New Computer - I want some form of Linux with XP on the side...

[big_teee]

Everything is pretty simple for engineers like Steve, and bob.
For one program, I would load the linux, and give the wine a try, before I got any deeper.
That may be all he needs.
T

[Steve Conner]

You can always google "tubecad wine" to see how other people have fared getting it to work. (Seems to "sort of work" )

This stuff isn't simple, it's more that if you wade through great putrid swamps of it for a living, you lose your sense of smell after a while.

[Steve A.]

I just can't give up my TubeCad. I have an old laptop from '07 that has XP on it that I use to run Tubecad, but this can't go on forever. I'm going to build a new desktop for myself and have decided to go with Ubuntu or Mint for my OS.

So keep your 2007 laptop for TubeCad and build your Linux box. You probably want to install it with dual boot capabilities (like giving it a partition if you need it later). I doubt that the WinXP license for your laptop can be used for your new machine. (If you bought a standalone version of XP it should work just fine. I called up Microsoft to see if I could transfer the authorization from one computer to another and they said to go ahead and try it first- it should work but if it doesn't then call them back.)

As for XP being obsolete the last time I checked both Wells Fargo and Kaiser-Permanente were using Windows XP 64-bit Professional in their offices. I run that on a Gateway computer which came with Vista and I run Win 7 on a HP computer which was factory installed- and I HATE it! The search function is nothing like that in Win2K or WinXP where you can search for filename, date, size and optionally have it look inside basic files for a search string. With Vista and Win 7 it automatically defaults to a search of both filename and content which takes forever and gives you useless hits that have absolutely nothing to do with what you are looking for. I never did figure out how to overcome that default and have been using "Everything" to do global filename searches. But I haven't figured out how to use that to search just one drive or folder. I just want an 2K/XP search window (I always turned off the dumbed-down XP search window with the animated dog and set it up to be exactly like Win2K.)

Win 7 is so busy snooping inside files to maintain its index that it doesn't notice the obvious. I can create a file and Windows Explorer might not show it unless I refresh the window! And Windows decides to lock certain folders that have nothing to do with system files- somebody told me about a workaround and I found an applet that adds "Take Ownership" to the right click menu in Windows Explorer. I could bitch about Win 7 for days (and often do!) And I believe that Win 7 is in fact brain dead. If I insert a SDHC card in the factory reader it isn't always recognized and if I double-click on it Win 7 will initiate a search for the card going through all of my hard drives starting with the C: boot drive! Huh?!?!?

I have what must be an unorthodox view of computers- if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you are running old programs and they work fine on your old computer and you don't need to upgrade them just leave well enough alone. If you are using a particular computer for a particular purpose you might think of it as an appliance with an embedded computer, which normally requires no updates or upgrades. Unless you need to play the latest version of a cool game there usually is no pressing need to upgrade your computer.

OK- WinXP does have security issues. So leave your computer with WinXP off-line. Use your new Linux box for the internet. If you want to share a monitor, keyboard and mouse between 2 or more computers you can get a KVM box.

Steve "the Digital Luddite" Ahola

[überfuzz]

I don't know where you see the hassle? The only thing you need to think about is that windows bust the grub when you install it. So you need to install windows first then linux. If you're booting in linux mostly you could opt for a fuller distribution. If so, I'd say that openSUSE is the best out there, at the moment. More important, it's the easiest OS to maintain, install programs, update etc thanks to the repository system governed by yast.

Off topic. You really should give windows a chance. Every now and then I boot windows, been doing so for the last 2 years, and it's not such a gnarly it used to be. Although, it's not worth paying for. And compare to linux it's still a hassle to get the right version of freeware and stuff and install them. But then again, how often do you have to install new programs.

Edit, if you're not sure of what you're doing, go with default settings while installing the linux system you opt for.

[big_teee]

It's just all in what you want out of a computer.
It sounds like the OP knows what he wants.
He said he basically wants a linux web machine, with the addition of his one Win program tubeCad.
I agree with the OP, with the Mint or Ubuntu.
I disagree with the OpenSuse being a bigger and better choice than Mint.
IMO anything you can do on OpenSuse, you can do easier with Mint.
I didn't like the way OSuse wants to force updates.
Mint lets you update when you want.
The drivers, and everything pretty much works when you get Mint loaded.
It is very stable.
LibreOffice, FireFox, and Opera browsers work very well.
Mint has been the number 1 downloaded Linux Distro for sometime for now.
If you like the looks of XP, you can get real close with Mint.
I agree with Uber, windows is Ok, just not worth paying for.
I do the daily updates, but no Viruscan, or other programs to mess with.
LibreOffice 4.0.4.2 is the best yet.
Very similar to MicroOffice Pro 2003.
Lots of good free software out there, I'll be glad when Linux is the norm.

