I don't know what could be the problem, and I cannot really help you. I would suggest you tried other distros in case they won't be as bad.

I don't like Fedora. At all. Try to get Debian. If you cannot find it, SuSe would work. ;)
Alright, I will buy SuSe tomorrow. But just out of curiosity, what's wrong with Fedora? You and BashLogic do not like it... why is that?
I played with it for a while. It has a package manager that is really annoying. I didn't get used to it. It also feels too much like the playground for Red Hat.

Maybe I should explain. There's a US company called Red Hat Inc that sells business solutions based on their own version of Linux called Red Hat Entreprise Linux (RHEL). Until 2005, this was the most popular version of Linux around (and then Ubuntu came along).

In 2003, Red Hat launched the Fedora project that was developed by the community and "backed" by the company. Today Fedora is still one of the most widespread Linux distros and is considered as the free (as in no-cost) version of RHEL (non gratis). I felt that the community revolved a lot around the company to suit their needs. New features are usually added to Fedora until they are considered stable and put in RHEL. (even though Fedora is pretty stable in general).

CentOS is 95% similar to RHEL (they use the same code), but it is made by a different company. Ubuntu is backed by a South African company called Canonical. SuSE was developed by a german company until they were bought by Novell, a software giant from the US.

SuSE are famous for two things today:

* They have a very non-strict policy about open source. Actually they do not mind giving you proprietary software in their distro. Novell has made many agreements with Microsoft: they're the ones behind mono the Linux implementation of Microsoft's .NET platform, and Moonlight, the Linux implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight. Just an example.

* They have a graphical tool called Yast (Yet Another Setup Tool) that is worth trying. Yast is a software that centralizes all administrative activities of SuSE linux. Some people like it, some don't. I don't mind it. I still prefer Ubuntu for the desktop.

As for package managers, it would be too long to explain on a forum, but think of it as the tool you use to install softwares. Ubuntu (and Mint) use a tool called APT, that was developed by Debian (my favorite distro). Fedora uses another one called Yum. It is yum I hated.

:-)
ah I see... things are very clear now, thanks a lot rahmu :)

Hopefully SuSe would work on that P4 machine!
ubuntu rocks,,, i m using it too !
if you need any software or any question i think i can help :)
thanks for the offer abouelchich. I would really appreciate it if you could solve my problem (read the above posts). Oh and a list of open-source software which work on Linux so I could download them would be appreciated. Basically, I need some good software which play mp3 files, play .rm files, video files. A good text editor for coding, a chat messenger that allows me to login to msn. That would be it I guess :)
I'm currently using Ubuntu 9,1. Rahmu i agree w u 100% about Fedora and the yast thing. tried it and hated it lol! apt is much better in my opinion.

congrats kassem on your first linux run!! welcome to the free world :P hehehe!

anyway, if you wanna check out the cool (eye-candy) side of ubuntu, i could tell you how to do some stuff.

first, go to System->Preferences->Appearance, then go to the Visual Effects tab, and select Extra. this'll give you pretty nice effects (it might take a bit the first time to activate your 3d drivers)

and if you feel like it, go to the software center (applications->Ubuntu Software Center) and download 'Compiz'. This program will let you configure all the visual effects on ur distro (3d desktop, wobbly windows,paint fire on the screen (lol) and LOTS of stuff).

if you do get compiz, be sure to check out the 3d cube and cube rotate plugins!

anyway, cheerz and keep us posted
oh i just saw there was a second page to this thread lol!

anyway, the rythmbox music player is really nice. though the first time you try to play mp3s it'll tell you it wants to download a plugin (its proprietary thats why they dont add it originally). i dont know about .rm. you can play video with the bundled Movie Player, but i'd recommend to get VLC Player. it plays almost any codec, from wav to mp3s to divx and avi. it might actually play .rm, im not sure.

for a text editor i use gedit , its very lightweight and it can understand almost any language (u can pick one from the bottom tab).

and for messaging, try empathy. Its also bundled with ubuntu, and it can connect to your live, gmail, yahoo, and jabber accounts!!

