FC3 vs. Windows 2000

[Kumara]

Thanks to Temlakos!
I also got much from this mail.
thanks again
god bless you!


----- Original Message -----
From: "Temlakos" <temlakos at gmail.com>
To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 10:55 PM
Subject: Re: FC3 vs. Windows 2000


> STYMA, ROBERT E (ROBERT) wrote:
> > Dear Fedora Advocates,
> >    My brother in law will be returning from Iraq
> > in another couple of months and one of the things
> > I am doing for him is to build him a computer.  He
> > is not technically adept and his computer activity
> > is pretty much limited to looking at his email
> > on yahoo and a little web surfing.  Sometimes he
> > prints an email or two.
> >
> > I am vacillating on building an FC3 machine or a W2k
> > machine.
>
> First, Windows 2000 is obsolete even by Microsoft standards. They will
> sell you a Windows XP license, which costs much more. Worse yet, Windows
> XP is very resource-hungry in comparison to any distribution of Linux,
> or even in comparison to Windows 2000.
>
> Second, having plug-ins for every kind of multimedia file one might
> encounter is highly over-rated. True enough, the Musical Instrument
> Digital Interface (MIDI) still has not been ported to Linux. Equally
> true, much of the sound content on the Web is in the form of MP3 files,
> and MP3 is not an open-source protocol. (Actually, however, RealPlayer
> 10 for Linux will play MP3's without a hitch, since RealPlayer paid the
> freight for an MP3 license.) But your friend has to ask himself whether
> "a little Web surfing" will necessarily include every kind of sound file
> that's published.
>
> Third, you can get plug-ins for Mozilla and Firefox very easily--at
> Mozilla's own site, or from the FreshRPMS, Dag, Dries, and AT
> repositories. (You can also point to the Livna repository, but its apps
> aren't built from the same source code as those on the others, so Livna
> doesn't mix well with the others.)
>
> All of which is to say that you're better off going with Fedora Core and
> /especially/ FC3.
>
> Now I wouldn't so much say /no/ need for anti-virus software. Instead I
> would suggest that you install ClamAV, the open-source anti-virus
> solution for GNU/Linux and similar platforms. I use it myself. Of
> course, Linux is a lot easier to secure from viruses than MS Windows
> ever will be. You can get ClamAV from any of the popular repositories.
>
> You can obtain the Java Runtime Environment directly from Sun
> Microsystems, or from a Fedora-compatible repo. The first alternative
> would let you get the latest version.
>
> As for codecs to play most Windows-compatible multimedia files: Install
> mplayer, or the Linux Movie Player, and then follow this link:
>
>
http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/falsehope/home/rathann/apt/7.3/RPMS.stable/mpla
yer-codecs-win32-2.0-1.i386.html
>
> It has a link to download an RPM that will install all the codecs you
> need. Then again, there's another link somewhere out there that has a
> tar-ball for installing those codecs--more on tar-balls below.
>
> The best thing to do, then, is:
>
> 1. Install FC3.
> 2. Configure Firefox for Web pages and Thunderbird for e-mail.
> 3. Search Google on the following key words: dag, dries, freshrpms,
> at-stable, livna, gstreamer, and fedora.us. Most of these repos will
> give you specific lines to configure the file yum.conf and the file
> sources in etc/sysconfig/rhn, so that you can use up2date and/or yum to
> keep your applications up to date, and use yum to find new packages. (Go
> to http://fedoranews.org/tchung/gyum/fc3/ and learn how to get a
> Graphical User Interface front-end for yum, written especially for
Fedora.)
>
> All of these repos offer apt, the package-transfer system developed
> originally for Debian and then rewritten for RPM packages for the
> Conectiva distribution and now available for all RPM-based distros.
>
> Apt works with a GUI-based front-end called Synaptic that lets you see
> at a glance which packages are available in the repositories you set
> up--but yum will let you set the machine up to fetch and install updates
> /automatically/ either every morning when you start up, or every night
> if you leave the machine on 24x7.
>
> And to answer your basic question: Yes, you /can/ obtain plug-ins and
> other applications in a small number of places. The days where you had
> to chase all over the Net to find all the apps you need are long gone.
>
> So you install an additional package-management system, either yum or
> apt, and configure a few repositories for yum or apt to search for new
> packages and updates.
>
> Then you can fetch just about anything you need, either from the
> repositories or directly from some of the developers.
>
> In the extreme cases, you can fetch the tar-balls and build your extra
> applications right on the system. Advantage: as long as you have the gcc
> compiler family and the linker (gmake), you can build anything, and when
> you do, you get a custom build for your hardware. Disadvantage:
> time-consuming and a slightly steeper learning curve.
>
> Good luck!
>
> Temlakos
>
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