Has anyone ever though about making a linux box? - Page 2

Greetz
Have things changed with VMs? I mean, can they use native, proprietary accelerated video drivers now or not? This alone is enough reason to forget about VMs imho.

Also, I would imagine that most overclockers have 1 of 2 (or both) situations at home.

1) You have a stack of parts lying around and have no need to spend money on old parts, or at least very many of those to flesh out a system

and/or

2) You prefer getting hardware ahead of time that you KNOW is well supported in Linux

and possibly

3) You'd like to explore networking right at home with an Intranet.

FWIW I have an overclocked socket 370 SuperMicro board with 8 Gigs of Ram running a game server on Slackware (primarily Minecraft) that cost me less than 100 bux total. It has been up almost 24/7 for 15 months w/o a single unscheduled reboot, of which there have been 3, despite a dozen game upgrades.

So if any of these appeals to OP, just do it. It's a fun project and can be very useful.

yes... VT-D PCI passthrough. The VM gets the card directly, the host can't even use it, so there's not much "V" about it. I have yet to see it in action myself but there's enough people doing it and the feedback is all positive. See the full thread i linked to in my previous post. Hardware incompatibilities are still widely abound, but with the right hardware, you can do it today.

enough reason to forget about booting into windows imho
Edited by lloyd mcclendon - 7/6/12 at 11:19pm

Every computer I own solely boot Linux - bar one PC which boot FreeBSD.

It would be a cold day in hell before I run Windows.

Same here. Freebsd kind of reminds me of gentoo a bit (probably because of portage) The only thing that keeps me away fom installing it on my main rig is the lack of proper amd gpu drivers.

You have to be pretty dedicated to run Linux only on all your computers it always amazes me. What exactly do you do if you can run Linux only? How long did it take you to get to the point where you are Linux only?

I tried going Linux only on my desktop as good as it is I couldn't even stick with it long enough to make it worth dual booting Linux and W7. I just leave Linux for my laptops (also if you count my chromebook, android tablet/phone) where I do less "stuff". My biggest issue is Adobe Apps. I spent a good amount of time and money in expensive education learning to use them and I don't really want to give myself the setback of learning a whole new system when they work so well already. Could never really get into GIMP and I don't know what can replace lightroom, indesign or illustrator. I could give up AAA gaming if I had to. That still leaves various odds and ends and bits and pieces that I couldn't use like google drive (though I hear Linux support is coming).

I will always have at least one Linux computer though, it has tons of handy tools and mechanisms that make it useful for various fix-its and repair tasks. Example: When I was testing Chrome OS on a netbook, it partitioned the usb stick in such a way that it couldn't be undone in windows. Had I not had a Linux machines I would have been out a usb stick.

I guess if I started now I could probably get Windows free in a year or two, but then I still don't have any guarantee that the next awesome new piece of hardware or software will be immediately compatible/available like I would with windows.

The only thing it won't do is game the newest titles ( dx10 and 11 mostly ). Aside from that as a daily OS it's really no different than Windows and can do everything Windows can and more. So it's really not a hard switch ( aside from the /slight/ learning curve if you didn't grow up with it like I have, or learn it at a younger age like many others).

To be fair, I'm not 100% Linux/UNIX only as I do have one laptop dual boot Win7 with some DAWs loaded. I keep giving audio in Linux a try but Linux is really lacking in decent sequencers. I don't get much time for music production though, so probably boot into Windows a handful of times a year at most.

I had dabbled with Linux on and off for a while but back when I was first using Linux you had to recompile the kernel just to load nVidia drivers and Windows 2000 was new and a fantastic OS (Microsoft's only decent OS in my opinion). But once XP was released I just gave up with Windows entirely. By that point Linux had matured enough to be pretty easy to look after (even in spite of my running a highly advanced distribution for n00bies: Slackware)

At the end of the day, it's just a matter of using what you're comfortable with. I never really liked Windows much (bar Win2000). I loved to hack Windows and pull it apart, but I seem to recall being constantly fed up with the general crappiness of Windows even back in the 3.x / 95 days. Even back then, I could never really understand peoples love affair with it. So for me, Linux was a logical choice.
Edited by Plan9 - 7/8/12 at 4:30pm

It's not a steep learning curve. Even going from Windows to Arch was not that hard, but it does take time and I don't necessarily want to spend my weekends relearning the alternatives to software I use at work so I don't fall behind when I am actually working.

Lets use an example: I recently started a new job, they wanted me to get in and connect to their servers to grab some files I needed for a brochure. Now I used Arch for about a year and a half as my main OS but not I am not an expert particularly when it comes to network issues. I would have had no idea how to get it mounted and setup in my usual minimal Arch environment but thankfully I had switched that laptop from Arch to W7 for safe compatibility so it was very simple.

This is what I mean by the needed dedication. I couldn't have taken the time to "figure it out" on the job no matter how willing I am to do so. I had never setup a network file system in Windows but it took me all of 5 seconds to figure out. It's harder to learn Linux on the fly unless you use something like Ubuntu but for me I start to loose sight of the benefits when running a heavy distro.

I am all for taking the time to learn Linux but sometimes you just don't have the time and/or I don't know when an issue beyond my knowledge might come up.

This is why having a separate Linux box is a great idea for gradual learning on a more personal time frame but I say you need to have a fairly particular situation and dedication for Linux full time.
Edited by cavallino - 7/8/12 at 5:07pm

I perfere linux because i don't game and everything else is much better (except for netflix, thats a bummer) the biggest thing for me is choice- in linux your free to do whatever you want, go advanced or as easy to use as you want, chose a different desktop if you want, rolling release, stable to kill, cutting edge, you can pretty much have linux any way you want. With windows your locked down, can't switch or chose. Theres also of chrose the fact windows in massively blouted and slow, and thouout its histroy microsoft has proven to be a backstabing monopolizing b**ch.

That's no coincidence. A lot of Gentoo is based upon FreeBSD concepts (including portage) after the the lead developer got sick of Linux after the initial release of Gentoo and thus used FreeBSD for a lengthy period.
I used to be like this but these days I find the reverse to be true, doing simple things in Windows now takes me longer than doing it in Linux.

At the end of the day, it's really just what you're used to.