Hi, here's my first post :)

 

Altough i am a noob at linux, i've managed to install an use Ubuntu Edgy and Hardy Heron, there was a time i tried to install Gentoo but it was too much for me; right now i am using Unbutu 8.04 (Hardy) but i am one of the many that go unlucky and have a series of bugs that are related to that release, one of those issues are unstability on some apps and in general and since my personal pc is also my 'production' pc, i use it for work at the office or wherever i need to go to and also for fun, so is a dual purpose machine hehe. Due to many unstability issues i decide to try another distro that maybe would let me do my job smoothly and also would let me have some fun.

 

Let me explain a little what i do and be very specific and maybe that way you could point me into the best distro for me, of course i just don't expect you to know if some apps work or not, but maybe i find someone who use them and could give me some testimony hehe:

 

A ) As a BASIS consultant (SAP) my daily tasks are:

 

- Connect trough SAP GUI to SAP R/3 servers. I currently use SAP PlatinGUI for JAVA (SAP GUI for JAVA). Works well with ubuntu.

 

- Use SAP Download Manager. Works well with ubuntu.

 

- Connect via Remote Desktop to give support and supervise Windows 200x servers activity, during this RDP sessions i may need to open command prompt window to run some ORACLE (or any other DB) admin activities that run specifically under that environment and do not have windows gui admin software. Also during this sessions may run ORACLE, SQL or any other DB windows based admin. software. Works with some bugs, like command prompt windows do not scroll automatically, i need to scroll the last bit manually or i won't be able to see the line to write a sentence, this is very annoying

 

- Connect to unix/linux servers. right now i am dual booting with xp so i can use putty to do this, since i do not know what to use under linux to connect the same way. Any suggestions would be well received.

 

Edit:

 

- Connect to VPN's, mainly pptp.

 

B ) Also while working or under normal leisure circunstances i:

 

- Listen to music using Amarok. Very unstable right now with Ubuntu Hardy, sometimes sound dies and needs reboot. any suggestions would be good, i heard of some player called banshee or something like that on Suse.

 

- Read / Write emails on thunderbird.

 

- Browse the internet, mainly on Firefox or Opera.

 

- View online videos and animations either they are on youtube, made with flash/dreamweaver, etc.

 

- Use IM. Right now i use pidgin when i need to be connected to all my msn and gmail accounts; but i use aMSN when i just need to be connected with one msn account. Both of them very unstable on Ubuntu Hardy.

 

- Write / Read documents, whter they are pdf (with or without acrobat), text, spreadsheets or presentations or slides. almost all of them on office 200x format.

 

- Do some minor image editing, mainly screenshots of problems, cut some photos, maybe adding some text, nothing complicated. I use Gimp since it is light and versatile. Currently no problem under Ubuntu Hardy.

 

C ) Leisure:

 

- Play World of Warcraft trough Wine. The only thing that runs perfectly under Ubuntu Hardy lol.

 

- Surely play Diablo III when it comes out!!.

 

 

Based on that i need a distro that:

 

1.- Is Very stable under heavy workload while multitasking.

 

2.- Has a Desktop fully compatible with Sun Java Runtime Environment 1.4 and above (needed for SAP GUI for JAVA). I'm thinking on trying KDE since i already used Gnome with Ubuntu, but if the distro let me choose between them both it would be perfect.

 

3.- Has a good multimedia player like Amarok but stable.

 

4.- Presents a way to see animations and videos correctly (youtube, flash, dreamweaver, etc.)

 

5.- Has the capabilities to get some virtualization software, kinda like Virtual PC, i want to run XP (or maybe vista) with Office 2007 (i can't get used to Open Office sorry hehehehe) altough i do not care if it is a bit slower than usual. Please recommend any good software for this since i was not able to run Office 2007 with Wine.

 

6.- Let me run World of Warcraft under Wine.

 

7.- If i have to work my way trough and learn some or a lot of things i do not mind, but at least that could let me do most things 'out-of-the-box' or at least with little work.

 

 

I really really appreciate all the help, every comment is welcome.