[bob p]

I have what must be an unorthodox view of computers- if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you are running old programs and they work fine on your old computer and you don't need to upgrade them just leave well enough alone. If you are using a particular computer for a particular purpose you might think of it as an appliance with an embedded computer, which normally requires no updates or upgrades. Unless you need to play the latest version of a cool game there usually is no pressing need to upgrade your computer.

I used to take a similar approach with TurboTax. I kept an old P3 sitting around with Win98 installed on it, just to run TurboTax and Quicken via a KVM. I did this primarily because I didn't trust Windows XP, with all of it's unsecured services, and I didn't want my data hijacked. The solution? Separate the boxes that are allowed to do promiscuous things like web browsing on the internet, from the boxes that are used to run financial applications. I ran TurboTax on Win98, because the OS doesn't have enough features to enable hijacking. That worked pretty well until MS abandoned support for Win98, and TurboTax required everyone to use WinXP. But at least the model that compartmentalizes promiscuous duties to one box, and non-promiscuous duties to another box was still intact.

I think your basic Luddite's premise is sound: just run TurboCad on an old box that's only used for those Win apps that you don't want to leave behind, and don't worry too much about Wine, or Virtualization if you just want to keep things simple on the new box.

Personally, I got very tired of having to shell out another $80 every time that some bit of buggy Windows software needed an update. Every year I was supposed to shell out another $80 for anti-virus, $80 for CD-burning, $80 for an office suite update, etc. Screw that. it must have been 10 years ago when I made the commitment that all new applications had to run on linux or I wouldn't use them.

[überfuzz]

It's just all in what you want out of a computer.
It sounds like the OP knows what he wants.
He said he basically wants a linux web machine, with the addition of his one Win program tubeCad.
I agree with the OP, with the Mint or Ubuntu.
I disagree with the OpenSuse being a bigger and better choice than Mint.
IMO anything you can do on OpenSuse, you can do easier with Mint.
I didn't like the way OSuse wants to force updates.
Mint lets you update when you want.
The drivers, and everything pretty much works when you get Mint loaded.
It is very stable.
LibreOffice, FireFox, and Opera browsers work very well.
Mint has been the number 1 downloaded Linux Distro for sometime for now.
If you like the looks of XP, you can get real close with Mint.
I agree with Uber, windows is Ok, just not worth paying for.
I do the daily updates, but no Viruscan, or other programs to mess with.
LibreOffice 4.0.4.2 is the best yet.
Very similar to MicroOffice Pro 2003.
Lots of good free software out there, I'll be glad when Linux is the norm.

Forced update..? If so, just alter the set up, you silly. I'll be honest, I didn't give mint a fair chance, I felt that the OS managing tool was to funky. Yast is the best I've tried.

If he want it to look like windows, which i doubt, he can go for KDE. Windows 7 is more or less a version of KDE3, visually speaking. I get the feeling he's more a gnome fella.

Oh by the way, Linux is the standard OS on this planet, today. It's only on PC the competition still lives. Take a look at windows 8 and take a wild guess why microsoft is going for a phony look on it.

[Steve Conner]

Linux has about 1.2% of the desktop computer market, so it's hard to see how it could be called "standard".

If you include other devices besides desktop computers, then smartphones and tablets running Android have 65% of the market. Android is based on a Linux kernel, so maybe the original assertion is true in a roundabout way.

There's so much more to an OS than the kernel, though. Android had Google pouring R&D into the user interface (incredibly important on touch screens) and enforcing policy and standards, providing an App Store and so on. Historically, the open source community has been pretty much useless in this respect. They develop software for fellow geeks, not for the man in the street. So, I think it is the "not-Linux" parts of Android that account for its success.

I think Win7 is Microsoft's best OS yet.

[big_teee]

There seems to be more folks running Linux on MEF than I origanally thought.
What ever version it is, that is a good thing.
T

[Steve A.]

