changing to linux..need advice?

[outspoken]

life outside Gentoo is not much fun. i've been through many distrobutions in the last 8 years and Gentoo has been the best one I've experienced.

From what I've heard Gentoo is a great distro! What are the differences that you can see between Gentoo and Slackware?

they both rely on source code for installation of packages, which is something that I enjoy as keeping my system customized is important to me. the difference though is the package management. Gentoo relies on the portage system which is structured after BSD's ports system. Portage's package management also checks dependencies where Slackware does not. USE flags (these are configuration options) effect how a program is installed, if you wanted to have the program Snort installed on your system with mysql support you would do it as so:

Gentoo:
USE="mysql" emerge snort

This will check your system (a simple world.txt file stored by portage system, so checking is quick) for dependencies that the installation may require. If your system doesn't have them it will add them for you. You can bypass any dependencies by issuing a '--nodeps' arguement to emerge like this:

USE="mysql" emerge --nodeps snort

That will install snort with mysql support and if you do not have mysql installed it will not complain, until of course you try to make use of mysql and you dont have one installed which you can then do a 'emerge mysql' to install it.

also you can set global USE flags in /etc/make.conf to look like so:

'vi /etc/make.conf'
USE="mysql X alsa -kde gnome"

this would put the mysql, X, alsa and gnome flag on anything you installed and remove KDE dependencies. there is more machine specific info in make.conf relating to gcc and other utils.

the installation is from source and compiled by the settings you have set your compiler to use so Gentoo combines the best of both worlds - source compilation and package management. not to mention the gentoo teams work around the clock delivering great support and very frequent updates. as soon as a new version (release candidates, beta, etc) comes out they are already working on adding it to the system. you can also make your own packages by creating/editing existing .ebuild files which are really simple to edit.

[the * dude]

advice....

duel boot

if you ain't good at cmd lines have windows to fall back on other wise ur pc will be gathering dust, the transition will take time!!!!!!

[outspoken]

advice....

duel boot

if you ain't good at cmd lines have windows to fall back on other wise ur pc will be gathering dust, the transition will take time!!!!!!

I disagree heavily with this advice. If you go Linux 100% then you are forced to get things working and learn how to use them in order for it to operate. It takes a strict will and some dedication but really this is how I did it and you should give it a shot!

BTW, there are so many GUI's out there now for Linux programs that you don't have to worry about commandline unless you want to. Even Gentoo has a GUI for its installation programs called Porthole, point-and-click! =)

[Garibaldi]

advice....

duel boot

if you ain't good at cmd lines have windows to fall back on other wise ur pc will be gathering dust, the transition will take time!!!!!!

I disagree heavily with this advice. If you go Linux 100% then you are forced to get things working and learn how to use them in order for it to operate. It takes a strict will and some dedication but really this is how I did it and you should give it a shot!

BTW, there are so many GUI's out there now for Linux programs that you don't have to worry about commandline unless you want to. Even Gentoo has a GUI for its installation programs called Porthole, point-and-click! =)

SO basically the main difference between Slackware and Gentoo is the package management system, right? Swaret is good for many things, but what I've found is that alot of the packages I want to install aren't on the swaret system (I can't speak for portage) and as such I just install from source, which like you I really prefer. Do you use checkinstall? I install all of my packages with checkinstall now and save a text file with the commands to remove them just in case. Swaret makes updating the slack version quick and easy just use:
swaret --update
swaret --upgrade -a
and sit back and wait

I'm going to agree with outspoken about the type of install. I can speak from personal experience, I have a dual slack/win boot and I haven't booted linux in a couple months because most of my time has been spent working on my website (see sig) and as such I just "feel" more comfortable in windows. However, you've convinced me to start messing with linux again now, I have enough time and experience to get everything in order and I'm excited to try and go more slack rather than win (if for nothing else just so I can see the chart of what operating systems hits on my site are go from heavily win to heavily linux!).

Now if only I could get dvd shrink to work under wine...

[vitualis]

Works (sort of) okay under CrossOver Office...

Regards.

[Garibaldi]

Works (sort of) okay under CrossOver Office...

Regards.

I've heard of someone saying that they got it to run with wine and even had support for ripping from the dvd.

[outspoken]

ive had great success with dvd shrink in wine. it is working 100% for me.

this is my 'howto' that i originally posted on the Gentoo forums:

here is a nice flatout no hastle method that i use:

packages needed:

emerge winesetuptk wine dvdbackup vobcopy k3b

of course all of the needed burning software should already be in place if not i think the above should take care of that. it has been a long time since i had to isntall these and i'm not at my machine so forgive any errors here.

