Possible compromise(s) when switching to a *nix based system

With the latest trends regarding Windows 10 and realizing that most of the tools or task I'm doing these days don't really requires windows anymore, I'm thinking about switching to either a Linux or FreeBSD based OS. The goal is to install it on my current PC, which is quite old, so drivers shouldn't be an issue.

Basic apps like browsers are working fine since I tried many time either inside a VM or a different partition as a learning experience but.. I never used it in everyday use except at work remotely with ssh. What I would like to know is what kind of compromise has to be done when you do the switch? Is there any issue for doing nesdev? CC65 is there, some emulators are available or should be accessible with Wine. I guess a windows VM could help is other scenario but I would like to avoid that but what other issues should I expect, if any?

I use Windows since I have been using it back from the dos days so it just an habit. Since I now use at work either Mac OSX or Linux, I'm now used to more than windows and the itch to switch is there.

Any opinion on the subject will be appreciated. As for nesdeving, I may do again someday if I can find the time but for now it's not on the radar yet.

I use Linux. One emulator available is Mednafen. Linux is much better than the Windows I had on my previous computer. I have not used Wine so I cannot comment on that.

I dumped Windows in 2006, and have used Linux exclusively since then. For me, there wasn't really any compromise - unlike many, I hadn't pirated Photoshop or other Adobe tools, and I didn't play PC games really, even on Windows my computer gaming was in emulators. I had to learn some new programs, but their functionality was equivalent, and they were Free Software (didn't matter at the time, but now I really value how I can customize anything, and nothing tries to spy on me).

Nesdev works fine, though the Linux port of fceux doesn't have the debugger and other niceties.

I could preach all the good things I got, but I doubt you're interested in that

I've written a set of helper scripts that I use with wine; it makes using various small windows programs (nones, fceux-windows, nintendulator(/dx), nosns) almost as good as native. (The file dialog still exhibits UI impedance mismatch).



The other important detail is that Nintedulator's keyboard remap dialog crashesused to crash, so if you have an old enough build of wine you might need what I said in this post.

FCEUX works in Wine. (And when it doesn't, I report bugs on its SourceForge issue tracker.) It also has a native version using SDL, albeit without step debugging.

Nintendulator is rumored to work in Wine except for problems with its input configuration dialog, though I haven't tested it.

For Super NES, bsnes-classic/-plus is available natively, and if you have a slow PC and are willing to run a proprietary emulator, NO$SNS works in Wine.

YY-CHR failed to start in Mono because it hardcodes backslashes into paths. Instead, I use GIMP to create CHR as PNG and some custom Python programs to convert it to NES CHR, Game Boy CHR, Super NES CHR, or whatever other format I need at a given time.

zzo38: I hadn't heard of winepath. I'll have to check it out.

If I had to give you a recommendation for desktop usage, re: Linux vs. FreeBSD, I would recommend you go with Linux. The device driver support is substantially better, and the likelihood of things "just working" tend to be higher. For example, a colleague of mine uses Ubuntu 16.x on his new laptop (which has an actual 512GB M.2 NVMe drive in it -- not M.2 AHCI/SATA SSD, but actual PCIe NVMe), which was the only distro which literally "just worked" upon installation and went smoothly. YMMV though.

If you did want to try out a "desktop BSD", I'd suggest PC-BSD (that's a desktop-oriented version of FreeBSD; both the PC-BSD folks and the FreeBSD folks exchange fixes/improvements/etc. so don't think of it as a "fork").

Footnote reminder: I have experience with both Linux and FreeBSD as *servers*, but virtually none with them as desktops.

The older C++ version works well with Wine, from my experiences.

@everyone

Thank you for your opinions on the subject!

@lidnariq

Thank you for the script, I will try it.

@tepples

I will try FCEUX then. As for YY-CHR, if the app is open source, it should be quite simple to fix that issue (if this is the only issue under mono). For bsnes-classic, I could be wrong bug I think a core 2 duo 3.0ghz should be enough. Didn't try bsnes recently though.

@koitsu

Regarding drivers, this is the same conclusion I came up too. But since my pc is 8 years old, freeBSD has no issue with it (except for some unusual 3G modem from japan which I can't figure it out yet either in linux or freeBSD).

For FreeBSD, I was able to install everything I needed from xorg, xfce, tools etc and my test partition is running fine. I have installed a few linux distro here and there but still not sure which one to use since they seems to install too much stuff compared to freeBSD. And for some reason, I felt that when I had issues with FreeBSD and searched, the information I found was clear an concise. Maybe I was just lucky. For that reason, it was fun to learn how to install it but I guess that phase will cool down soon.

Still, I'm not 100% sure if I will use either linux or freeBSD yet. I'm in no rush, kicking the tires.

@freem

Good to know since I use that tool once in a while!

Check out Arch Linux. The base installation is minimal and their wiki is top-notch.

I did try it in a vm 2 days ago The wiki is quite good but since I'm still not much an expert on the subject, I was able to install it up to the chroot then was lost in the flood of information. Maybe I will try it again if I can find enough time to learn all the small details.

In my personal experience I had mixed experiences with Wine. On some systems it worked fine, but on others, I had many problems with graphical glitches, extreme slowdown (by extreme I mean it can freeze your computer for minutes for no apparent reason), and other annoyance, such as that how your keyboard switch from wine environment to linux environment is buggy, so I was enraged with those bad experiences. I guess Wine should only be used at last resort.


After attempting Ubuntu-based linux, Fedora-based linux and finally Gentoo (tooks about one week of compiling before you can actually use the system you've installed), I tryed my hand on Arch Linux. I didn't use it much yet so I can't comment, but I was able to install a working system quite fast (compared to Gentoo), and while it's definitely not an "out of the box" distribution, it sounds very promising if customisation and performance is your thing.

As for "switching to Linux"; for me Linux is emotively the operating system of work. The last 4 years I always used Linux at work and Windows at home for leisure (with a few exceptions here and there in both cases). So it'd be very hard to force myself to use exclusively Linux at home because I'd feel like I'd be at work. The absence of Tile Editors and emulators with advanced debugging features could be a problem, too.

