on a side note I really like the easy of exporting word/write documents to pdf with openoffice...nice quality, easy breasy...

I have an old copy of Lindows 4.0 I'm pretty happy with...the next linux desktop I was considering playing with is xandros. Plug in, install, done...bundled WITH wine and some other setup that allows for fast installation of those 'must have' windows aps...

:thumbsup

WINE only runs PS 7.0

If you try to run CS2 in WINE, your system will freeze up if you right click a layer, as well as many other known issues - if you can even get it to run ...

See my previous post for a MUCH BETTER solution ..

I always have VMware running for StatsRemote :thumbsup

was going to say that he will be back to windows in a day or two..but it sounds like he is already back lol

Update on Linux. Tried Suse 10.1. Not bad, but I just installed Linux on the Ubuntu distribution and found it way easier to use and manage.

Highly recommend Ubuntu.com if you want to get off Windows.

You forgot myspace. Well win 2003. :)

Yeah, microsoft has never done anything wrong. Its all the applications fault. Yeah.

Firefox is on the verge of bringing about the end to IE. People make that switch with much less thought because its a whole lot easier. They'll switch away from Windows too, but it will take much longer because thats a much more painful switch.

I think I may well be in a huge minority here....
but I've *never* used Windows in my life.

First started on an Acorn BBC, then moved over to a mainframe doing everything on Vax clusters, then shifted to SGI/Irix, then to Mac (OS7-9) and now am on Macs running OS X and el cheapo white boxes running BSD and linux.

Am I alone here?

and to add, my family's firewall is served by an old 386 booted from a 3.5" floppy and the old 6400 Performa Mac (both circa 1997) is also still running fine, serving the family disk server (750GB) but running Suse PPC.

Why recycle puters when they can be put to good use!

If you want to play with linux and try it out first, Knoppix has a bootable cd, or download.:thumbsup
http://www.knoppix.org/

cool, i'm starting to get into linux too :)

Couldn't agree more. Further, I've read that Open Office 3 will be released before the years' end to run natively on OS X. No more X Windows - it'll be a native OS X app. That'll hit the MDU at Microsoft hard.

ubuntu.com's instillation cd you boot up via the cd, and you can either run it to test it out, or install it

i use windows since Win 3.1 in 1994 or 1995, i know where i find everything on the system, i know what might be wrong when something strange happens, i even did support for Windows for a while and build networks.

all the programs i need run on Windows - like video editing and encoding, dreamweaver, photoshop, outlook

i got two Win 2003 server here that run without any hassle since 2 years now - just a reboot from time to time after updating. and we have about 7 or 8 Win XP clients

of course i tried Linux from time to time - but everythings that's just an easy doubleclick away on Windows (like installing programs, drivers, new drives etc.) requires hours and hours for me on Linux to figure out how it works.

so there's no way i ever switch to Linux as my desktop system - i got no time for learning everything all over again.

:2 cents: