Offline User Friendly Linux Distro with Updated Wine?

[TheBilgeRat]

Oh ya? Hmmm, so much of the Linux community acts like Microsoft and Apple when it comes to resources too hugh? We got em' why not waste em'?

Anymore, yes :/  KDE 4.x, Unity, and Gnome 3.x are monuments to this thinking.  While Nicholas says he has KDE 4 running on 11 year old hardware just fine, I would not assume that to hold without loss of generality.  The simple truth is you will sacrifice some speed for eye candy, and sacrifice some ease (as in "push button change config") of configuration with faster, lighter weight solutions.  The integrated distros (crunchbang, linux mint LXDE edition, Lubuntu?  So many) that use LXDE, or E17, or Openbox + will run much faster on older hardware, period.

Having SAID that...  As commodore john has pointed out, Linux can..er..suck.  It is still not windows - and coming from a windows background can be obtuse and confusing as to how they do things.  I have never set up a linux that is completely GUI driven for all setup yet.  They may be out there - I just don't know of them.

BUT, if you don't mind some googling and a bit of tinkering at first (I mean, c'mon!  We are Amiga people in 2013!  We are no strangers to obtuse breakages and googling) you can end up with a very stable system.

O.K. you got my attention. Windows is pissing me off again too.

Any of those distros you mentioned make it easy to find out what drivers you need and get them without having to be a Linux guru?

Man I wish AROS fully supported this, I could just drag and drop the required drivers to where I need them. :/

Like Nicholas said, mostly all drivers should automagically be found by the kernel during install.  From you laptop's era, the couple of things that probably won't be found are wireless card drivers (lots of closed hardware blobs not linuxable right out of the box) and wintel modems.  Everything else should be fine, if at least functional.  These days, even Nvidia drivers are installed (via the Nouveau driver set).  Your laptop has an Intel set if I remember right, so it should have no problems on the display side.  I've never run into an install in the last 14 years that wouldn't display.

[ElPolloDiabl]

Go Into the BIOS and change the hard drive setting.
If it is AHCI change it to IDE
If the mode, under hard drive settings is IDE change
it to AHCI.
I'm pretty sure Linux needs it to be AHCI. Windows XP
needs it set at IDE

[nicholas]

Anymore, yes :/  KDE 4.x, Unity, and Gnome 3.x are monuments to this thinking.  While Nicholas says he has KDE 4 running on 11 year old hardware just fine,

Erm, my 11yr old step-daughter has it running on her 7yr old hardware. lol

[nicholas]

It is still not windows - and coming from a windows background can be obtuse and confusing as to how they do things.

I've never understood the thinking of those that want UNIX to be like Windows.  If you want Windows use Windows. Simples!

Like Nicholas said, mostly all drivers should automagically be found by the kernel during install.  From you laptop's era, the couple of things that probably won't be found are wireless card drivers (lots of closed hardware blobs not linuxable right out of the box) and wintel modems.  Everything else should be fine, if at least functional.  These days, even Nvidia drivers are installed (via the Nouveau driver set).  Your laptop has an Intel set if I remember right, so it should have no problems on the display side.  I've never run into an install in the last 14 years that wouldn't display.

Perhaps his laptop has the dreaded Poulsbo chipset?  Was that chipset even around 7yrs ago?

[TheBilgeRat]

Erm, my 11yr old step-daughter has it running on her 7yr old hardware. lol

Oh!  That makes more sense :lol:

[XDelusion]

Oh man!I almost fell in love with Crunch Bang! It almost felt worthy of my use, till I could not find WINE in the Package repository, and when I try to install ANY browser, it always fails in the end.

On a positive note, my wireless was ready to go straight off the bat.

Cuss cuss cuss!!! :/

[TheBilgeRat]

Oh man!I almost fell in love with Crunch Bang! It almost felt worthy of my use, till I could not find WINE in the Package repository, and when I try to install ANY browser, it always fails in the end.

On a positive note, my wireless was ready to go straight off the bat.

Cuss cuss cuss!!! :/

http://wiki.winehq.org/GitWine  

Plus, iceweasel should be installed by default.  (that is firefox without the branding)

[XDelusion]

Figures.

[XDelusion]

Cool, now my mouse keeps going in and out randomly, but only since I have been using this distro. Odd. Well No GIT for me, gotta find GIT now, prolly gotta compile it, bet it will say,"oh, you are lacking dependencies" or some crap.

Man I'm starting to hate this again already.

EDIT: Strange, now Wine is showing up under the package manager. WTF?!?!

Well aside of my mouse no longer working, things are starting to look promising again, I'll keep trying till I'm ready to throw this laptop against the wall.

EDIT: WOW, just installed Wine, typed WINE, it says it's WINE 64 and it's here to tell me to get WINE 32 and it will delete itself in only I type these damned APT-GET commands that don't work anyhow.

GRRRRR...


Ya man, screw this! I want my Amiga!!!!

[haywirepc]

"Until Linux can come out with a Desktop distro that makes me forget I'm using Linux, and make me believe I'm running an advanced Amiga OS or Haiku, then I ain't going back."