I switched to Linux mainly in 2012 with Linux Mint, and have owned a gaming desktop that only runs Linux since Jan. 2014. Mint at first, then I switched to Arch. Arch for my PC is great because it's powerful, uses all my hardware because I compile/use pre-made modified kernels, I can game, and programming is fast and easy, and I know what it's doing and just stays out of the way. There's some software I don't have that is on Windows, but most of that software is shit anyway. Linux is 100% more than capable for basically anyone's workflow if they invest time in to it. Most of our software beats all paid software, so it's just a matter of time before it tasks. The only problems you will have switching to Linux is your shitty software you probably shouldn't be using doesn't support it. It's the best issue to have! I will never, ever use a Microsoft operating system on my hardware ever again, period.


Still, the main reasons to use Arch are:

1. Aur: This hosts tons of scripts to automatically compile and install software. Great for powerful hardware, terrible for lower end machines.

2. Pacman will let you do bad things to your system packages with a simple flag (-Rdd) when something fucks up, as opposed to basically bricking an installation I've encountered on Debian distros.


But yeah, Arch is what you build to be your own. But that is what makes it powerful. It's ONLY for power users, the people who can fix things if they break, and people with good hardware. But if you fit that general description, Arch is a breeze and is probably the most stable distro I've used, even with "unsupported" AUR packages, kernels, etc.

So maybe you can dress up a comprehensive list of how to get tools useful for NES and other retro console development on Linux ? That'd be useful I guess, for me included.

As for software, one of the most major problem I've always had with Linux is how the folders are organized. Every single time I install a software I have absolutely NO idea where it's located whatsoever. It occurred to me a couple of times that I couldn't even TRY to use a software I installed, because the installer didn't put the appropriate shortcut on the desktop or whatever.

The other problem is that it's insanely easy to break things on your computer without knowing. This goes from innocent stuff like your taskbar setting (extremely annoying when you move it's layout without wanting to - and this applies to ALL desktop environments available) to more harmful stuff like breaking up the system. My worst experience was with Fedora, where I wanted to uninstall a program with yum and it just removed all the packages it depended on, breaking up other programs and eventually the whole system. So my personal recommendation: Do not use any yum-based distro, EVER. Pacman looks great, but I didn't use it enough so it's too soon for me to comment.

GNU/Linux systems tend to follow a Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

• /bin: Programs needed for single user mode (that is, command-line system recovery), which may also be useful outside it. Things like ls (list files in a folder) are here.
• /sbin: Programs needed for single user mode that only an administrator should use
• /usr/bin: Programs in distribution's packaging system
• /usr/sbin: Programs in distribution's packaging system that only an administrator should use
• /usr/share: Read-only data used by programs in /usr/bin
• /usr/local/bin: Programs compiled and installed by a PC's administrator (cc65 usually goes here)
• /usr/local/share: Read-only data used by programs in /usr/local/bin
• /opt/{publisher}/{appname}: Programs installed by external installers (most similar to Program Files on Windows)

For more info, run man hier on any Linux system to view a summary of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

The big things you need in any environment are

1. A text editor
2. cc65 (C compiler, assembler, and linker targeting 6502 systems)
3. A paint program supporting indexed color mode, such as GIMP
4. A way to convert standard graphics formats to CHR data format
5. A build tool to recognize which source code files have changed and rebuild object code files, such as GNU Make
6. An emulator
7. A web browser (to promote the end result)

Your machine will come with an adequate text editor and web browser, though you may want to install a different one. Under Debian or Xubuntu or Mint, the command sudo apt-get install build-essential gimp python3-pil wine will give you C (GIMP), E (Make is part of build-essential), and the dependencies for B (cc65 is typically installed from source, and GCC is part of build-essential, D (my PNG to CHR converter is written in Python), and F (the debugging version of FCEUX uses the Win32 toolkit).

This leaves a few potentially unfamiliar experiences:

• Compiling cc65 can be an unfamiliar experience for someone who's never built a program from source code before. Download a snapshot of the source tree at GitHub, unzip it to a new folder, read the README, and follow the instructions.
• If you need, such as support for NES 2.0 features, you'll need a copy of FCEUX built from SVN. So far my best choice has been obtaining binaries from EmuCR, but its files are hosted on free file hosting sites filled with fake download buttons that are really ads.

I'll recommend mtpaint for working with pixel art. It's easier to use than GIMP but still has all of the features that you need. It's a nice little image editor.

For working with tiles, check out the Tiled map editor.


AUR hosts precompiled binaries too though, and cc65 is a good example of this; it has two packages: one pre-built and one that compiles from git. I hope people aren't getting the idea that Arch involves compiling tons of things from source, as that's really not the case nor is it the point.

My main gripe with Linux (I used Ubuntu for a while) is that a simple OS update completely bricked my computer. "Do you want to install updates?", "Yes", Bam, computer doesn't boot anymore. And before that, for no apparent reason, it stopped mounting USB drives automatically. I don't know enough about Linux to debug and fix these problems, and I can't go re-installing the OS every few weeks when it pulls one of these on me. It felt very unstable to me.

This is a problem with UBUNTU indeed, I and other people experimented the same as you! But not with Linux! Fedora's package manager Yum is even worse, but all the others are much better than apt. Also I belive this problem with apt has been fixed 4-5 years ago so it should be fixed today (although I do not remember the details - I'll let you use google for more info about the ubuntu update bugs).

@3gengames

I have interest in arch because of it's philosophy of total control and that's a Canadian's distribution but with my limited time... I guess I will start with something simpler. Hope I can configure it properly someday.

@Bregalad

Everything you install doesn't always have a shortut in the GUI so if you don't know the name of the app, it's make it quite hard to figure it out. If you know the name, you could always use "which appName" to know where it's located.

As for apps, if I can figure out how to use my tools for nesdev, I will be more than happy to share at a later stage.

@Tepples

Tepples to the rescue for specific information about the hiearchy of the file system I learned a lot!

@Pubby

I didn't know about MTPaint, thanks!

@Tokumaru

Same experience here. In the past, I always wanted to try all windows manager and as much package as possible: bad idea! in 90% of the time, the installer fail when you select too many packages (must be some dependencies issues). These days with the live CD with limited packages and no custom selection, the installer fails less.

@All

Keeps it up! Any info about the best tools for nesdev under linux is always appreciated. That will make an interesting thread. Maybe we should put the best tool per OS in the wiki. Windows I know but for Linux/OSX, not yet.

For now, I think I will experiment with one BSD partition (somehow I like it, don't know why) and another one with fedora XFCE. I will install wine for Nintendulator and Famitracker and see how it goes.

These days I speaks in Japanese only so it feels strange to write in english! I'm losing my english My grammar must suck big time!

