Hi Everyone [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.png[/img]

 

Been Dabbling with linux for some years now, with the exception of the "Dreaded", and "avoided at all costs" forays into the Terminal, I can navigate folders/files and perform updates and basic stuff, but when it comes to things like compiling software or re configuring hardware.........oh  dont know, as soon as go there it just all seems to go tits up [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif[/img][img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/laugh.png[/img] of course I  suppose it doesnt help that I'm mildly Lesdyxic as well [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/laugh.png[/img] I do try, but usually things either grind to a halt and then Nothing, [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/huh.png[/img]  or it breaks big time, and i have to plump for a re-install and start over [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/blink.png[/img]  after frequenting other forums and the IRC networks with requests for help, and finding that I usually get either Ignored, or someone just posts hundreds of lines of code without even a explanation of how, what, when, or why, [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/huh.png[/img]  somewhere along the line i just became very dissolusioned with it all, and it seemed to me, that if you didnt know everthing about linux...."Tuff go back to window"   and if you did then hey "welcome to the club."

 

Cue Linux Noob, well here I am throwing myself at your mercy in the hope that i can finally master more than the GUI [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.png[/img]

Hello and welcome! Thanks for your introduction -- we're quite the 'small' community at the moment, but we hope we'll prove more helpful and less RTFM-focused than others!

 

I've found the best way to learn new stuff is to pick little projects for yourself. Get excited about some cool thing, play around with it, break it, fix it, break it again, fix it, until you really understand what you're doing. I've been following that sort of cycle since I started with Linux -- over time you start to pick up a wide body of knowledge, and more importantly, get a sense of where to look when things go wrong.

 

So, if there's anything you're playing with on Linux, or any crazy ideas, do let us know, and we'll see if we can help!

 

If I'm a little slow in responding to another thread you make, poke me in this one, as I'll now get email updates.

 

Again, a very warm welcome. Let's play Linux! :)

Hello bodhihermit, and welcome to the forums!

I've been to some forums like that, well there's quite a few out of them there. I'm still learning alot and I find the community here nice and friendly. But lately I've noticed that like hybrid advise is just to break things and try to fix them.  I've setup serveral small projects myself that I found u usel for myself and then I try and set it and see how far I get, and when I get stuck I post on the forums. Also something is that you have to keep using or doing something before you really start to understand it and remember it. What you can also do is ontop of your running linux system, you can run like <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="https://www.virtualbox.org/">virtualbox</a> or some other virtualization software and run virtual machines and try stuff on there and then when you do break something  it's not your actual system.  A useful command is the man command. You can use it like this.

 

man ls  --> it will give you the online manual of this command and all it's options etc. you can do this for any command in linux: man command. That will give you alot of info also. And if you're not sure which command to use, you can do a search on key word. man -k keyword. What distro are you wanting to start with? I would recommend <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.ubuntu.com/">ubuntu</a> or <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://fedoraproject.org/">fedora</a> and you could also try <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.linuxmint.com/">mint</a>.

 

Maybe a first cool project for you is to install a linux distro and find apps which you want to be using replacing stuff you used to use in windows or try different opensource packages and see which ones you are most comfortable with installing/removing via gui and via command line and learning how to update the system via the gui and via the command line.  Well let us know what distro you decide to try and start working with, and just post when you get stuck and we'll try to help as best as we can.
 

Thanks for the welcome guys

 

At the moment i am running Netrunner 12.12 KDE 4.10.4 which i really love using as its a very polished Distro. so unless they decide to screw it up like Mint did with the switch to unity, I'm going to stick with it.

 

Projects:

I have a Mint 14 XFCE running in Virtualbox, so I am going to get to grips with compiling and installing from source, that should be fun [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.png[/img]

the main reason is I'm a design engineer, and i used to use a Great little app called Wings3D a polygon mesh modeling program.

But for whatever reason, some donut of a Dev decided to drop the Erlang dependencies from the repositories [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/ohmy.png[/img]  and it can't be installed any longer, [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/sad.png[/img][img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/mad.gif[/img][img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/mad.gif[/img][img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/mad.gif[/img][img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/mad.gif[/img]

so now i have over 2TBs of .wings Design Files that are pretty useless at the moment untill i can figure this out [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif[/img]

Ubuntu is the one that did the switch to unity. Mint usually has spins of xfce, kde, mate, and cinnamon.  Installing from source is fun, but it's better just to use the package from the repo of your distro. Since if you installed it manually you'd probably have to maintain/update it manually. Installing from source is fun, make sure you read the README file or HELP. In debian/ubuntu/mint I think you need to install: build essentials


and having the <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-install-kernel-headers-package/">linux-headers</a> install when building is usually necessary too.

 

First time ever hearing the name of that distro. Is it deb based or rpm based?

 

You could try using <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.linuxalt.com/">these</a> to open .wing  files?

 

<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.k-3d.org/">http://www.k-3d.org/</a>

<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://artofillusion.org/">http://artofillusion.org/</a>

<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="http://www.blender.org/">http://www.blender.org/</a>

Netrunner is the distro from BlueSystems and is based on Kubuntu, so yeah .deb based

 

have a look here [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.png[/img]

 

http://www.netrunner-os.com/  

 

As an OS it's not that old, but it seems to be making definite ripples in the KDE Distro world, and the Bluesystem Devs have really put some work into sorting out most of the major Bugs that Kubuntu has inherantly suffered from, It also has WINE & Gnome intergration built in

 

The new release 13.06 is due to be released in the next couple of weeks.

I can't wait, [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.png[/img] I Grabbed a copy of the RC2 to live boot from USB,  and it runs flawlessly [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/wub.png[/img]   

 

K3D is a great little app but mostly aimed at animation though, still playing around with that one at the moment, but i do use Blender regularly, unfortunately neither of them will open .wings files, they have to be exported as .obj wavefront files first, (and this is the major crunch), after a bad update, due to a repository snafu, a lot of systems went down, I couldn't even log in to my system, it wasnt untill i reinstalled netrunner that i found the problem with Wings3D, which made exporting them .obj a no go[img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/wacko.png[/img] [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/huh.png[/img] [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/ohmy.png[/img]    

 

 

But i will be definitely having a look at the artofillusion app, thanks for that :)