Old PC Linux

Will,

Unix, from which Linux is derived has been around since the late 1970's when you were still a young man. So it's not so much something new as that something passed by you unnoticed

Rog

You can just use an ordinary browser for this - I have a last-century* laptop in the workshop on which I listen to both live internet radio and catch-up, running firefox under Mint 17.

* last millenium, come to think of it

Have a look ar LibreCAD if Draftsight has too many problems. It will open and save several type of drawing files. For 3D FreeCAD is looking to be the best bet. I am playing around with SketchUp under wine. Not working fully so far so I am awaiting a bug fix on PlayWithLinux as it allows a number of wine settings to be changed easily. To be honest though as I find out how various things are done with SketchUp I feel it's cranky and bugged. The other problem is that it comes as a trial of the £300+ version and stays like that for 3 months. No idea what remains after that.

If I listen to the radio I use VLC. It's a media player and plays media and video too. Radio is a text file with the url's in it or typed in directly. It will remember those via open recent media. Video is on odd ball on Linux as many of the codecs are proprietary. How disto's support them varies. VLC comes able to support the lot. It can do all sorts of things. I keep meaning to see if it can be used to play flash in web browsers.

PDF's can be read using Adobe as they maintain a Linux version. The Linux one that comes with KDE is very slow when scanned books are flicked through so I generally use a reader called Foxit reader. It's free, fast and small. They do a windows version too.

I switched to laser printers a long time ago as we didn't print that often and I was fed up with them blocking up. Colour lasers. They do work out cheaper per print even given the cost of the toners. I always buy one that supports Linux directly so that there is no problems obtaining drivers. I'm not sure how many printers are supported now but in the distant past this could be a problem for some especially if they wanted the latest greatest. I understand this has improved a lot of late - people at HP for instance writing drivers in their spare time for instance. My opensuse seems to have HP's device manager in it some where. Probably because HP always validate Suse on their servers.

Flash has had a bit of a problem of late as Adobe haven't updated the Linux version. Google seem to have done something about this. Looks like Chrome/Chromium needs what ever they have done. Firefox queries using the older player at times but does and Opera doesn't care and just uses it. The update was down to security concerns that I suspect don't apply to Linux. Adobe have done this sort of thing in the past on their reader. Big bloated thing so I use Foxit anyway.

For photography I mainly use 2 programs. Fotoxx and RawTherapee. Both are happy working on jpg's. There are a number of others I use for panoramas/extreme perspective correct, Hugin and yet others for HDR. Also the GIMP at times. There are a series of video tutorials on Fotoxx. Others too.

Fotoxx is Linux only. It's aim is to be able to do what 95% of even pro's might want to do to shots. No single application will replace PhotoShop but a mix will.

There are all sorts kicking about including PDF editors and pdf are an option on printing to file. LibreOffice might even export them. Sometimes the easiest way to find things is google Linux what ever it does.

John

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John,

See my posting on page 1 of this thread re programs I use. And below.

Why do I use them?

PaintShop Pro - because I do very little actual work of this nature, mainly "improving" slides being converted to digital, converting eg, tiff files to jpg & resizing jpg's for transmission to relatives. Hence I can't be bothered learning something new when PSP via Wine does what I want. Furthermore, a quick look at Gimp, the Linux equivalent, and it seemed so alien that I decided against it.

However, recently I discovered that later versions of PSP gave an additional facility which will be very useful to me when converting my slides to digital, and on checking with Gimp, I find that Gimp has the same, and arguably better facility so now I'm trying find my way around Gimp.

DesignCad 2000/DesignCad Pro 3D v. 17. Earlier & later CAD programs. When I first started with CAD, I used Draft Choice which worked very well for me, especially as it had a very good introduction to CAD. Unfortunately as time went on, computers & software were upgraded, and Draft Choice became more and more unreliable hence eventually I had to find an alternative. I could not get on with the then offerings from TurboCad and other CAD's were somewhat expensive. Eventually I found DesignCad 2000 going for the tremendous sum of £12.99 including P&P so I thought it worth a punt. I found it similar to Draft Choice and very easy to understand and use. It does all that I want and works well via Wine in Linux so as yet, I have no reason to change.

Masterfile Professional (Mpro). This is a DOS based database program which is very, if not extremely, reliable. I got it working under Windows XP using a 50 line x 80 column display so in display terms it was almost as good as genuine Windows based programs. With help form a separate (non-Linux) forum, I have got it working, not perfectly, but satisfactorily, using DOSemu under Linux. Again, I have no reason to change - the program does all that I want.

I have had the above programs working in Linux via Oracle's Virtual Box hosting Windows XP, but in reality, I have slowly moved away from that working method. The problem with Virtual Box is that it is a long winded method of getting things going when starting up. Also, there is a definite performance hit when using Mpro this way. There are no problems with data sharing between Linux and the individual programs - it just means setting things up to suit: in my case I used a DOS batch file.