 

Edit:

 

Oops my bad, i never told you what pc i use:

 

Dell XPS m1710

Core 2 Duo T7400 2.16Ghz.

2GB DDR2 667mhz

Geforce 7900GS 256MB (not shared, they are dedicated) 1920 x 1200.

100GB 7200rpm HDD

Intel 3945ABG wifi + bluetooh

5 in 1 media card reader

Dual Layer DVD R/RW

 

 

 

Best Regards,

Gokudan.

If this is a business PC, have you considered a commercial distro with support?

 

If you want to stick with a free distro, how about Debian? Your Ubuntu experience would transfer, you can get the stable version which is very reliable, and the repository is huge. There's also the special, long-term support version of Ubuntu.

 

I'd steer clear of Fedora if you depend on Java. I couldn't get the genuine article to work, and Fedora's IcedTea is not completely compatible.

Quote:If this is a business PC, have you considered a commercial distro with support? 

If you want to stick with a free distro, how about Debian? Your Ubuntu experience would transfer, you can get the stable version which is very reliable, and the repository is huge. There's also the special, long-term support version of Ubuntu.

 

I'd steer clear of Fedora if you depend on Java. I couldn't get the genuine article to work, and Fedora's IcedTea is not completely compatible.

 

Hi there David :)

 

Yeah, it's a business / leisure PC, the fact that i didn't consider a commercial distro with support is that i live outside USA, more specific on chavez land u_u but that's another issue lol....and here, the only commercial distro is red hat and since the only distros they sell here in my country are enterprise server and advanced server i never had a serious thought about it, plus the whole idea was to know linux since i always wanted to learn it but never made the leap, and i consider that if i pay for support i won't care about learning. :)

 

I've heard a lot about Debian, but actually never seen it. Does Debian support Virtual Box? i've heard with virtual box u can run windows xp or vista, i'm interested on this since i won't ever get used to OpenOffice and i plan using Office 2007.

 

Thanks for the reply David :)

 

Best Regards,

Gokudan

Quote:Hi, here's my first post :)

Welcome from another newb!

Quote:- Connect via Remote Desktop to give support and supervise Windows 200x servers activity, during this RDP sessions i may need to open command prompt window to run some ORACLE (or any other DB) admin activities that run specifically under that environment and do not have windows gui admin software. Also during this sessions may run ORACLE, SQL or any other DB windows based admin. software. Works with some bugs, like command prompt windows do not scroll automatically, i need to scroll the last bit manually or i won't be able to see the line to write a sentence, this is very annoying

This sounds more like an issue with the remote OS than with local processing. I've not had an issue with remote windows command prompts not scrolling, but with keyboard translation.

 

Note that Oracle has remote administration via OracleDBConsole (the web-based OEM) - it should be possible to set it up over an SSL connection then use a browser on your local machine to connect, rather than remote in.

Quote:- Connect to unix/linux servers. right now i am dual booting with xp so i can use putty to do this, since i do not know what to use under linux to connect the same way. Any suggestions would be well received.

SSH is inbuilt into Linux. Try ssh username@remote.machine or ssh -l username remote.host. If you use a different port other than 22 (which is a good idea for internet-facing machines) use ssh -p portnum -l username remote.host

 

Quote:C ) Leisure:- Play World of Warcraft trough Wine. The only thing that runs perfectly under Ubuntu Hardy lol.

- Surely play Diablo III when it comes out!!.

Take a look at Cegeda - that should allow a lot of windows-based games to run under Linux.

 

Quote:Based on that i need a distro that: 

1.- Is Very stable under heavy workload while multitasking.

Most of the current distros are - it only tends to be specific applications that barf, as far as I know. IME, people experience some applet crashing out under a graphical system and then slate that distro for being flakey, despite the fact that the GUI and OS is still up and running and no other services are affected. However, if you want corporate-level reliability then look at RHEL or one of the paid versions.

 

Quote:2.- Has a Desktop fully compatible with Sun Java Runtime Environment 1.4 and above (needed for SAP GUI for JAVA). I'm thinking on trying KDE since i already used Gnome with Ubuntu, but if the distro let me choose between them both it would be perfect.

