Alternative Operating Systems

[Garibaldi]

I was just wondering what other oses besides windows and mac are out there, and what is worth trying out or not. I already an running linux (topologilinux, a special flavor of Slackware) and really like it. I would like to try BeOS too but the live-cd won't work on Athon XP processors, which is what I have. I wish there was a way to make a live-cd for Athlon XP (or an image install, something that doesn't require repartitioning), maybe from the BeOS Max version. Anyway, if you know of some alternative oses, could you give your opinions and post links for downloads?
Thanks.
Garibaldi

[DereX888]

XP Home is a cheaper alternative to XP Pro...

[Garibaldi]

XP Home is a cheaper alternative to XP Pro...

True. You could also buy 2000 rather than XP.

[bazooka]

XP Home is a cheaper alternative to XP Pro...

True. You could also buy 2000 rather than XP.

But why would you buy 2000, when microsoft has already stated that certain patches would be xp only, leaving 2k users out?

The 2k support cycle is going to expire soon.

[Garibaldi]

But why would you buy 2000, when microsoft has already stated that certain patches would be xp only, leaving 2k users out?

The 2k support cycle is going to expire soon.

Some users prefer 2k to xp, but I'm not one of them (I'm not sure why). I would like this thread to be mainly about oses other than Windows, Mac, or Linux variants.

[bazooka]

I was thinking about trying syllable.

[glockjs]

i heard DOS is pretty solid these days

seriously though anybody had any experience with suse?

[bazooka]

I do.

I prefer Fedora though.

[Garibaldi]

I was thinking about trying syllable.

Is that an os? If so do you have a link?

As far as dos, what about something with a gui, not all command line?

[bazooka]

Yes, it is an OS.

Here is the link
http://syllable.sourceforge.net/

[Garibaldi]

PostPosted: Nov 10, 2004 19:36
Yes, it is an OS.

Here is the link
http://syllable.sourceforge.net/

Thanks- I'm downloading the livd-cd now to try it out.

Have you ever heard of or used QXN? If so what do you think (is it worth downloading)?

www.qnx.com

What about ReactOS?
www.reactos.com

[bazooka]

Never tried those

[Garibaldi]

I tried the Syllable live-cd- it would boot up to the GUI and then give an error with network config. The mouse and keyboard wouldn't work. I am now trying the QEMU version.

[Garibaldi]

I cannot get my mouse to work in syllable- my keyboard works though. Any ideas on how to get it working?

[tekkieman]

seriously though anybody had any experience with suse?

I'm getting ready to try that now. I have the live dvd, but I need to move the dvd drive to my new server. Everything I've read so far looks great.

[glockjs]

im about ready to try a new OS. yeah xp has more features and this and that but it seems they are just pilein more and more on to the point where a big bad new puter cant even rip stuff up like it's supposed to. i wanna see somebody else beat M$ to the punch for 64bit puters. that would be awesome and a good time to take them down.

[Garibaldi]

I'm getting ready to try that now. I have the live dvd, but I need to move the dvd drive to my new server. Everything I've read so far looks great.

I tried out the suse live-eval cd, and personally I found it a little too GUI heavy for my tastes. Its great- but you can get virtually the same thing (with Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, Vector, ect ect) for free. The only difference that I could see is that Suse really customizes the menus and such- for instance instead of having K3b as a menu choice, it has been renamed to CD/DVD Burning- which makes it easier to tell what programs do but isn't really useful beyond that. But that is just me, for someone else it may be great because it doesn't require any real setup or tweaking.

im about ready to try a new OS. yeah xp has more features and this and that but it seems they are just pilein more and more on to the point where a big bad new puter cant even rip stuff up like it's supposed to. i wanna see somebody else beat M$ to the punch for 64bit puters. that would be awesome and a good time to take them down.

Have you tried linux at all? If not you might want to download either the slax live-cd or knoppix live-cd and just try it out.
www.slax.org
www.knoppix.net

[ViRaL1]

i wanna see somebody else beat M$ to the punch for 64bit puters. that would be awesome and a good time to take them down.

Technically just about everyone has beaten M$ to the punch as far as 64-bit Operating Systems go. Sun, SGI, IBM SCO and pretty much every other Unix / Linux vendor. For the average user there's really no compelling reason to move to 64-bit computing. Still I'll probably make my next system either an Athlon64 or a 64-bit Xeon, provided I can find the means to reclaim my old 'bleeding edge' way of life.

[Garibaldi]

Sun, SGI, IBM SCO and pretty much every other Unix / Linux vendor.

Any links? By Sun I'm guessing that you mean Solaris. Is there a live-cd of it for x86?

[ViRaL1]

Actually I do believe they have a LiveCD version of their Java Desktop (I think that's what it's called). Not sure if that one is 64-bit. They do make Solaris for x86, but I don't think they have a live-cd version. If you burn an image of your drive to DVD, then you don't always have to use live cds. I'll see if I can find the links.

[Garibaldi]

I'll see if I can find the links.

Thanks, that would be great!

[ViRaL1]

I believe this is where you get the Java Desktop. http://jsecom16k.sun.com/ECom/EComActionServlet?StoreId=8&PartDetailId=JDSEI-999CDE9S&...MLoadBalanced=

Solaris 10 is available as an eval at http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/10/

[Garibaldi]

I believe this is where you get the Java Desktop. http://jsecom16k.sun.com/ECom/EComActio ... dBalanced=

Solaris 10 is available as an eval at http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/10/

So will I be able to just burn either of those isos to a cd and run it as a live-cd, or does the eval require a hd install?

[ViRaL1]

If I'm not mistaken the Java Desktop is a live-cd. The Solaris install is more than likely an hd install.

[DereX888]

Solaris with Java Desktop are both hdd-installable, dont work from CD aka LiveCD (minimum install is 5GB hdd space and 1GB of RAM just for Java OS )

[DereX888]

I believe this is where you get the Java Desktop. http://jsecom16k.sun.com/ECom/EComActio ... dBalanced=

Solaris 10 is available as an eval at http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/10/

So will I be able to just burn either of those isos to a cd and run it as a live-cd, or does the eval require a hd install?

I dont know about eval. installation, but with 'regular' version you just burn the isos and install the OS on your hdd.

[sterno]

Actually everybody else in the industry beat Intel to 64-bit, MS couldn't really produce a 64-bit system when they're an Intel-only system. Now that Intel and AMD do have 64-bit chips, Linux and FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD have native IA-64 and/or AMD64 support (all of them had at least some support for other 64-bit platforms, so it wasn't a huge architectural change). 64-bit is mainly useful for things like big database servers, which usually couldn't be run on any version of Windows anyway.


QNX is nothing special for a desktop, though there's nothing really wrong with it aside from a lack of software. It's a real-time OS, variants of QNX are often used in embedded control systems.

[Garibaldi]

I dont know about eval. installation, but with 'regular' version you just burn the isos and install the OS on your hdd.

It looks like its probably an hd install- I guess I will have to hold off for now until I can get an old computer to mess with. This is kind of a dumb question but I wanted to be sure, is Solaris a special flavor of linux?

[ViRaL1]

IIRC Solaris is Unix, not Linux.

[sterno]

Solaris is not Linux. Solaris is a UNIX variant developed by Sun Microsystems. The primary hardware platform is Sun's SPARC/UltraSPARC processor family, which includes both 32- and 64-bit chips. Solaris is also available for Intel systems (Solaris-x86), but I don't think that has real 64-bit support yet. x86 isn't really an important platform for Solaris, I keep hearing talk about Sun just dropping it altogether.