I would just make one further point. People, especially the Linux fanboys, will suggest using dual boot, Virtual Box, or even not using Linux, indeed anything rather than sully Linux with Windows type software. Virtual Box I have mentioned above; dual booting immediately prevents one using multi-tasking and task swopping which to my mind are the two big advantages of modern computing. Not using Linux does not even warrant a reply.

Unlike some people who seem to think the computer is a toy, it is my belief that the computer is a tool to make our lives easier and therefore there should be no restrictions on how it is set up to achieve that task, hence my present set up.

Final comment to Will.

I'm the same age as you, and yes, in some respects I agree with what you are saying. But, and it's a big but, it all depends on what you want. In my case, over the last 25-30 years I've come to realise that althogh Microsoft has had some good ideas, and they have been badly treated in respect of software theft, some of their antics have left a sour taste and hence the removal of support for XP was the last straw for me. They thus pushed me into transferring to Linux and learning the new jargon. I think it's worth remembering that all that Windows is, is the engine of the computer, and that is all that Linux is, an engine, albeit a different engine, but nevertheless an engine for the computer. Think of it this way, how many cars have had different engines installed to that originally installed by the manufacturer. The programs that run on the computer are dependant on the engine, for example, you couldn't run a petrol engine on diesel (or is the other way round?), so PaintShop Pro being a Windows program will not run on Linux. Yet, just like a petrol engine can be modified to run on either LPG or petrol by using additional equipment, so PaintShop Pro can be made to run on Linux by means of a program known as Wine. If you are happy using Windows, then simply ignore Linux.

Finally, there is the not inconsiderable fact that Linux and Linux based programs are for all intents and purposes free, something which Microsoft hates.

Regards,

Peter G. Shaw

GIMP is one hell of a package to get into Peter. One of the problems is all of the plugins that are available for it, which ones to use and in some cases the results they produce as they will be what the person who wrote it wanted. Making use of the underlying features in GIMP is also unlikely to come easily. Much like Photoshop actually but there are some good video tutorial about. You might like to watch the Fotoxx videos. It will do more than you need but is very simple to use. Coral After Shot Pro is available for Linux. Not OS but cheap and pretty capable. Very very little tuition about on fully using it though. A couple of video's of one person.

You could try freedos for dos programs. I have used that on some very old msdos applications at times. Dosemu is another.

I haven't used virtualbox often for a long time but when it was maintained by sun and not 64bit it ran things at a native speed, hardly any difference at all.

I had to compile LibreCAD due to my version of OpenSuse being past it's support date. Given that the compiler and bits and pieces are installed it's easy. Some distro's will probably install this as a job lot. Best ask on it's forum if in doubt. Maybe sucking eggs etc on this subject but just in case as it can be handy.

First download the compressed file somewhere sensible. Right click and extract here. That will unpack the file into a directory named according to it's version number. Get in that directory and look at any readme or install text file. Often they will tell you what to type in the terminal.Then right click on that folder and select actions open terminal here. This is KDE, others are likely to be similar.

There are 2 basic ways things are compiled. If there is a .pro file in the directory that was opened it will use cmake. This is being used more and more so to compile

cmake ./whatever.pro

make

su or sudo

make install.

Or the older way

./configure

make

su or sudo

make install

Both can be followed by a make clean. It removes some files that were used to produce the final program.

The first command checks how the machine is organised and if all of the needed bits of software are there. Errors if any will be can't find so and so. So find it and install it. It really is best to restrict sources to the distro that is being used. They can be compiled from source too and if that goes without a hitch all should be ok. Another error might be that a certain part can be found but it's the wrong version - best forget installing what ever it was as fixing that may mess all sorts up. I have messed things up this way and had to go to the distro forum to get help sorting it out. It might have killed the machine all together. Really this is what distro's are for - they will provide software that will all work on the machine without upsetting each other - but if they don't provide a particular piece of software compiling your own is the only way.

Sometime the configuration part suggests a piece of software that is needed and then when it's all done suggests another. Just keep doing it but after 2 or 3 it might be best to give up.

I used microsoft software even dos to write software for the machine itself and for the systems I was working on. Going back to the early days when I found that printing tied up the machine up fully and that dos wasn't re enterant I came to the conclusion that Gates was some sort of idiot that didn't really know what he was doing. As IBM wanted him to arrange for it to do that from day one that might be the case. Lots of extremely bad practice. Things like compilers and assemblers were a bit jocular as well compared with others I have used. Later on as some aspect of the tools they provide are still lacking I do wonder if this is all down to a rather clever but savage business model. I've also watched while they have slowly but surely wrecked other software businesses who produced much better offerings. So cheesed off with this sort of thing and not wanting to use what I used at work I switched to Linux at home. Apart from BASH which I hate it's ok and hasn't caused me much in the line of difficulty for rather a long time now and I still know very few BASH commands. I've mentioned most of them, but not ls and cd and the . / 's etc.

I really should sit a type these in one go - less typo's but too many to fix on this one - probably.

John

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Edited By Ajohnw on 08/02/2016 17:49:16