n00b gettinginto linux

ok so i am in the works of getting a linux box setup right now i have
SKT775 motherboard
500watt PSU
DVD Burner
Black case
40GB ide drive with a 500GB external

I have just downloaded ubuntu 7.10 and as soon as i get the rest of the parts i will be installing, i just have a few questions...

Im going to be gaming on this linux box, right now only native linux supported games for now because i dont want to have to deal with cidega or wine until i master linux more

1) Will the following hardware be good for what i want to do..
p4 ~2.8GHz
1GB DDR2 533
7600gt or 2600pro

2) did i choose the right distro to get started with?

3) i will also need programs to do the following: play music and video files, burn cds and dvds, instant messaging, video converting. what programs are the best for this? i have looked some up but there are sooo many i dont know where to begin lol

4) i have games like ut2004,quake4, and doom 3 and i have read that they have linux versions is there any way to kinda convert my windows version of these games to play on linux?

thanks in advanced

dust2dust43 said:

ok so i am in the works of getting a linux box setup right now i have
SKT775 motherboard
500watt PSU
DVD Burner
Black case
40GB ide drive with a 500GB external

I have just downloaded ubuntu 7.10 and as soon as i get the rest of the parts i will be installing, i just have a few questions...

Im going to be gaming on this linux box, right now only native linux supported games for now because i dont want to have to deal with cidega or wine until i master linux more

1) Will the following hardware be good for what i want to do..
p4 ~2.8GHz
1GB DDR2 533
7600gt or 2600pro

2) did i choose the right distro to get started with?

3) i will also need programs to do the following: play music and video files, burn cds and dvds, instant messaging, video converting. what programs are the best for this? i have looked some up but there are sooo many i dont know where to begin lol

4) i have games like ut2004,quake4, and doom 3 and i have read that they have linux versions is there any way to kinda convert my windows version of these games to play on linux?

thanks in advanced

Click to expand...

1.) That hardware will do pretty good for Ubuntu. I wouldn't worry to much about that.

2.)Yes, Ubuntu is a great starting point.

3.)Ubuntu comes with pretty much everything except the video converting program... that I'm not sure of. As for video playback I'd say VLC and for music, well its up to personal preference. I use amarok personally.

4.)I have tried and failed hard to get those to install. I'm not sure why but, the way linux handles the cd drive it makes it a real bitch when it won't let you eject the disk (unless you have the DVD versions, then you're fine.)

so you have figured out how to install them with the dvd versions but not cd?

w.r.t. the games there is usually a d/l you ... dl for the linux runtime and then files are copied off the CD/DVD

Gentoo has nice ebuilds to automate this (even the finding the correct d/l and order as well) there may be an equiv for ubuntu

^how hard is it installing games on linux, ive tried live discs before but only for like an hour

As far as video/audio playback. I like Elisa. Really easy to install and looks nice all in one type of program. SMplayer and Amarok are nice. ( I couldn't get SMplayer to work reliably on ubuntu, works very good on my EeePC tho)

Dont know about the others, but for doom3 you just grab one file from ID Software, run it and then copy the files it says to off of the CD's. A little more involved that next, next, exit, but its not too bad. I would expect other games to be roughly the same.

^alright thanks for the input

UT2004 with the DVD wasn't too bad. I did it from the terminal though if that kind of thing scares you

I thought UT204 almost auto-installed in Linux. No?

is there a bit torrent program made for linux

im really trying to keep away from using wine or cedaga

Azureus has a native Linux 32-bit and 64-bit client which is what I use.

I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 and it works awesome on my P4 2.4 with 1 GB of RAM. I use Comptiz Fusion and it is fun and amazing.

Ubuntu is a great place to start. Many Linux afficiando's (sp) don't like it and call it "not Linux", but it still is. I love it's simplicity and apt-get. Learn the command line, if you know that, you can pretty much go to any other Linux distro and know what you are doing. It also comes with a LOT of programs to get you started.

1. Get 8.04, not 7.x - it's faster and is the most recent release
2. If you bank or need security, uninstall the beta firefox 3 that comes with 8.04
3. install WINE to play games and to run windows apps
4. sign up for the ubuntu forums. Read the FAQ. Read the help. Lots of valuable info on setting things up like .avi and mp3 playback.

ubuntu is a great way to start learning linux. You can check out KDE 4.0, XUBuntu (install it), just to get familar with the environment.

The hardware will work fine. Just make sure to use the 7600GT nVidia card, though. ATI cards generally don't have the best Linux drivers.

As for installing the games, all you should need to do is go to the game's website and find the installable binary for the game. Run that and it should grab all the files from the DVD/CDs from them. It was a cinch installing ET:QW under Linux. All I did was grab the binary, run it and it installed the game as well as copy all the needed files from the DVD. There are manual ways of doing this as well, but I don't see a need to do it manually.

As far as your choice of distro, that's up to you. I started with Fedora, messed around a bit with Ubuntu and finally settled on openSUSE as my preferred distro. Personally, I'm not a fan of Ubuntu or any of it's other flavors.

As for software, you shouldn't have any trouble finding Linux equivalents. My main problem in that area was an audio player. While Amarok is nice, it still does not compare to foobar2000 plus it seems to have problems with a lot of the tags in FLAC files I have. I have no trouble running foobar2000 under Wine.

I do not care for Azureus. It's a resource hog from hell and I find it to be more annoying than anything. Ktorrent is very similar to utorrent and works well enough. Again, I still prefer utorrent so I run that via Wine as well. Other than some games that I run under Wine, I don't really use any other Windows software. I still have WinXP on my main system with openSUSE but it's only used for games that won't run under Wine. Otherwise I have all my systems switched over to Linux.

WINE isn't something to worry about. Getting things working in WINE takes no linux skills, really.

Ubuntu and Kubuntu are probably the absolute best Linux distro for first timer's. They're the easiest to install/get working. They're installed via GUI running off of a LiveCD, which is very simple. There are other distros out there like Gentoo that you'd have a very hard time getting working, since you have to compile stuff.

Ubuntu comes with tons of stuff when you install it, like GAIM and a bunch of music players, and just about anything else you'd need. If you can't find what you need there, you can use Add/Remove programs and get what you need there.