Animatronic Radical Skepticals Part 1
The summer has been quite a bouncy affair. After classes went out last April, I knew this free chunk of time would be worth something. Indeed it's that time to catch up on cleaning out that stuffed closet, reading those shelves of unread books, or updating my Livejournal frequently.
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Mandrake seems to be a good introductory point for most *nix novices, although Fedora (formerly Red Hat, now a fully open-source distro) is also reputed to be very good across a wide range of expertise. I went the whole way and did a Gentoo Stage 1 installation with absolutely no knowledge of any GNU utilities. But the Installation Guide on the distro's site is excellent and walks you through every step so that when you finish, you're left with a complete, functional Linux system. I guess while I'm at it, I should also pimp Gentoo's excellent package management system, called Portage. You can almost always find the most up-to-date packages, although sometimes it does take a while to get them into the stable branch (I'm looking at you, NVIDIA drivers).
My desktop environment of preference is GNOME, although I did originally start with KDE. I think for end-users, it's just a matter of personal taste. Hopefully, the differences will become less and less once the freedesktop.org project has taken better hold (it's already started with the new releases of X.org).
As for the Windows applications you're using, maybe you should look into native Linux applications that may be as good or better. DPEncoder (http://dpencoder.sourceforge.net/) is a Qt frontend to MEncoder that rips DVD movies to DivX. As for video editing, there seems to be a wide array of applications, ranging from simple splicing and text overlays to studio-quality editing. Check out this link for more info: http://www.gentoo-portage.com/search-result.php?search=video+edit.
In any case, congratulations on your adventurous endeavors into the world of Open Source software. Just hope that you don't end up becoming a Slashdot addict like me. ;)
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I've tried FreeBSD and it was pretty nice. If I can recall correctly, Gentoo's portage is based on FreeBSD's ports system. Unfortunately, my laptop's video card wasn't so friendly toward it. So I had to get rid of it by necessity since my laptop has little hard drive space to spare. Hopefully with a regular PC, the hardware support will be better.
As for GNU/Linux, I love Slack. The package management system is so simple and unobtrusive. The configuration files are a snap to edit up. If I'm missing a library, I'll hunt it down no prob. Making packages is no brainer either, so I can compile and write up a quick install script. I'm a bit weary of fancier package management systems that do more than that, since there's the potential to update libraries without asking first. Hunting those down is no fun. I tend to avoid GNOME and KDE altogether since my current one is skimpy on the RAM side. I just go for Fluxbox and all my performance woes are gone.
Thanks, I'll look into those video editing programs. Alas, I still have to keep Windows for my scanner since its chipset isn't supported by SANE yet. I can't wait for the day when WINE supports Virtual Dub.
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