Once you have wine and winesetuptk install then then run 'winesetuptk' this will configure your wine structure based on your system and your input.

Download DVD Shrink, you can get them all from here: Old DVD Shrink List

Now on with the show:

Step 1: Insert dvd and mount it!

Step 2: This is useful if you care to have the exact same naming scheme at the original, when you go to burn you can replace the voulme name with the one shown here.

volname /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 (or location of your device)

Step 3: Simply type /whatever/dvdname in the quotations at the end and it will create the directory and place the VIDEO_TS folder in that directory. This is an exact copy of the DVD disc.

vobcopy /mnt/cdrom1 -l -n 1 -O . -t "some directory name"

Step 4: Now if you are unfamiliar with DVD Shrink you will need to go out on the net and find yourself a tutorial, it is extremely simple to use. In this case what we are doing is Re-Authoring the disc, so you would click on the "Re-Author" button at the top and then browse to the location where your VIDEO_TS folder is on the hard drive.

wine ~/.fake_windows/dvdshrink

Step 5: Use K3B to burn: all we are doing here is starting a new DVD Video project and adding the contents of our VIDEO_TS folder. Change the volume name and burn!

With DVD Shrink you can maintain menu structures, re-compress certain titles, or completely re-author the entire project so only the main movie is there at the highest compression available to your blank DVD.

Good luck!
Some of the above was borrowed from other examples, when I get home I might compile a How-To on all of it with images included for ease.

I have made a small script to ease the dvdrip proceedure, you can put it in your /usr/bin directory and chmod +x on it so it becomes executable. This is not my latest version as that one has a check to see if the drive is mounted before mounting, but i redid my system and haven't pulled that one from backup yet.

/usr/bin/miniripper

#!/bin/sh
# miniripper v.090
#
#check for mount, mounts dvd
#reads volume name
#vobcopies and ejects dvd when completed
#
#Change your MOUNTPOINT=""
#TODO: check comments for more

MOUNTPOINT="/mnt/cdrom"
# alter this so it grabs mountpoint from fstab instead of manual edit
SYMLINK=`grep $MOUNTPOINT /etc/fstab | awk '{print $1}'`
if [ -z "$SYMLINK" ];then
  echo "Cannot find device in /etc/fstab to associate with $MOUNTPOINT " ; exit 1
fi
DEVICE=`grep dvd /etc/fstab | awk '{print $1}'`
if mount | grep -i $MOUNTPOINT > /dev/null ;then
  echo -e '\E[30;40m'"\033[1mDrive already mounted..\033[0m"
fi
if mount $MOUNTPOINT ;then
  echo -e '\E[30;40m'"\033[1mMounted Drive\033[0m"
fi
VOLUME=`volname $DEVICE | sed 's/ *//g'`
echo
echo -e '\E[32;40m'"\033[1mBackup of $VOLUME has started..\033[0m"

mkdir /multimedia/video/$VOLUME && cd /multimedia/video/$VOLUME
#user specified commandline at prompt, $1/$volname $$ cd /$1/$volname
vobcopy -l -n 1 -O . -i $MOUNTPOINT
echo -e '\E[32;40m'"\033[1mBackup of $VOLUME has completed..\033[0m"
umount $MOUNTPOINT
eject
#create iso $2 is filename, $1 is dir to image
#mkisofs -dvd-video -o $2 $1

#to burn
#growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 .iso

Please don't pay attention to the sloppy scripting and comments, unless you want to fix them yourself. I'll be posting a more final version when I'm happy with it, but in the meantime you are free to use it. The top part here is a good way to get wine/dvd shrink working. Also you might want to know that I use two DVD Shrinks.

I also have a 'bigripper' script that has dvdshrink and mkisofs/growisofs in it, this one popups up the beta dvd shrink for reading/previewing then you close it and up comes the new dvd shrink and when you close that the burning process is started, all automatic. i'll post that one later, it actually is working quite well but there are some checks i need to make first before releasing it.

Versions of DVD Shrink I use:

DVD Shrink 3.0 Beta 5 - this one has a working preview mode for my system (your system may vary, I have no idea).
DVD Shrink 3.2 - this one supports exporting in .ISO format so I use it, it also allows you to replace video clips with still images (I usually make my own images).