I think Win7 is Microsoft's best OS yet.

Microsoft keeps dumbing down their interface- like the mandatory Ribbon in the Office 2007 programs (I had to buy a 3rd party add-in to get the normal menus back.) This dumbing down actually makes it harder to customize the program and the interface to meet your needs. I liked Win 95/98 because all of the programs and the OS as well had INI files which allowed you to set your options with a text editor. Win2K introduced the registry which pretty much replaced the INI files and RegEdit which can really screw up your computer if you don't know what you are doing.

Solution: why not let the user customize choices for specific programs in the INI file and let the Registry compile those settings? So rather than having to edit the registry you just set your options with a text editor. INI files had gotten very elaborate right before the registry was introduced- it slowed down the system to have to read all of those text files. There could also be a System.ini file in which you can spell out your choices for things like search engines and whether Windows Explorers instantly re-alphabetizes file listing when you rename them (a real pain in the butt if you need to rename a lot of files and just want to go down the list one at a time- something that content creators often need to do and content consumers as well.)

While Win 7 might be a great OS for browsing, watching videos and maybe playing games I find it to be way too restrictive for content creation (which usually involves a lot of manipulation of files.) I should mention that my HP computer came with Win 7 Home Premium, which is responsible for some of the restrictions I've mentioned. In the past when you paid more for your copy of Windows you got more programs and features. With Vista and Win7 the home versions fall under the category of "crippleware" since basic features are eliminated.

I put up with Windows 7 on my HP box but I don't enjoy it. I really need to switch back to my same vintage (2009) Gateway on which I installed Windows XP 64-bit Professional now that I fixed it.

Steve Ahola

P.S. Another pet peeve about Win 7- it allows me to relocate the My Documents folder to a different drive but it still insists on having a Steve/My Documents folder on the C drive which is used by some programs. Vista and Win 7 have this dual naming system where you can get to folders by clicking on my name Steve or by navigating through the directory structure.

[Steve A.]

WineHQ maintains a database with entries that describe the performance of various windows programs under Wine. Here's the entry for Tube CAD 1.1.3:

WineHQ - Tube CAD 1.1.3

Thanks for posting that! I do question how WineHQ doesn't consider the inability to print to be a bug.

Steve

[bob p]

Steve is a pretty knowledgeable Windows user. I fancy myself as a guy who knows a thing or two about the x86 platform and every now and then I learn something very helpful from Steve.

I have to echo his comments about "supidification" (W) of the user interface. Windows dumbs things down to the point that as an end user, you don't really know what's going on when you execute a command. Back in the old days before Xerox brought us the GUI, running a command was a concrete concept, where the results that were produced were exactly in line with the results that you expected. If you issued a command on a CP/M or a DOS box, then you pretty much knew exactly what was supposed to happen. And in thee absence of user error, you got exactly what you were expecting.

Fast forward to the days of the first MS GUI and even with the advent of the GUI window manager that came with DOS 7 (commonly referred to as Win95) you still knew exactly what was going on, because the underlying OS was still DOS. [Steve: notice that I use the terms OS and window manager separately, where a lot of people don't make that distinction. More on that later.]

Things got worse as the Windows software progressed. With DOS 8 (aka Windows Me & XP) things got even worse -- many commands and services were added to the system, such that the user tended to have no cllue what was going on in his computer. Things had progressed to the point that the user no longer had a real grasp of what was going on with his box, and he didn't have any means of actually controlling many of it's features. A great many of the commands were undocumented, and a great many of the services were so poorly documented that you couldn't make sense of them, and you couldn't really control them either. Daemon after daemon was running in the background, and many of these daemons were interactive and dependent upon one another. The OS was evolving into a spaghetti bowl mess that was impossible for end users to understand, but quite easy for hackers to exploit.

Microsoft's response? To further dumb-down the user interface, obfuscating the operations of the system to the user. A cottage industry developed for plugging the gaping security holes, and the problem was so great that these security companies evolved into major players in the Fortune 500.