Again, as far as I know most of the distros are Java2-compatible (some even Java5). KDE is probably a bit more stable than Gnome, although RedHat invested a lot into Gnome back in the RH8/Bluecurve days so that's come on leaps and bounds.

 

Quote:5.- Has the capabilities to get some virtualization software, kinda like Virtual PC

Virtualisation has been around a lot longer in the Unix/Linux world than windows, just that it's gathered more exposure due to the Microsoft community (which isn't a bad thing) - I've been running a UML node run in the States for the past 5 years or so.

 

Take a look at TechComparison, User Friendly Virtualisation or TechThrob, since you're using uBuntu

 

By the way, if your computer (running Windows) is crucial to your work, you may find it safer to drop Linux onto another machine and run that separately. I've heard of many people experimenting with Linux on work-critical kit then bemoaning that it knackered up things for them and thanks to Linux, they can't work any more (yes - that's clearly a fault of Linux that forced them to use important kit). I'm not saying you'll find yourself in that situation (hell - you've already been playing WoW on your SAP-connected machine) but I'm just considering damage limitation if you rely on that machine for your livelihood.

 

Hope that helps!

Hi Dave!

 

First of all thanks for the welcome! :)

 

Well, regarding terminal server client i just noticed that, btw, is there another "gui" for rdesktop different to terminal server client?

 

Ab out ORACLE, well, the IT ppl of many clients refuse to do the necessary network exceptions on firewall and servers to open the ports or get up the web based oracle "gui", so, after a while we quit asking them.

 

Thanks for the SSH tip!! i'll practice it a lot :)

 

Wow runs just fine on Ubuntu, i haven't tried yet on OpenSUSE 11.

 

1.- Never liked Red Hat, but thanks for the suggestion :P

 

2.- Right now i'm using Gnome, but i think i'll try KDE since for what i have seen OpenSUSE is more a KDE oriented distro, i think it is more polished, altugh i tell ya gnome it's not far behind in it, the out of the box look of gnome on OpenSUSE is very neat.

 

5.- Just installed VirtualBox an it runs very smooth, altough i have some issues sharing a folder :P

 

 

Right now, OpenSUSE is working like a charm, i hope it keeps that way hehehe, so far i just tried everyday computing, just got SAP GUI installed, so, i will start to give him heavy use very soon once i finish setting up all connections.

 

I really appreciate the time and effort you put on answering my post, thanks Dave.!

 

BR's

GD.

Quote:Well, regarding terminal server client i just noticed that, btw, is there another "gui" for rdesktop different to terminal server client?

I'm not certain what you mean about another GUI. As far as I know rdesktop (or tsclient) works under Gnome and KDE - if you mean another client to use, then I'm not certain (I don't do graphical stuff on Linux, unfortunately).

Quote:Ab out ORACLE, well, the IT ppl of many clients refuse to do the necessary network exceptions on firewall and servers to open the ports or get up the web based oracle "gui", so, after a while we quit asking them.

That sounds familiar. Good that Oracle is, like with many other packages it is utterly useless in the hands of the inexperienced (I teach Oracle Admin courses, and they're not intended for beginners).

 

When you say you quit asking them - does that mean you drop them as a client, or refuse to support them? I used to have a major issue with support versus control (luckily those days are over).

 

Quote:1.- Never liked Red Hat, but thanks for the suggestion :P

Bear in mind that this is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you disliked RH, then you may not take to RHEL but it may be worthwhile grabbing a copy of Fedora and giving it a go, purely from the OS point of view, just to compare. It's certainly come on leaps and bounds, and I'm probably more familiar with it (configuring pure-ftpd under FC4 was far easier than my friend's ubuntu server).

 

Quote:5.- Just installed VirtualBox an it runs very smooth, altough i have some issues sharing a folder

Again, logfiles are your friend - check /var/log (on the guest OS) for something that may be mentioning permissions. Are you sharing via samba? There's some good help in other threads.

 

Quote:I really appreciate the time and effort you put on answering my post, thanks Dave.!

No probs - welcome to the forum, hope you enjoy your stay!