Also I use PgcEdit which lets you remove VTST sections so things like previews and junk before the menu you can just blank them entirely and the dvd will show you the Menu when you put it in your player. It is a platform independent program written in Tcl/Tk. Google PgcEdit for some good info, there are great tutorials out there.

Let me know if there is something I forgot or if you have questions.

[Garibaldi]

Thanks for the great guide!!! I used my existing windows partition in my wine setup and I was able to get dvd shrink to see my dvd in the drive, but when I select it it says "internal error" and won't let me open the dvd. Any ideas?

[vitualis]

I never got Wine to work once with an existing Windows partition (though admittedly, I didn't try very hard). CrossOver Office is really quite impressive. OfficeXP works just fine as does Photoshop 7 and NeatImage (and advanced noise filtering software which I use on a regular basis).

The only thing which is preventing me from moving to a Linux only environment?

ActiveSync. If I can't sync my PDA, I cannot use Linux as my main PC.

A number of "highly desirable" things are missing as well (e.g., native version of "Office" software that has 100% format compatibility with MS Office -- which is NOT OpenOffice, and something like Picasa which Lphoto is not).

Regards.

[Garibaldi]

I never got Wine to work once with an existing Windows partition (though admittedly, I didn't try very hard). CrossOver Office is really quite impressive. OfficeXP works just fine as does Photoshop 7 and NeatImage (and advanced noise filtering software which I use on a regular basis).

The only thing which is preventing me from moving to a Linux only environment?

ActiveSync. If I can't sync my PDA, I cannot use Linux as my main PC.

A number of "highly desirable" things are missing as well (e.g., native version of "Office" software that has 100% format compatibility with MS Office -- which is NOT OpenOffice, and something like Picasa which Lphoto is not).

Regards.

The way I got wine to work with my existing windows partition was to use the wineinstall (I think) utility in the /tools directory of the wine source. This tool automatically installs wine and autodetects your windows partition for you, making it alot easier.

I agree that there are a few apps (like active sync) that can't yet be duplicated on linux. I wonder if you could use something like that in a windows install with boches or something?

[mrbass]

Thanks for the great guide!!! I used my existing windows partition in my wine setup and I was able to get dvd shrink to see my dvd in the drive, but when I select it it says "internal error" and won't let me open the dvd. Any ideas?

two things #1 in your .wine/config
[Version]
"Windows"="win2k"

second make sure your softlinks are setup correctly in .wine/dosdevices
then OPEN DISC should work in DVDShrink and no ripping is required save it for ARcoSS DVDs.

[mrbass]

I would use Gentoo but I've been through that back in 1998 learning internals of Linux. I have done a stage 3 install though. I did learn a couple of things from it so it's good to do.

My two current favorites for desktop distros are Mepis and Ubuntu both debian based. I run three servers for my site...2 are redhat RHEL and one is Debian. My goal is to eventually replace one of my redhat servers with freebsd...someday. Also if you've never tried XFCE 4.2 and don't want to install it on your distro whatever it may be...give it a spin by downloading SAM LIveCD with XFCE it's about 200MB http://distrowatch.com/sam It's better than downloading XFLD 680MB XFCE knoppix version.

Until I got Japanese input working reliably in Ubuntu I was playing with BerryLinux Live CD (fedora based japanese distro).

I still visit http://www.distrowatch.com daily. Sweet PHLAK 3 is out...might have to mirror that one. Now having said all this I use mac tiger daily for most things...just like it.

[Garibaldi]

Thanks for the great guide!!! I used my existing windows partition in my wine setup and I was able to get dvd shrink to see my dvd in the drive, but when I select it it says "internal error" and won't let me open the dvd. Any ideas?

two things #1 in your .wine/config
[Version]
"Windows"="win2k"

second make sure your softlinks are setup correctly in .wine/dosdevices
then OPEN DISC should work in DVDShrink and no ripping is required save it for ARcoSS DVDs.

Well I'm on xp so that should be "winxp" right?

[mrbass]

either one works. Just if dvdshrink sees win95 or win98 it won't work the OPEN DISC that is.

[Garibaldi]

either one works. Just if dvdshrink sees win95 or win98 it won't work the OPEN DISC that is.

Oh it won't? We'll I'm going to try this right now!!!

[vitualis]

Off topic... but... I'm posting this with Firefox in Xandros OCE 3 via VMware on my Windows XP machine...

And the sad part... Xandros 3 runs better through VMWare on a host system of Windows XP than natively on the hardware.

Linux still has a way to go with hardware detection...

Regards.