そうですか。
ちょっとだけ。^_~　でも、あたしの日本語はちょっと…

Mednafen also works for debugging, though it's more built for one-window/fullscreen use, is more keyboard-oriented than mouse, and requires increasing the view multiplier in the config to at least 3. Tepples's monitor wasn't big enough.

IMHO Ubuntu is a terrible distro, for precisely this reason. It's not a problem inherent to Linux; Canonical just doesn't give a shit.

I can't speak for many other distros, but Debian stable is precisely what it says on the tin: stable. Not exactly user-friendly if you're not familiar with Linux though.

The store where I purchased this computer preinstalled OEM Ubuntu and said not to upgrade; now I know why. Nevertheless the current version works for me (once I changed most of the packages and other things).

...I use Ubuntu...

This is not an excuse. The package installer is supposed to do its job properly, no matter if the user told it to install "many" of "few" packages. Especially considering those words have no precise meaning for a computer.

For some reason I don't like Ubuntu and maybe I was right about it

@Myask

I'm French native but I never was good at grammar: not able to remember it! As for English I learned by mostly by reading and talking, which means I have no idea about the grammar, I just try to reproduce what I remember。 日本語はどうでしょう！仕事するながら「何となく」勉強をなりました。日本語でも文法はあまり上手ではないので、申し訳ありませんですが、日本語の勉強関係はサポート出来なさそうと思いますｗ

@Bregalad

I totally agree with you, an installer should not fail in any case. This was one big turn off while trying to install linux in the past. It seems to be more stable right now, if they don't have much package to install at the same time!..

I had issues with package manager too, but by selecting the packages in the correct order (including specific versions if needed) and then using the interactive conflict resolution if needed, you can get it to work correctly. (For some reason, what is selected by default is often stupid, but it can be overridden with correct operations without too much difficulty.)

Ouais? Je me débrouille. English is native; Japanese, German, French are learned.
「出来なさそう」を分かりません。

That leads me to a relevant consideration: the IME.
(a half hour later)
Don't see any problems with the intersection of alternate keyboard layouts and the Japanese IME, and I found out how to turn this Windows key into Compose instead, much more useful for French and German.

My personal opinion is that if you need to resolve conflicts every time you install a program, well, the package manager failed at its job A package manager should be a software that allows me to install programs without having to worry about conflicts since this is the reason I use the tool in the first place.

Maybe this is a Linux thing were "conflicts are common and everyone knows about it, you didn't know?" that I'm not aware of.



J'utilise mon français une fois par semaine alors je vers le perdre d'ici peu! It's interesting to know multiple languages, the problem is to find the time to improve those skills.

出来 , to be able (dekiru)
なさそう unlikely , doubt
Means I think it's unlikely or don't believe that I will be able to do, related to the previous thing mentioned

食べなさそう I don't think I will be able to eat that

Maybe this website would give you plenty of example :
http://eow.alc.co.jp/search?q=%E3%81%AA%E3%81%95%E3%81%9D%E3%81%86&ref=sa

It gives a list of example of なさそう. It's a site a like to use from time to time when searching some phrase example.

Ok, Japanese was off-topic, before the fairies start to split we will continue to talk about linux

I had not seen any places it's used directly as a verb suffix/ending, so I was uncertain. I tend to use jisho.org.

I haven't had any package-manager problems, myself.

@Myask

After asking my wife I may not have used it properly ^_^;; It seems that you are not supposed to write that way when referring to youself, thus my lack of grammar is showing again. She said she understood the meaning but I should have used 出来ない instead. I learned on the job so I don't know about those small nuances.

back on topic, with older versions of linux, I always had issues if I chose too many packages. I guess I was just not lucky then.

At least in Aptitude anyways. However, in most cases (according to what I actually use) software can install fine with no conflicts, from my experience. In some cases there are conflicts though and they must be resolved manually (there is an automatic resolver but in my experience it doesn't work).

Aptitude is mostly-abandoned and its solver is about 20% broken.

Which is unfortunate, because it's my favorite UI.

In practice, I try to use aptitude to take updates, and if its solver has problems then I use apt-get or plain apt.

(FWIW, I run Debian Sid and am pleased by it)

For the programs that have to run under windows I may need a guest windows xp for them (my eeprom burner never got an update..). Should it be ok with qemu? I never used it before so I don't know what to expect. I could use virtualbox but I try to avoid software from the current owner ^_^; let's just say that I don't like their business practices.

I am not thrilled at all about VirtualBox's owner, but I have been using it just fine with a bunch of older WinXP-requiring programs.

The time I tried all the virtualization options, qemu's video emulation was painfully slow.

Paying a little bit for VMware might be worth it.

I'm using it all the time at work, it's just that I'm trying to find an alternative. If they could change owner like they did for open office.. It would make my day

Regarding vmware, I thought the player was free except for fusion?

VMWare Player is free; it's the only thing that I know of that'll accept my parallel port Zip drive, so hopefully it'll work with your eeprom burner.

Just for fun, I tested the latest 32-bit build on my Ubuntu VM and confirmed that the configuration dialog wasn't working (at least for keyboard and mouse input). Fortunately, I was able to fix it by adding 2 lines of code (to process window messages when it waits for you to press a key) - for whatever reason, Wine's implementation of DirectInput seems to have some flaws, at least in the version I was using.

FWIW, the newest version of wine in debian (package wine-development version 1.9.8) it works correctly without that additional change.

Thank you. Even if newer Wine has a fix for this, it's still a good idea to add a bit of belt-and-suspenders redundancy, especially for users on long-term-supported distributions that might be stuck with a 6- to 30-month-old version of Wine.

I had this issue while testing nintendulator on mac osx with winebottler but didn't know the cause. Must be the same bug. The dev version was using wine 1.8.

Thank you for fixing that bug. I will see if I can test it again once I reinstall wine.

Well, that's a very rare case, as 99% of the stuff in the AUR is build scripts for source code. Pre-compiled items usually should be in extra/ and not the AUR, but I guess it doesn't have enough clout to where that's how it's done for CC65.

Latest version of nintendulor is working fine with wine bottler 1.8 rc4 on mac osx.

Just so that everyone knowns, I just tried Cinneamon desktop. It looks a lot more Windows-like than other more popular desktops (such as Gnome, KDE, LXDE/XFCE and Unity), so if you aim to have a Windows-like desktop, Cinneamon is definitely your choice. Personally I like it a lot more than all the other desktops I mentionned there.