The problem just gets worse and worse with every successive implementation of the Windows OS. I tried to run Win 7 and I absolutely hated it. There was further alienation of the user from the computer, to the point that the OS was acting as an insulator between end-user and hardware. Maybe that's good for people who don't understand computers and don't want to understand computers, and prefer to mindlessly just click on icons while Colossus manages their lives for them, but that's not for me. I like to understand what's going on in my computer, and to a great degree I actually like to exert control over the function of the system. With the modern OS, we're seeing a divergence in the way that the OS is designed to function. The PC is no longer a device for people who know how to use a computer. The PC is now becoming a device for people who have no friggin' clue how to use a computer. When you embrace that paradigm, it's impossible for the user interface to become anything but dumber and dumber with each successive implementation.

[Steve Conner]

I gave up trying to customise user interfaces. I just expect whoever designed the UI to get it right for me. If it's painfully bad, I'll use another program.

I'm not over fond of the new Office ribbon interface, but I bit the bullet and learned how to use it.

One of the things I like about Win7 is that they finally fixed the directory tree. In XP, if you were in the My Documents folder and pressed the "Parent" button, you would end up in "Desktop", whereas it should be your home directory, because that's where the My Documents folder lives. Windows hardly uses the home directory, so most people would never notice. I never noticed until I started using Cygwin.

In 7, the Parent button in Explorer finally does the same as "cd .." at the command prompt. There are about a dozen other annoying "features" that MS fixed too, like renaming "Documents and Settings" to "Users".

7 also brings in a more Unix-like security model that won't let you do certain things without "elevating" your privileges. It's not a million miles from "sudo" and its assorted graphical front ends on Ubuntu and Mac OS.

But then they confused everything again by introducing "Libraries" and breaking the search function. ;(

[bob p]

I think Win7 is Microsoft's best OS yet.

I guess it depends on your criteria for defining what is good.

A. If a good OS amounts to something that any brain-dead idiot can learn how to use with minimal training, it might well be their best OS yet.

B. OTOH if the criterion is based upon the ability of a user to exert granular control over their working environment, I'd have to say that Win 7 is MS worst OS yet.

C. If the critera are based upon watershed events that changed the computing paradigm and the capabilities that a PC brings to the table, I'd have to argue that Win 7 isn't even close to being meaningful. IMO there are many more OS releases from MS that had a bigger impact on changing the way that the world works. But you might have to be a bit of an old fart to appreciate them.

IMO the following OS made significant advances to modern computing that go far beyond what Win 7 brings to the table:

DOS 2.x brought support for hard disks to the IBM-XT and clones by PCs Limited, which would later become Dell Computer. The advent of the 10 MB hard drive and a tree-structured file system had a profound impact on office computing. Files could now be archived in one location, while being accessed in real time. This effectively put an end to playing "disk jockey" with a shoebox full of 360k floppy diskettes.

DOS 3.x brought support for FAT16 and "large hard disks". People who are old enough will remember that the advent of FAT16 was a major event, as it enabled the use of "gigantic hard disks with unlimited storage capacity."

Windows for Workgroups (aka Windows 3.1) revolutionized the concept of PC Connetivity by supporting LAN devices in a GUI environment. This MS release probably had a bigger effect on changing the way the PC was used in business than any other MS product.

DOS 7.x (aka Win95) imparted a major paradigm shift to the way that most consumer end users began to utilize their PC. It's had a huge impact in making a computer useable to someone who has only minimal training.

I guess one could say that the advent of Internet Explorer was significant as well. but Windows 7? I don't see it changing the game at all. It's just another incremental upgrade of the user interface. Or a downgrade, depending on how you look at it.

It's easy to lose perspective on how far we've advanced in the field of personal computing. In an age where a cheapo garden-variety PC can be loaded with a free OS that can give you instant web access, email, and office applications, it's easy to take modern functionality for granted.

[Steve Conner]

Well, I like Ubuntu and Mac OS, and I think Win7 is the closest Microsoft has got to emulating the features I like in those. So that's why it is my favourite so far. Also, for 7 they rewrote the kernel from scratch.

I'm done messing with computers for fun. I want them to be tools that just work out of the box. If there is some security hole or bug, I expect the OS vendor to patch it for me with an automatic update. I really could care less about having "granular control".

In this sense, I am deliberately and cynically "brain dead" per Bob's Option A. But I also get a lot of work done. I use my computers to write firmware for industrial devices, and I understand the architectures and OSs of the devices we make in minute detail, as I have to to do my job.

But how my desktop OS works, I really don't care too much as long as it runs the cross-compiler and PCB design software, and doesn't eat my files. That's Microsoft's job, or Canonical or Apple's, not mine.