Your missing the point. The point of any Gnu/linux operating system IS total freedom. You can make it look and work like mac, windows, linux, amiga, haiku, or anything else you can imagine, but that of course requires some planning, time, and alot of tweaking many don't want to do.

Look at this screenshot of my linux desktop :
http://www.subcultureproductions.com/scrshot.jpg

From a clean mint xfce install, takes me perhaps 8 or 10 hours to set up the system to my liking. You can see an amiga style ramdisk, Linux boot drive icon, work drive icon, windows drive partition icon, dos drive icon, amiga drive icon, os2 drive icon, even atari st drive icon, and more. There are also drive icons for my mp3 and sound samples partitions. (I do audio work)

On the top bar are my most commonly used apps and links to stuff, On the right side bar is my most commonly traveled internet sites (1 click beats typing)

I use linux programs but also wine, dosbox, UAE, atari st emulator,c64 emulator, and more.

I CAN forget I'm using linux because I'm not just using linux, I'm also using amiga, dos, windows, atari, c64, os2 programs and more.

Most people are too lazy to set up the system. Trust me. Its SO worth it!

Now I have my current system cloneable, so I can install my already set up system on any other pc. I LOVE it.

Steven

[haywirepc]

Actually after I posted I realized it took me a bit more than 8 or 10 hours to set up my system... Perhaps 20 or 30 over a few weeks, setup a few things a day while doing other things until its as you like it. Still worth the time if you ask me. I have thousands of amiga games, and programs and demos, thousands of dos games and programs, thousands of windows games and programs and more...

Now I'm working on adding icons for many things in folders so its all point and click from launchers... Including hundreds of sega genesis games, super nintendo games and more.

Since this screenshot, I added a "toolbox" icon with drawers full of program launchers for audio, video, programming, graphics and office apps.

Linux is awesome, but you do need to put some time in to design the computer system of your dreams. Still, its possible to create your very own "VERY PERSONAL" computer.

Easy to get overwhelmed with the task, I just do a bit each day while mostly just using the computer. I have 5 in progress things going on the computer at a time usually, but eventually the stuff gets done and set up.

[Crumb]

Puppy linux is also a good option for lower spec older hardware. Now? I run mint on my combo workstation/server.

Puppy Linux feels like a slow msdos machine running a crap GUI written in pascal. Running GadTools apps from a floppy disk is a much more enjoyable experience.

Slow response times are general in mainstream OSes like OSX, Windows or Linux.

I still don't know why Linux based OSes are so crap and require recompiling everything. Take as an example Android devices. Updating the OS should be as simple as "here's my devices/ directory, read drivers from here. Here's my L/ directory, read filesystems from here. Now, update the rest of OS". Linux works like a monolithic design from the 70s despite the efforts to modernize it most of developers seem to think that desktop users are un-important.

Desktop developers don't understand the meaning of fast response and prefer to emulate all the crap invented by Microsoft&Apple in a strange love&hate relationship.

Linux users that claim it to be fast sound like those amiga users with poor standard 1200, who set them to productivity modes in 256 colours, load birdie, use glowicons everywhere, fill everything with horrible textures and later brag about the poor 1200 being faster than peecees (in their imagination probably)!!! (if my sarcastic comment is not enough clear for some of those a1200 users I'll explain that if you notice how the gui is written then it's not fast, it may be fast compared to your peecee swapping to hd when it struggles to show the background but it's still no fast. OCS and hi-res with 8-16 colours isn't fast either)

[nicholas]

Did I mention I use Ken's icons on my KDE setup?

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/?content=118574

[nicholas]

You want your Linux experience to be like that of Amiga OS 3.x where you have to do everything manually? Then you need http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/

You want it to be like Windows? Can't help you.

[XDelusion]

Don't get me wrong HayWire, there is a lot to be respected about Linux, I like the ad free software and such, the secure browsing, and the fact that it is not controlled by a corporate entity, but alas...


I'm not one of those guys who just wants a nice GUI based system where all the software is pre-compiled, and I can pretty much just drag and drop drivers where ever I need them etc. Amiga and BeOS spoiled me I guess you could say. I took classes on Linux years ago, but every class I felt like not showing up again and really only did so because I got along so well with everyone else in the class, but ya, I did not like the learning curve that was required for that kind of freedom, so I'll settle with the Freedom that Amiga OS, MorphOS, AROS, and Haiku provide also.

[nicholas]

Don't get me wrong HayWire, there is a lot to be respected about Linux, I like the ad free software and such, the secure browsing, and the fact that it is not controlled by a corporate entity, but alas...


I'm not one of those guys who just wants a nice GUI based system where all the software is pre-compiled, and I can pretty much just drag and drop drivers where ever I need them etc. Amiga and BeOS spoiled me I guess you could say. I took classes on Linux years ago, but every class I felt like not showing up again and really only did so because I got along so well with everyone else in the class, but ya, I did not like the learning curve that was required for that kind of freedom, so I'll settle with the Freedom that Amiga OS, MorphOS, AROS, and Haiku provide also.

Command line Haiku is pretty much identical to Linux so if you get comfortable with it on Haiku then Linux will become much easier for you.

BTW: If you are interested I ported the command line Amiga module player/emulator to Haiku a few weeks back.

http://ports.haiku-files.org/ticket/695