New Linux User

[leopold]

piracy, you wouldn't believe how much one can download in a month.

yeah as a matter of fact i do.
i go through between 30 and 40 cdr's a month
surely you don't keep everything you download on your harddrive do you?

 

[Athelwulf]

piracy, you wouldn't believe how much one can download in a month.

yeah as a matter of fact i do.
i go through between 30 and 40 cdr's a month
surely you don't keep everything you download on your harddrive do you?

Exactly what are you two pirating that uses all that storage space?

 

[przyk]

Well, I don't know how to answer, really. I haven't used Linux much so far because I can't use the Internet through it yet. As far as the terminal, it feels like I theoretically have so much power over the OS, which is kinda kool; at the same time, however, I feel ignorant because I know little about command-line interfaces. Other than that, I got no answers.

I can get back to you on that question later.

Yea, I'm pretty much in the same position.

By the way: in the shell, your best friends are ls, cd, and man.

 

[leopold]

Exactly what are you two pirating that uses all that storage space?

there is some stuff i pirate but not very much.
i have 3 or 4 apps that i have pirated and i never use them.
the rest comes from download servers that i find.
i am in the process of downloading a server now. i have approx. 50 cdr's full from that site.

i also download a boatload of videos from the internet archive. i have 30 or 40 cdr's from that site.

the rest comes from various places on the web.

 

[Xerxes]

Which OS(es) do you use? Do you use FAT32 exclusively?

Gentoo Linux, and WoW OS...err I mean windows XP with WoW installed on it.


leopold99,
Are you flippin insane? Buy a dvdrw drive.

Actually I keep mostly a combination of archived media/files - things like lossless classical music which take up a lot of HD space. documentaries, DEMs (digital elevation maps,) important files etc - then stuff which is either to be burned or deleted.

Keeping such files on a seperate disk is smart, because they're not tied to an OS, only a filesystem.


Athelwulf,
There's so much stuff to download from the newsgroups.

Here's my recommendation, Athelwulf:
Your POS computer is making this a bad experience. Buy and build a new one using midrange parts. Get a cheapo nvidia video card, decent motherboard/processor, a gig of RAM, hadrive (which is quite cheap these days) whatever else you need and, using the Gentoo installation handbook, install Gentoo Linux. It's easier than anyone mandrake of fedora recommending dork will ever admit. Takes longer, but you will be satisfied.

 

[Avatar]

Are you flippin insane? Buy a dvdrw drive.

If one dvd breaks, I lose ~4.2gb
If one cd breaks, I lose ~ 700mb

 

[leopold]

Are you flippin insane? Buy a dvdrw drive.

i second what avatar said plus i only have a 18GB harddrive
the way i have my drive partitioned i can't store enough files to fill a double layer dvd.

 

[przyk]

If one dvd breaks, I lose ~4.2gb
If one cd breaks, I lose ~ 700mb

But you'd need more CD's, which could increase the probability of losing or breaking a disk.

 

[Avatar]

They're all stored in one place anyway, the problem is that discs degrade over time.
Anyway I don't feel the need for a dvd burner. Heck, I don't even have a dvd rom connected to the pc (although I have one in the drawer, but I don't own any dvd's).

 

[Stryder]

Avatar, Just make 2 copies of your data on DVD. If one breaks, hopefully you would have kept the other somewhere nice and safe (literally in a Safe etc)

 

[Avatar]

I once set a 100 cd tower of documentaries on fire, was uncareful where I put incense. Luckily enough all the cd's survived, although the casing partially melted.

It's an advice as well as any, Stryder, but I don't feel like spending 30 quid for a dvd burner when I can spend nil and continue to burn cd's.

 

[leopold]

know of any good freeware cd catalog programs?

i have discovered a great way to name cd's.
some cd's will have an obvious name but others aren't so obvious or have so many programs on them that you can't name it.
i found this freeware dice program that you can vary the number of dice rolled and the number of faces on each die.
whenever i am ready to burn cd's i also open the dice program. set it to roll 5 dice, each die with 99 faces.
when the burner program asks for a label i hit the roll button on the dice program about 5 or 6 times.
the number that is displayed i use as the cd label. if the digits 1 through 9 appear on a face i insert a 0 to make 2 digits.

an alternative to this scheme would be to use the date as the first 6 numbers and the dice program for the last four.

 

[Avatar]

Not really, I use my brain memory for cataloguing purposes, but I'll ask one friend of mine, he uses one for his collection.

 

[Xerxes]

If one dvd breaks, I lose ~4.2gb
If one cd breaks, I lose ~ 700mb

I second Stryder.

Any important data should be stored on a good hardrive, and possibly mirrored on the internet. Hard drives are cheap cheap cheap. My 320gb seagate cost only $110CAD.

Good DVDs are just as reliable as CD-Rs and cost about the same. Consider the DVD-RW as an investment. The money/space you save will have be more than worth it in a few years..

 

[leopold]

I second Stryder.

Any important data should be stored on a good hardrive,

i disagree.
any data that is worth backing up should be stored in 2 physically seperate locations. one copy at home and the other at work. if your home is your work then store the other in a safe deposit box or other physically seperate location.
and further more if it is critical or sensitive it should be encrypted.

 

[Xerxes]

and possibly mirrored on the internet.

Most of my data is not that important, but I do use the internet for backup.

If you want real reliabity, try something like Amazons' S3.

 

[firdroirich]

I have dual boot SuSE 9.2 & XP

This is how I did it.

This is usually only on older machines, but ,in Bios make sure "boot from CD" or CD/HDD/ ...

Turned machine on with Ultimate Boot Disk (or similiar, such as Hiren's boot disk) in the CD drive. info..
-Navigated to partition tools
-Created 15 Gig ReiserFS partition info on reiserFS
-Marked it as active
-Rebooted

Placed SuSE linux cd in tray
SuSE installer was graphical, self-explanatory.
GrubLoader configuration automatic, opted to mount "My Music" 40Gig NTFS partition on startup.

Everything works mint

Nvidia FX4400, 256MB drivers auto- detected
AcctonW2401 wireless card detected I manually updated driver though
AC97 built in audio auto-detected. Had no audio, but a trip to the Alsa homepage took care of that.
SOHW 801s DVD RW, upgraded firmware with omnipatcher to 802s, works fine in SuSE.

Had to update video driver to get video to work. Mplayer or Real for linux.
Xgl would'nt work - only on 10.1 I think - any ideas?
YAST takes care hardware configurations etc, YOU (YAST Online Update) for updates & it tells you the ones you have to manually do,
or which dependencies etc are needed.

Pretty good for my uses . Apache, MySql, learning C++

But if you just wanted to have a peek try out LiveCDs or VMWare, you get virtualisations for just about every OS now that will work from within XP. I use FreeBSD

If you think you dont' want to dual-boot anymore & would like to use 1 operating system - format the windows partition hehe, reclaim space with fdisk in console

...if you're not quite there yet format linux,
-reboot with bootcd or one with fdisk.exe on it , alternative is FreeFdisk

Drive Letter:\fdisk /mbr

Clean slate.

All you have is 1 partition with WinXp again, to try out another distro.

 

[Athelwulf]

Any important data should be stored on a good hardrive, and possibly mirrored on the internet. Hard drives are cheap cheap cheap. My 320gb seagate cost only $110CAD.

Explain more to me about this "mirror on the Internet" concept.

And I read somewhere about harddrives somehow breaking from use and people losing all the data that was on those harddrives. What are the real risks of this? Do harddrives wear down from constant use, or even if left in a dark closet for years on end?