Cinneamon is GNOME-based and uses Gnome libraries, but have an interface which is much more Windows-like. I have to say it is my personal favourite among the desktops I have yet tried on Linux.

Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE can all be configured to be Windows-Like. By default, they're just not. But if you run Linux Mint, you'll find all the desktop versions are pretty much the same, just with different effects. Ubuntu have 3 versions with Unity, Mate, and Gnome, all three which can look pretty much the same with configuration. Tying why you should use a Linux desktop to the interface rather than the actual distro is the exact opposite thing you're supposed to do, as nearly all desktop environments can be made to feel that same way.


Plus, as a Linux-only gamer, Cinnamon has absolutely abysmal performance for gaming because it features baked-in custom compositor. It's basically unusable. If it works good on your device for light stuff, it's fine. But it usually is pretty bad when using non-mobile, modern hardware.

Linux can be used without a desktop environment. I use Linux with a window manager but not a desktop environment. (In my opinion the desktop environment mainly just gets in the way, so I have uninstalled it.)

Lxde and xfce can look very similar to windows when configured properly. If you look at manjaro 16.06, you would never know that it was xfce.

I got one partition with fedora working but no luck with the 3g dongle. It sees it but fail to connect. No error message except failed in logs so cannot do much. It's a dongle from japan and old so I cannot find much info on the subject.

My only way to use it would be to start the internet in a guest vm then share it but my lack of experience in linux networking is the roadblock right now. I set a host only adapter in virtual box and xp/fedora seems to see each other but I don't know how to access the internet from the guest with the current host settings. I have that annoying compromise until I switch internet at a later stage.

I think the xp vm side is fine since I did share in the past from an xp netbook and used similar settings. Anybody got any experience in sharing the internet access of the guest vm?

Cinnamon is windows-like by default. The others aren't.



Sure, all those desktop environements and/or windows managers can be configured to look pretty much anthing you can imagine, however, as a user I probably do not want to spend more than a couple of minutes configuring the GUI. What I liked with Cinnamon is that it looks like windows by default - sure the colours etc... are very different, but I mean how the task bar is layed out and how things are organized.

I like the concept of a "lightweight" desktop like XFCE/LXDE but for some reason I do not like them very much, I could not tell why exactly. They are not quite windows like by default.


Sure, but window managers comes without any task bar so you're back into something that is Windows3.1 like in its interface. Also, it takes hours to configure one to look half-decent, as they tend to be extremely ugly by default.

Windows 8.x isn't "windows-like by default."

I used Cinnamon a little bit and it similar but not quite the same as windows. It depends wich version of windows you are talking about.

If you look at the LXDE included with Fedora 23, which is the one I'm using right now, it's feels very windows like to me.



I included a screenshot of XFCE on Manjaro. Look quite good too. I like how much they customized it.



If you don't like to configure I guess your best bet is to find a distribution that configure it the way you like it.



Since not many people likes it maybe we should call it Windows "hate" (we don't voice h in french so it's easy to make that mistake )

The real question I always propose is, why would you want it to look like Windows by default anyway? Windows has one of the biggest waste of pixels panels and menus interfaces ever. And the menus can look different all of them point to the same crap. If you need Windows menus, you should probably just use Windows. Linux menus all do the same thing, the look is the only thing that is different. And if the look throws you off, yet not functionality, you need help.

You can use xterm to start up programs; that is what I do. Also, it looks fine if you get rid of all icons and decorations.

(Open/flux/black)box have reasonable defaults.

I'm still inordinately fond of Windowmaker.

Because desktop environment I have been used to always worked like that and I don't like change, especially if something is not broken. I'd as well use a command like rather than a desktop environment which is not comprehensible to me.¨

(Note : When I say "Widnows-like interface" I really mean "Windows 95 interface and it's derivate, not the bad turn that interfaces have taken in recent Windows releases)


I do not care about your opinion about that for the mentioned reason above.


No because I neeed Widnows 95-like menus, and they're dropping that in Windows 10 and they'll eventually stop to support 7 which is the last which have fallback to Windows 95-like graphical style. They're also droping compatibility with the older programs I use and which do not exist on **n*x.

"Linux" itself is command line and to not have menus. You need to instal a graphical interface to get menus.


Since you use a graphical interface, you spend most of the time interacting your computer with your mouse and the windows and menus, so yes, how they look and how they are layed out on the screen is not only important, but also the most important thing. If that does not work, I'd rather use a command line.

In particular, I could not explain why exactly, but I much dislike the "feel" of LXDE and XFCE on their default configuration. By their default setting most Desktops add unnecessary stuff to the task bar and remove necessary stuff elsewhere such as in the start menu, but remove important stuff from the desktop icons, such as access to all disk drives.

Then let me rephrase: Major X11 desktop environments' menus all do the same thing, the look is the only thing that is different.


Among current desktop environments that I'm aware of, Xfce actually comes closer to this feature than Windows.

• Xfce has a separate desktop icon for each mounted removable drive, as well as "File System" for fixed disks.
• Windows 95 (4.0) through 10 list mounted drives inside "This PC" (called "My Computer" in some editions).
• Only OS X lists all mounted drives on the desktop. (So did Mac OS Classic and GS/OS.)

I perfectly understood what he meant, I just wanted to troll him. No need to rephrase what he said.


Well, you might well be correct. But Cinnamon really "feels" more windows-like than Xfce. Also, Cinnamon do not show all the mounted drives on the desktop just like windows, but instead there is a link that allows you to open a windows that browse them.

All major DE's show mounted drives when you go to the desktop options. I know for a fact it's on XFCE and Cinnamon, at minimum. I have it on MATE, but I don't know how I got it on here, if it was in my standard options or not. It seems you don't really have much knowledge of any basic Linux software. Maybe if you use it and got over the fear of it not working 100% like windows, you issues wouldn't exist. Because TBH, nobody cares to help with anyone's preference issues. Just use it and get over it. Nobody bitches that Mac isn't Windows, and how they wanted a Mac that works more like Windows. They just shut up and use it for 10 minutes and figure it out. Plus, it's not like they're asking to use i3 or something asinine. If you're using a DE, just stop being such a prude and get over it that different software has different things in different places. It's at most a couple minute experience to browse it all and figure it out and never have an issue again.

