Linux or XP to revive flagging laptop?

[Bone_Idle]

Further searching on the internet has raised a good point. UBUNTU doesn't appear to need a firewall, Anti-Virus or spyware/malware detection sortware, so that must save quite a bit of system resource.

Is this correct?

[BigWill]

Further searching on the internet has raised a good point. UBUNTU doesn't appear to need a firewall, Anti-Virus or spyware/malware detection sortware, so that must save quite a bit of system resource.

Is this correct?

It's true to a degree and I myself run Ubuntu without any anti-virus software (never needed it..........no one bothers to write viruses for Linux) though all that stuff you mention is available and you can run it if you're really paranoid about security.

That's the up side to Ubuntu though you may find it's incompatibility to mainstream software somewhat limiting if you plan to use photoshop for instance for your photo editing. Yes, there is the gimp (Linux's open source photo manipulation software) but I've personally always found it's interface awkward to use compared to photoshop.

BigWill

[FujiSigmaNolta]

Hi,

For the security issues question it's a yes and no. They do still advise you to get a Firewall running and it doesn't impair performance in any way whatsoever, but as for viruses it's not only that nobody bothers, but the way Linux works it is near impossible to get a virus to work according to some Linux experts. Note the words of caution, near impossible. Granted there aren't any viruses but who knows in the future. The only means of infection at the moment is if you run Windows and Linux on the same machine and share files. Some viruses are meant for users who do this so it will affect their Windows partition but not the Linux one, it happend to the servers of Linux magazine and they put their hand up and owned up to that and advised readers on how to not let that happen.

As for the graphics stuff, my laptop is not a great machine, but you can run Virtualbox, which will run full Windows OS and install Photoshop into it. I have tried on my laptop, it runs reasonably well, but since my laptop is not the most powerful thing around at times the speed just drops. If your laptop can take 4GB of RAM then I would say do it, if the you laptop max is only 2GB you may want to try it,but I wouldn't expect blistering fast performance on PS. At the moment I have Virtualbox running Windows but given my limitations I am just running some games and other stuff with only 892MB of RAM assigned to it, the curious thing is that it runs faster than a plain Windows machine with the 1GB of RAM (I have tested this by removing 1GB from my machine when I restored it, mine dual boots), which is incredible. The ext4 file system is great.

Alternatively, Photoshop CS works with Wine under Linux without using Virtualbox, but obviously you want CS3 or CS4.


By the way, I am using Linux Mint 7 which like Ubuntu is Debian based (I would even say it's the same thing but without the top panel bar).


PS: I just also noticed that you are saying that your laptop is flagging, then I would say, yeah Linux will give it a breath of fresh air.

[Bone_Idle]

All is not good in Linux Land. I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 and burnt the image on a CD and then I tried to install it inside windows so I could give it a try.

It took a while and when it finally finished and re-booted it looked like got the screen size completely wrong, with the login box nearly off the screen, bottom left. I opened up the display settings and it looked like it wasn't recognising the Graphics adapter as it didn't allow any change to the refresh rate other than to 0.

It looks like I may have to stick to windows which I've managed to get running a little faster with a thorough clean up of unwanted programs, start up items and a registry and disk defrag!

I think I'll still persevere with Linux but I need to see if I can find a way to get it to recognise by graphics adapter/screen.

[FujiSigmaNolta]

That's why I recommend Linux Mint. In terms of compatibility with graphics adapters, it has been flawless. Mint is now a major distribution, so support is exponentially increasing.

[Bone_Idle]

Will give that a go tonight. Although I was expecting Ubuntu to be 100% compatible as it's a fairly major distribution.