Now im not sure if the same apps bundled with 9.1 (my current) are the same for 9.04, but anyhow u can just get them in two clicks from the software center.

cheerz
I would strongly recommend learning the use of Vim as a text editor. It might be a bit more difficult to get used to at first, but it makes in my opinion the difference between a real programmer and a amateur one.

Here's waht I use:
* VLC for videos
* Rythmbox for music
* Pidgin for messaging (MSN and GMail)
* Chrome for web browsing (I still use Firefox and Opera for development)


Once again learn VIM. It takes time to get used to, but man how good you'll become!
Hey eurybaric, thanks for the tips and suggestions. I have a good feeling about this "free world" :P

@ rahmu, I'll make sure to download and install Vim, after reading the other thread where you argued with xterm about it I really felt like I should try it out (that's one of the reasons which made me decide to give Linux a try by the way). So yeah, I bet it's worth giving it a shot. Currently I use jEdit for PHP coding, it's a great text editor but it's not perfect yet. I usually prefer having open files in tabs and not in a drop down. And one more thing that SHOULD be fixed in jEdit is that you cannot move or copy files inside the navigator although you can access directories and all this stuff...
Vim is installed by default on almost every Unix you can imagine. That includes Mac OS X and of course Linux. Which makes it all the more interesting to learn.

jEdit is ok, especially for PHP (my boss/mentor uses it), but Vim is on a whole other level of power. You can see examples of its power on Youtube.

PS Be sure to read a tutorial before even trying it, because you'll have troubles exiting the program ;-)
I use EmEditor on Windows (sadly no OSX/Linux version, but I use TextWrangler / Smultron there instead)
All these have regular expression search/replace, which is what I need in 90% of cases.

For more complicated tasks I wrote once a marcro in EmEditor, in it's macro language (it supports VB and C# like syntaxes)
Ok I couldn't find SuSe today but I found Mandriva... I'm installing it right now, hopefully it works fine this time. If you check the website, you'll see that it is not for free. Isn't Linux open-source and open-source = free world?
Kassem wroteOk I couldn't find SuSe today but I found Mandriva... I'm installing it right now, hopefully it works fine this time. If you check the website, you'll see that it is not for free. Isn't Linux open-source and open-source = free world?
www.linux.com.lb
BashLogic wrote
Kassem wroteOk I couldn't find SuSe today but I found Mandriva... I'm installing it right now, hopefully it works fine this time. If you check the website, you'll see that it is not for free. Isn't Linux open-source and open-source = free world?
www.linux.com.lb
I read the info on this website. Very good introduction to licensing and the history of Linux.
where do u usually get the linux installations from?

I get them mostly from the net and sometimes from magazines... and btw some linux magazines are really nice. some of them are targeted for beginners in linux, and even people who never used linux, and are full of tutorials and learning material.
eurybaric wrotewhere do u usually get the linux installations from?
I get them from CD stores close to my house. There aren't many disto's available, only a few ones. When I ask them for a certain distro they literally get lost, they cannot think of an OS other than Windows lol. But they get their CD's/DVD's in bundles and sometimes there are some Linux DVD's in those bundles.

By the way, right now Linux just freezed while I was trying to access some app. What should I do when this happens?
@Kassem, It is nice to hear that you are checking out Linux, I hope you will like it, just don't expect it to be like windows and expect to learn lots of stuff, hope you like it :)
where do u usually get the linux installations from?