I think it would be best to tone it down a little. Bregalad's interest in using a system that defaults to a configuration he's familiar with is reasonable, and the breadth of choices with constantly fighting users is one of many things that keeps the average computer user away. However, I don't disagree with what you're saying. I think it is worth taking ten minutes or so to learn something that is different and configure it to your liking once. One thing that is nice about many of these environments is the ease of copying and restoring a configuration file you only have to put together one time.

My "DE" of choice is Openbox, with a minimal RC I put together for it. It gives me window-side snapping similar to Windows Aero, pressing Win+R to bring up a launcher dialogue (gmrun), and Win+E to bring up a terminal emulator (xterm). I know the latter mapping is a little odd, but it's next to R, so it's what I chose. I have Win+L lock the screen with slock at work, though at home I do not feel the need to lock my computer.

If you are interested in my configuration and would like to give it a try, it's as simple as dropping a file into a directory and running openbox. I would not mind sharing it if you would like to try it.

I habe been using linux regularly for 7 years, although mostly at work. (I have still yet to get strong enough motivation to defintely quit windows at home.) I tried pretty much every of the most popular desktops environments out there, although none of them for a very long and extended period of time. Although all of them were satisfying, none of them was really "perfect" for me. Please don't call me a moron just because I am not feeling really confident with this large sets of available DE.


So linux fans constantly advertise "switch to Linux because Windows suck", but then they shout at people complaining that it is too different to the classical Windows 95 experience. WTF really ? Do you want people to "switch" or not ?


In this particular case, I am mostly interested in *nix because Microsoft stops to support traditional Windows 95-like desktops in their Windows operating system. Once again, this is the primary reason to "switch" to linux, keeping a traditional Windows 95-like desktop is the whole point of the "switch".

If this is not a priority for you, fine. For me it is. I am fine using a different interface now and then to play, but for everyday computer interface I badly want it Windows 95-style. That or command line.


No, they don't.


Yeah, they use that at work on shared machines. The interface is absolutely awful in my opinion, but I know it can be configured to be better by changing just a file. However one error in the file and the graphical interface won't start

Personally although I understand the point of window manager to be between full DEs and command line, I have to say installing a full desktop is still a nice thing to have, especially if I don't want to configure a window manager to look like a DE for hours.

If 9xtalgia is a big selling point to you, consider ReactOS. It's not Linux; it's a free Windows clone atop a free NT kernel clone. Do its screenshots look enough like Windows 9x or NT 4-5 to you?

The thread is going wild! I don't mind, a lot of interesting stuff is coming out of it.

I was able to share my internet from my guest os after proper routing so I can finally start to use linux normally. The only thing is nesdev in firefox doesn't look that good compared to other platforms. I don't know why the fonts looks like that.

@Bregalad
I love win95/2000 windows style since a long time. It's my favorite one. There are some theme that change the widgets to be windows like, the redmon theme? I will try to find it again.

@3gengames

What I like with linux compared to other os is that you have the freedom to choose whatever desktop/windows manager you want and you can adapt the ui the way you want. Maybe some people prefer windows like and we should keep an open mind for that. Everyone can do whatever they want and this is what's great about it.

@Tepples

To suggest using reactOS which is in alpha stage is not a good suggestion. Yes, it's look like win9x/2000 but you cannot use this os in everday use. It's still for experimentation only.

Font config is a messy business. There are two chief parameters that differentiate the most common OSes.

On Windows 2000 and below:
Hinting is Full.
Anti-Aliasing is None *unless set to greyscale in 2K

On Windows XP and above:
Hinting is Full.
Anti-Aliasing is Subpixel *unless disabled

On Mac OS X:
Hinting is Slight or None.
Anti-Aliasing is Subpixel or Greyscale *except for software that explicitly allows the choice.

On Linux, different distros do different things, and different applications may or may not respect font configurations. The Arch Linux fontconfig page is helpful for more experienced users, but I can understand the configuration choices being daunting for early users.

If you want a Mac-like font rendering experience, turn off hinting and crank up anti-aliasing. This seems to sate a lot of "just works" users. Personally, I loathe that style and disable AA entirely for fonts below 12pt, and enable full hinting for those fonts. That gets me neat Windows 2000-style fonts, made for a pixel grid, while larger fonts (or web fonts, which don't have hinting instructions) don't look like a mess in the web browser.

This is because programs are given a blank window and are expected to do all the rendering themselves (this is why every toolkit looks so different and there doesn't seem to be a "native" look). Yes, this also means doing all the widget interaction themselves as well. How come most Linux users seem convinced this is a good thing is beyond me, but I guess that even suggesting absolutely anything that isn't "let me do absolutely anything I want" is considered like a war declaration.

Raw X11 calls (e.g. XDrawText), such as in the SDL2 error dialog, and a bunch of really legacy programs (xless, xman, xmag, editres, older versions of Tk, &c). Only really supports 8- or 16- bit per character bitmap fonts without antialiasing.

By now, I'd be content going back to the X11 experience of 1991 instead of the fetid pile we've evolved into instead. And I really don't expect Wayland to fix anything I care about (as opposed to just break everything I still care about)

I just started to use Linux, are you guys trying to discourage me right away?

Each toolkit does fonts how they like to do fonts. Pick a toolkit and let someone else manage a nice library, or spin your own. It's not as bad as you make it, it's flexibility. But I can't wait until Nvidia gets their Wayland driver compliant and Wayland comes along. It might not fix it, but getting rid of Xorg helps.

Once we no longer have X11, what can fans of traditional desktop Linux say in reply to "Android is Linux, and that ought to be good enough for you"? Because the possible compromise when switching to Android is that Android has traditionally enforced a window management policy of all maximized all the time.

Android runs on Linux and is built on Linux, but Android is additional software to be an OS onto it's self, so I don't really care whatever Android wants to try to do. By the time it matters, hopefully Google or Canonical will have finally made the market running pure Linux+DE OS's and get rid of the middleware we don't need now, which is Android.

The only thing Android has in common is the kernel and nothing else (what we traditionally think as "Linux" is actually GNU, a completely different operating system - hence their whole insistence of calling it GNU/Linux). In fact I wouldn't be surprised if some day Google goes ahead and replaces Android's kernel with their own or maybe a BSD kernel. Maybe drivers will be affected (but Android is driver hell anyway), but as far as apps care, as long as the same syscalls are there it shouldn't matter.

