Hi Roy,
You wrote:
> I have been lurking for awhile and am beginning to sense your frustration.
I guess it's normal, but it is a bother.
> First on a replacement for XP. It is a good idea to replace XP with a
> Linux distribution, but which one is always a tough to figure out.
> Everybody has a favourite and their recommendation may not be good for
> you.
My choice of Mint with the Mate interface is based
on the recommendations of someone on a list for
another subject--his reasoning was based on a
bit different circumstances but what he was seeing
as advantages seemed like a good fit. That being
said, many replies do sound like many who should
know doubt that's good for me.
> Mint is often recommended to newbies and there are good reasons to
> choose it and not choose it. It is based on Ubuntu, but it has its own
> desktop environments. Some like them and some don't. It is probably
> good to try a few out by running them in a VM, from a usb stick (if
> you can boot from usb) ...
Yes my bios appears to support that and I will be
trying it out when I get that far.
> There are a couple of problems with choosing Mint. It has no upgrade
> tool so upgrading it (which becomes necessary as support runs out) is
> complicated matter of editing your sources list as root. This is not a
> newbie skill. The other problem is that Mint is dependent on Ubuntu
> and Ubuntu is making following them increasingly a challenge, so at
> some point Mint will probably be forced to spin off and be in flux.
> All of Mint is also dependent on GNOME which is making as many flaky
> choices as Ubuntu lately. Their developers are good, but this will be
> much extra work and they are spread thinly enough now.
Great--That's some specifics.
> A better choice for a newbie XP user might be to choose a distribution
> closer to the Ubuntu tree, such as Xubuntu or Lubuntu. Xubuntu is
> Ubuntu with the XFCE desktop environment. It is faster than anything
> Mint produces, it depends solely on Ubuntu repositories and it has an
> upgrade tool. It also has a closer Windows look and feel than Mate ...
Very interesting--that will probably double my
downloading project, though.
> If your computer can boot from usb in the BIOS settings then you can
> install Unetbootin in Windows and run it and it will take care of
> downloading the ISO and installing it on an empty usb key (2 or 4 GBs
> is usually enough).
>
> http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
I'd heard mention of Unetbootin. One program to
take care of the download and also mounting it
on a USB stick sounds good.
> Getting Linux onto your computer is not difficult. Choosing the
> distribution that is right for you is much harder. To that end, I
> would try several distributions including Mint and the *buntus. I
> would also look outside the Debian based ones to a couple of simple
> RPM based distribution. Run each one from CD/DVD or usb key.
>
> If you are really up for a challenge and your hardware is beefy enough
> I would suggest installing VirtualBox and trying to run ISOs directly
> from the VM.
The VM approach may be what I need when I
get a new machine. (A program I want needs
Win8.1 even though I feel Linux is the way to
go for an OS.) It would probably not be that
great for this machine--my WinXP is an OEM
version and that is (at least) not easy to rip
out to a VM.
--
Regards,
Gene Falck
gfalck@merr.com
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