I get them mostly from the net and sometimes from magazines... and btw some linux magazines are really nice. some of them are targeted for beginners in linux, and even people who never used linux, and are full of tutorials and learning material.
Which Linux Mag do you read? I read Linux Format it's a great magazine and it comes with an 8GB DVD full of open source software and distros. :)

Btw if anyone needs any Linux Distro I have most of them on DVDs so I can make you a copy, here is a list of the distros I have:

Ubuntu 8.10 32 and 64 bit
Fedora 9
Gnome 2.28
KDE 4.3
Moblin 2.0
Puppy Linux 4.3.1
Ubuntu Netbook Remix
Arch Linux 2009.08
Haiku OS alpha 1
Linux From Scratch 6.3
Slackware 13.0
Zenwalk 6.2
CrunchBang 9.04.01
Damn Small Linux 4.4.10
Lubuntu Lucid alpha 2
Mythubuntu 9.10
Puppy Linux 4.3.1
Red Hat Linux 6.0
Slitaz 20091104
Tiny Core 2.8.1
Unity 2010 2.8.1
Vector Linux 6.0 Light
Mandriva 2010
OpenSUSE 11.2
Ubuntu 9.10 32 and 64 bit

So if you need any of these distros I would be glad to give you a copy, I will be buying the latest issue of LXF this month so I will be updating the list. Have a good day.
i would suggest going with Gentoo
after ur done installing it, u would have learned quite a lot :)
I kinda like Mandriva. They have a control center that is a little similar to Yast. Their handling of the network is really cool too. I used it on my netbook for a while before I shift back to Ubuntu.

As for free software vs open source, a quick overview.

In 1984 a guy called Richard Stallman was working at the CS lab in MIT. He was an operating system developer, working on a version of UNIX. He got really upset when companies stopped sharing the source code and put licensing limitations to the use of software (it might look normal today, but until the late 70s, source code was passed naturally through all programmers). Anyway he quits his job and founded the Free Software Foundation, whose goal is to create a clone of Unix that is entirely free he called GNU. As Stallman himself puts it, think of "free as in free speech, not as in free beer". There are four freedoms that a free software should respect. I do not remember them exactly, but they include the freedom of modifying a software to suit you, the freedom to redistribute and copy a software, the freedom to use a software as you see fit, ... (For example, though it is technically possible to do it, it is illegal to install Mac OS X on a non-Apple hardware. In this sense MacOS does not respect Stallman's freedoms). He started by developing a C compiler (GCC) then a C debugger (GDB), then a text editor (emacs - the only text editor that is possibly more powerful than VI. It can virtually do anything). He also rights the GPL, a legal license that grants the freedoms to the users. Slowly people from across the globe joined him (the 80s were the beginnings of the democratisation of the internet). The GNU project was born. More info on GNU on their website.

Linux is not a whole operating system. It is only one part (the main part) of the system called the kernel. Mandriva, Ubuntu, SuSE, Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Mint, Android, Chrome OS, ... all these systems use Linux as a kernel, but use many more programs on top of it. Usually these programs come from the GNU project. This is why the majority of these sytems call themselves GNU/Linux systems.

Let's continue our history trip, and move forward to 1991. The GNU project has evolved and is now well known in academics circles. A lot of students see in GNU a cheap way to get a unix station at home, as well as a great way to study some professional code. However, GNU is not ready at all. They were still missing a kernel, the central piece of the OS. (Hurd their own kernel is still in development today).

At the same time, on a totally unrelated project, a 21 year-old student in Helsinki Finland starts working on his own kernel. His name is Linus Torvalds. He calls his system Linux and publishes it on the internet under a GPL license. Because of its simplicity, stability and wel written code, Linux quickly became the most popular of the free Unix systems out there.

By 1998, Linux had more than one million users. Projects like Apache have made it really popular and considered as a viable alternative in the business world. However the term free software didn't sound corporate enough. People are not very likely to invest in a solution because it is morally decent. So lead actors of the community (Eric S Raymond, Bruce Perens, Tim O'Reilly, ...) created the Open Source Initiative and came up with the definition of open source as a development methodology that produces better software because the users are involved in the evolution and development of the software. The most famous examples remain Linux, Apache web server, Firefox and Mozilla, ...

So to answer your question, Free software is different than Open Source in definition but every free software is an open source one.

And remember, free has nothing to do with the cost. For example, Mandriva (and Ubuntu) are available online for you to download. But also, this guy has the right to sell you a Mandriva DVD. This is a big difference with Windows.