I'm well aware of that. Their response would be along the lines "Why do you need GNU/Linux when you can just use Android instead of GNU/Linux?" For a while, I've been trying to use "X11/Linux" as shorthand to distinguish operating environments that embrace multiple tiled or overlapping windows. But with X11 getting replaced with Wayland to plug the "XEvilTeddy" hole in the snap package format's isolation model, that may lose its distinctiveness. And I need the shorthand as a rhetorical means to avoid "those who demand multi-window are too demanding" and "Samsung's recent Galaxy tablets have a split-screen mode; replace your Nexus with a Galaxy and use only apps that opt into this Samsung proprietary feature" comebacks.

It has more to do with the fact that merely showing a bitmap on screen has an absurd amount of overhead just because it wants you to set up a network connection (even if to localhost) just so send it the data. But yes, the keystroke snooping (and way more, as just about every resource is shared) is ridiculous, that actually makes it the least secure operating system in practice and the situation isn't DOS levels of bad only because it isn't the most popular so there isn't much effort put into it.

This is hardly the place, but anyway...

I think the network architecture of X11 is a significant advantage over all other OSes, and throwing it away with Wayland is a mistake. On no other OS can you transparently network any application anywhere.

Macs have VNC built-in - entire screen to one point only. Windows has RDP, which is usually the entire screen, but has limited support for apps only, again to one point only. In X, I can transparently have windows open on my screen from ten computers, some in LAN, some across the world, all cooperating seamlessly, using the same window decorations, passing copy-paste, in merged harmony that's not interrupted by having to switch entire screens.

The applications of this in thin clients and remote computing are obvious. It's also regularly used by scientists using compute clusters, for things like weather modeling.

I wonder whether that's an advantage for the majority of the public, which appear to have accepted tablet OS publishers' mentality of "You will eat switching entire screens, and you will like it!" Most posts that mention the phrase "all maximized all the time" other than my own are actually by people preferring this policy, some even asking how to accomplish this. See an anonymous question on Tom's Hardware and kyleg's answer on MetaChat.

Pretty much every "average Joe" user I've seen in my life maximizes every window, and I myself maximize everything and use alt+tab all the time, so there's definitely some rationale behind that (I guess that unless you have a large enough monitor to have two windows side by side without losing too much space in each, you're always going to want to do this).

That's completely irrelevant though since this is about having programs seamlessly running on different computers through the same endpoint (be it windows or switching fullscreen apps or whatever). For the record just looked it up, it looks like Wayland may end up getting network transparency after all. Though the biggest problem of X11 wasn't doing things over network, but enforcing it regardless of situation (which makes absolutely no sense when the screen is in the same hardware other than to be "elegant").

That's VNC-like sending of pictures, which is inefficient compared to X with well-made apps. It's also an afterthought - it's not usable right now, and probably won't be in years.

X using a socket over localhost carries very little performance harm, even if it's not elegant.

Ever since short-screen monitors became standard, I basically always put two things (emacs/xterm/&c) left-and-right. My use patterns are also extremely "not normal", so.

The obnoxious pedantic argument is that any program using libfreetype or gtk3 is already just sending pixmaps everywhere anyway.

Which is why I'd like to avoid them, but I can't.

Even a 1024x600 pixel netbook monitor is wide enough for two 80-column-wide windows using a 6-pixel-wide font. That's how I have IDLE (Python IDE) set up on mine: source on one side and output on the other.


It's also about the availability of multi-window mode for those who want it, as I mentioned above:

A lot of interesting topics, for now I will stick with x11.

On another subject, my pc is almost configured but one issue I have compared to when I tested freebsd is to install app with all their dependencies.

For example, if my memory is good, I could install nestopia from the Command line package manager and all dependencies were installed. They have quite a lot of app in their repository. On fedora, on the other hand, even after adding rpmfusion repository (still don't know if it should be trusted or not) installing apps is an hit or miss proccess with dnf. If some depencies are missing.. Good luck finding the name of the package to install it!

I found the rpm for nestopiaua(?) but cannot install because of missing depencies. Tried compiling it but now I need all the sdk with whatever depencies they have.

How do you manage to find missing depencies on linux? It seems more hellish than freebsd.

I don't like Wayland; I prefer X11, although there is a lot of junk and extensions added now. X has good stuff built-in for fonts, and Xaw work well for GUI, but many programs won't use that and instead use anti-aliased and Windows-like stuff that is no good. X core fonts is better.

Unfortunately, most of us here seem to be in the world of debian derivatives (apt, deb) instead of red hat derivatives (yum, rpm). So I don't know how to help you.

I see. Does it means that Debian based distributions are easier to manage than red hat ones? I installed fedora out of habit but I don't have any preference per se. I can still reinstall another distribution over the current one.

Fedora has ethical issues with emulators, leading to problems like yours. A more user-focused distro like Ubuntu or Mint may be better.

I'm pretty sure Debian has a kitchen sink somewhere in its repository. Nestopia, FCEUX, mednafen and xa65 are just an apt-get away.

I was not aware about that one. No! I almost finished my fedora partition

Where can I find about those ethical issue/philosophy about specific distribution? I want to stop using windows because I'm getting tired of the way they are doing things with windows 8+ (telemetry, ads, in latest insiders automatically creating a Skype account without asking etc) but I don't want to get in another problematic distro again.

For some reason I don't like Ubuntu but have no issue with Debian. I guess I may try again Debian again soon then or continue my Freebsd partition. I like freebsd but for a beginner.. It's a little bit hard to know what you need to install since you need to do almost everything. It's almost working (except for a few software) but I have no idea what I may have forgot for a basic installation (like firewall etc.).

Good thing I'm still not using it much yet.

I don't know of any centralized source of difference in philosophy between the two. Both projects rely on what are essentially the Debian Free Software Guidelines. (Fedora uses a slightly reworded version called the Open Source Definition that's substantially the same.) One difference is that Fedora excludes software subject to a U.S. patent, and it's more likely to exclude software what Debian calls its contrib component (software with a non-free dependency).

In theory, Fedora allows emulators that aren't bundled with non-free game ROMs. But Fedora has excluded emulators of Nintendo platforms because Red Hat feared the cost of having to defend a lawsuit from Nintendo, especially when the set of non-infringing ROMs wasn't viewed as substantial. (Source: explanation by Tom "spot" Calloway, Fedora Engineering Manager at Red Hat, on Fedora's legal mailing list in November 2010, part 1 and part 2) On May 3, 2016, Fedora expanded the wording of its policy on emulators. (Source: wiki diff by spot) The effect of this more detailed wording on the permissibility of emulators of Nintendo platforms is unclear to me.

How hard would it be to write an emulator that only takes source code as input, not ROM images, using a mechanism similar to that of LibreJS to ensure that all code is under a free software license? Even then, Fedora might still reject it because of the possibility that someone might apply a false copyright notice to, say, SMBDis.

What do you mean "false"? A complete SMB disassembly is clearly a copyright violation.

LibreJS decides whether or not to allow a script to run based on the contents of the script's copyright notice. A copyright notice applied to an infringing script to get it past LibreJS would be a false copyright notice.

Likewise, LibreJS-like logic in a hypothetical emulator that runs only source code decides whether or not to allow an assembly language program to run based on the contents of the program's copyright notice. A copyright notice applied to an infringing program to get it past LibreJS-like logic would be a false copyright notice.

Tried to install Debian latest version, non live one, and like always for distribution that are on dvd (maybe I 'm not lucky but that happened too many times) after more than 40 minutes the installation failed and was left with a non operational system... No error, just that something failed. I hate that part. Maybe I will try again with the live image only.

People have issues in general when installing Debian 3 dvd version?

Dunno about Debian. With Ubuntu when installing using the live CD you're left with a working installation (assuming your drive is working properly, many old drives don't >_>), but it leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion. The minimal installer, though? (the one that runs from text mode and downloads everything) That one works really well. I have no idea why there's such a big difference between those two.

I have always gone with the Debian Testing netinstall. In a typical use case, I do not see much benefit to downloading a DVD image containing every package that you might use over grabbing them as-needed during install.

The reason I 'm not using such a lite distribution is because of my internet is a dongle that doesn't work in linux (yet or don't know how). I need to use another computer for sharing but the other issue is the speed, which is quite slow. The more package at the beginning or as a repository to install, the more convenient it is.

Tried Debian live image but had issues with grub after... There must be something that debian doesn't like on my computer somehow the fedora live, in less than 20 minutes I can have a basic workstation up and running.

I want to try Debian since it seems more convenient for emulators (don't have much time to figure out how to compile them these days). At the least, even though it's taking time to configure it, I feel this time I will have something that work. I learned a lot so it's not such a bad thing.

You mean a USB mobile broadband dongle? NetworkManager has a fancy GUI for them, or if you're oldschool like me you can even use pppconfig.

I did try with the neworkManager. It sees the dongle, can select the japanese provider and the information seem appropriate but... It fail when dialing, nothing is shown on the screen. There is some information in the log but it doesn't show the reason of failure, thus my current issue.

I want to try to configure it manually since I found an old post on the subject (in japanese). The problem is that I don't know how to configure it that way. Will try it again.

For now my only way for using the net is setting up the modem inside a guest os an set a host-only adapter then share the net from it. It's working but a pain to use

I don't have NetworkManager installed anymore, so I can't really give you any advice for that, but if you don't mind doing things in a terminal then pppconfig is fairly straightforward. You should only need to know three things: the number to dial, the authentication method and the device/port (usually /dev/ttyUSB0; run ls /dev before and after plugging the dongle in). Everything else is for ancient dialup modems and can be ignored/left at defaults, except for DNS, which should be set to "Dynamic" (press space first, then enter).

Once set up, use the commands pon and poff to dial and hang up, and cat /var/syslog | grep ppp to check for errors. You'll need to run everything through sudo at first; there's an option in pppconfig to give other users permission to use pon/poff once you've got everything configured.

Is that so? I will give it a try tonight then! Thank you for the information on the subject.

After upgrading my distro (Linux Mint) and upgrading to wine-1.9.12 and mono 3.2.8, the .NET version of YY-CHR works now. Hopefully this should work for others as well. Drawing performance isn't nearly as good as the C++ version through Wine, though, so unless you need the .NET version for something (e.g. plugins), it probably isn't the best choice.

I agree with this. X was well designed but now they made a mess of it. I still insist to use X and not Wayland or Mir.

@Rahsennor

Since I didn't know how to do it with fedora (pppconfig is not available) I decided to install a derivative of ubuntu (xubuntu), installed pppconfig and tested it. At first it didn't work but now I can connect to the internet.

At last! Ubuntu way is a little bit "different" since you cannot use root directly but most package are there and easy to install so for the beginning I think it will be more than enough. Wine works fine so the few remaining tools are working.

Thanks again!

I cannot overstate how disgusted I am with Ubuntu's (total lack of) stability, but if it works for you then cool.

Since I tried to install a vanilla Debian and failed (normal DVD fail to install and live version grub doesn't work for some reason) and couldn't find how to install pppconfig on Fedora (not that I searched much), the fact that Xubuntu works will be another compromise until I figure out how to install something better. But the good side of things is I can use almost Linux the way I used windows so I'm very close to a 100% switch.

Thank you again, this means this modem does work on linux, just the network manager doesn't do squat even though all the options were in the GUI!

How much do you know about pppconfig? My guess is this is just a wizard that create a script for you? I need to figure out about that and try to find info on the subject. Does pon poff parts of pppconfig?

edit:
this is how my desktop looks like. For some reason, the fonts in xubuntu looks fine for nesdev

+1

What I really don't like is that Ubuntu tends to hide errors instead of displaying them at you so you can google them and get a fix for your computer, like you can with other distributions more "programmer friendly" and less "newbit user friendly". Ubuntu is great to quickly try out how a linux installation works, but it is horrible for serious usage.

@Banshaku : Wow, you also use mc ? Incredible.

Old habits don't die, I guess. I have been using Northon commander 3.0 since the dos days and Total Commander under windows. But I use it less often than before. Now I use the terminal "as-is" to do admin tasks. Sometime just like to fire it up for a few admin tasks.

What I like is I found some MS-DOS like fonts so it looks a lot like Northon now. I guess it's for the nostalgia factor only

Anybody use the "More Perfect DOS VGA" ttf font? Found it by accident today. Looks close to what I remember under ms-dos and similar to dos box.

edit:
@Bregalad

If you look at the screenshot I changed a few things to make it behave like windows. The window frame is similar, the widgets are not but the one I chose are not so bad, the task bar contains a launcher on the left with my start button and my options on the right. I could have but the taskbar grayish like w2k but I decided for now that I liked the transparent black one.

WTF there's a newer version of that font? o_o Note that if I recall correctly it has its glyphs arranged like in the 437 codepage (so you're in trouble as soon as you try to use non-ASCII characters), the font was meant to be used to display DOS stuff.

There's also Nouveau IBM which is similar but with actual diagonals (i.e. doesn't pixelate when scaled up), and if I recall correctly also has glyphs arranged like in Unicode instead. I think the bold font wasn't the same width as the regular font, though :/

It's not too hard to remap a cp437 font into a iso8859-1 or iso10646-1 font. IIRC FontForge has the ability to do that baked-in.

I mean, yeah, that's different from having it come the right way in the first place.

(and it's also different from Windows FON bitmap fonts in "OEM" layout or X11 xlfds of "*-ibm-cp437")

Yes, it's the 437 code page so I won't be able to see japanese characters but for now I don't mind. I had to disable the bold fonts since it didn't look right.

I don't use ttf, but just bitmap fonts. I do have a bitmap font for the PC characters, although it is in raw PC format and not the format needed by X. Converting into the X font format won't work so well either, because the characters in a VT100 or whatever are not even the same as PC characters, so there is no way it is going to work properly anyways. (I did make a draft of something that will help (and will even display Japanese), although this is not yet completed or implemented so you cannot use this.)

No, that isn't the problem, I mean the glyphs weren't assigned to their Unicode equivalents. This means that all of extended Latin (U+00A0 to U+00FF) is going to show up wrong as well, not to mention a few symbols like the arrows and such (which are in other locations but also present in 437).

EDIT: this is what I mean (note how the font glyphs don't match the codepoints they're supposed to represent)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cl63l09WQAEklfp.jpg

How new is your machine? I vaguely remember something about the EFI on modern PCs making Linux hard to boot, maybe Ubuntu handles it and Debian doesn't? I don't know, I specifically hunted down an older model when I bought my current laptop.


Yeah, it's just a wizard to do the hard work for you. Pretty sure it writes to /etc/ppp/peers/, /etc/chatscripts/ aaaaand probably somewhere else for authentication stuff but it's been a while since I've stuck my nose in there. man pppconfig should get you started.

pon and poff are seperate tools, which control pppd, the daemon that actually manages the modem, and in turn runs a bunch of other programs, like chat. In typical Unix fashion, there's a command for everything.

@Sik

Oh, the unicode mapping. Well, I was just happy to find a font that was dos like so I didn't check the impact of using it yet

@Rahsennor

My computer is more than 8 years old so it's not efi related. It could be there was a partion on it already and it didn't like it. I will figure it out someday once I find the time.

As for pppconfig, I found the scripts were you mentioned. I will check the man pages for pon/poff. I just hope I can reuse those scripts on another distribution if required.

Well, if you don't mind the fact it's not pixelated, Nouveau IBM doesn't suffer from that problem:
http://i.imgur.com/jIZEj9w.png

Font size 12px should be closest (as in pixel-level close) to the actual text mode font, though if you want the text to look larger it'll definitely look better than Perfect DOS VGA (or its variants).

@Sik

I did a quick test at work and it look almost the same except the height of the font seems a little bit different. By height is doesn't seems to be the font per se but more some extra space on top and bottom. Except for a few small difference it the font, it's look good.

To make it look good I use it at size 16. Look quite nice that way. The DOS font was saying to use it in multiple of 8 so I tried it mostly at 8 (too small) or 16.

Thank again for the font.

Last setting, Japanese IME. Worked fine when tested in VM but fail at home Debugging time!

Edit:

Figured it out. It was not like it was explained on the website but it works (somehow!). Now some emulators and that's it. Pretty much everything is working.

Was it the difference between pixels (nominally 1/96 inch) and points (defined as 1/72 inch)? If you had to set it at 12 points to get 16 pixels, that was probably the case.

On the EUFI, Linus Torvalds said "Fuck you." to the whole system, as he should. It exists only for Microsoft. It will be guaranteed that Linux will never have any UEFI official firmware, key, anything. It offers no more security than any current method before it. But that doesn't mean the distro's can ship their own signed UEFI firmwares and whatnot, which they do. But Linux it's self will never, ever really have official support for it.

@Sik, @Tepples

Regarding Nouveau IBM, I had the chance to test it at home on my linux partition and it's working fine, not stretched at all. For some reason it doesn't react the same on a Mac.

Wine is quite useful and I like it, some basic tools works better than I expected under linux. The only thing left is to remove the anti-aliasing of fonts since I want the fonts to look like windows 2000 without the blur. For normal linux apps I don't mind. There must be a setting for that and I will figure it out soon.

With the VM for a few exception I don't need to boot in windows.

Thank you windows 10, your arrogant push in the insider preview gave me the motivation to switch. I will always be grateful!

If you can specify the font using an XLFD (such as -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--*-120-*-*-c-*-iso10646-1), you can get the font without anti-aliasing. (If you don't have that option, consider using something other than xfce's Terminal; I happen to like rxvt-unicode.)

Otherwise, it's using Freetype and getting a mix of antialiased and aliased fonts will be tricky, if it's even doable at all...

To turn off AA system-wide in Xfce, open Start > Settings > Appearance > Fonts > Rendering and turn off "Enable anti-aliasing".


("Start" refers to the Applications Menu or Whisker Menu. I'd paste the symbol for these menus but for outdated MySQL.)

@Tepples

Thank you for the information. I knew about that setting, I just want to remove inside wine only. I tried to remove system wide once and it looks awful so my goal for now is wine only. I found some registry entry to disable it but it didn't seem to work. Maybe I had to restart wine or something, don't know yet. I will check again tonight.

Edit:
I checked this morning at the office and the wine version that I use on Mac doesn't use any antialiasing by default. The fonts looks clear. Either it is something different with the linux version or the version I use on mac (winebottler I think) disable it by default. The good news is there must be a way to dit on linux too without disabling the windows manager settings.

Edit2:

Tried all kind of settings inside a vm and it doesn't seems possible to separate both like on mac. So I disabled antialiasing and set a different font for xfce and now it's looks like win2k. Some apps like web browsers seems to override that setting so they stay aliased. But... Now the fonts looks good.

Edit3:

I found a way by adding .fonts.conf inside your home folder you can override the aliasing. So my main account for coding will be very win2k inspired and I will just set another one for when not necessary. My quest is over, I have a working machine. With the Tahoma font, you wouldn't know it's linux until you look at thundar or the taskbar That was great learning experience. Now it's time to stop writing in this thread and check how to get back to programming.. I don't remember much.