Originally posted by Alastor the Stylish

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You didn't say lol level 69, you said lol 69.

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Originally posted by Sukasa +

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Tatrion, if you never die, then how would you have any last words?

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Originally posted by FreeDOS +

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Originally posted by HyperHacker

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What I'm really looking for is the open-source equivilant of Windows XP, minus the bugs. (I know of ReactOS but last I checked it's nowhere near complete enough to be useable. I'll probably try it anyway though.)

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well the, you will never get what you expect from Linux. Because Linux is not Windows. It isn't implied that you can't do same tasks, but it does not work like Windows, because it isn't Windows. You have programming experience, maybe you should consider developing ReactOS..?

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Originally posted by HyperHacker

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I intend to keep XP installed as a dual boot but I want to use Linux for the majority of things, ideally only switching to Windows to see how my programs run there or run programs not available in Linux. That means I want to be able to do just about everything I can in Windows, especially developing software that can run in Windows since that's pretty much what I do all day*.

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You can try using Wine for running Win32 PE binaries. It runs most programs fine, though some oddballs (like Microsoft Office, etc) don't run properly or at all. Also, there's MinGW for Linux, it can cross-compile native Win32 PE and other NT binaries; it's also a billion times easier to set up in Linux than Windows.

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Originally posted by HyperHacker

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Emulation is also important since I do a lot of ROM hacking too, and I hear there's very little available in the field of Linux emulators.

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Not much to do here. Either deal with what's available, or use Windows for emulation. It's a hard choice, and I can't really tell which is better.

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Originally posted by HyperHacker

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Other important things include NTFS access without mucking up my data (as I'd rather not have to convert everything to EXT2 given there's no good EXT3 drivers for Windows), sharing files on the network (prefferably accessible from Windows machines), and supporting two monitors (both on one video card; one on a standard VGA port and one using a DVI-VGA adapter) acting as one large screen.

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NTFS is not a problem, ntfs-3g pretty much nails NTFS write support 99% (there are some cases that it can't perform some operations; but the NTFS is in such an odd state, it's rare to ever encounter it, you probably won't). Windows can access ext2/3 alright with the driver from http://www.fs-driver.org/. It's closed source though, so I don't trust it on anything except test partitions.
Sharing files on a network is a simple with Samba (hey look its configuration uses INI format, so it won't be strange to you)
About the video thing, it's absolutely not a problem. Normally, I'd ask why do you ask, but I just remembered you're coming from Windows.

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Originally posted by HyperHacker

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And of course it has to be reliable and fast. (Mandrake was worrysome... only supported 1024x768 and crashed frequently. ) This doesn't just mean not crashing at random, but also not corrupting my files or having a lot of annoying little bugs like Windows.

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Mmk, don't use Mandrake. Try Debian or Ubuntu. Those two both take on an Apple approach to software; it just works, and all the fancy stuff is hidden enough to not bother casual use, but it can easily be found and used for doing fancy commands.

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Originally posted by HyperHackers

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I can compile other peoples' code, but I've never had much luck doing it. I always have to make signifigant changes for one reason or another (in many cases just plain bad code) to get it working, which is difficult. (It doesn't help either that every piece of software I see these days that isn't written with Visual Studio uses a Unix-style makefile, which I have no experience with; I use batch scripts to compile my programs.)

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First off, it's probably Windows bugs that make it seem like "bad code", if the code is coming from a Unix. This is assuming you're experienced only in windows. Makefiles aren't hard, they're basically shell-scripts (Unix equivalence of DOS Batch files) with features to make it more suitable for compilation.

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Originally posted by HyperHacker

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I've become quite accustomed to Textpad with its huge list of features and customizeable hotkeys. I'd really like to find something similar for Linux. I don't know how I ever lived without auto-indent, a clipbook, hotkeys to indent/outdent and move quickly between bookmarks and matching brackets in code, and a search/replace function that accepts regular expressions. Customization in general is pretty important to me.

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Never used Textpad (or heard of it ), but most of those listed features are standard in all text editors, basic and advanced. reg-exp searches are the exception, you'll want something like Emacs or Vi(m) to do those.

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Originally posted by HyperHacker

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I've heard good things about Ubuntu but it sounds more like it's designed for people who have no idea how to use a computer than people who know computers but don't know Linux. Does it still offer all the power and flexibility of other distros for those who know how to use it?

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Sure. It's designed for people with no experience with computers at all, like Mac OS X is. Also like Mac OS X, all that advanced Unixy stuff is a click's away to the Terminal.

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Originally posted by HyperHacker

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*This is probably my biggest concern. Most of what I do is design software. If I move to Linux I'll have to learn how to do everything there that I already know how to do in Windows. And since Windows is still dominant, I don't want to drop support for it (I know you'd all hate me if I released a Mario Kart 64 editor for Linux only), especially since I already have a number of Windows apps in development. So I'd have to write programs that run on (or can be compiled for) both Windows and Linux. Realistically this means using some form of wrapper (especially for GUIs) that would let me use the same code for both, like GTK. Problem there is I've never seen one of these in which the Windows version doesn't suck ass. Maybe I could write my own if I really need to, but ehh...

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Try using Qt, it's pure awesome. On Unixes, it looks like whatever the hell you want. On Mac OS X, it looks indistinguishable from a native Aqua application. On Windows, it looks -- guess what -- just like native Win32!! And the API is marvelous, best API of all GUI widgets evar.

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Originally posted by HyperHacker

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(BTW, if it's possible to somehow run Windows inside Linux, that'd be awesome. Virtual machines are about what I mean, but they tend to use a "fake" filesystem in which the virtual hard disk is really a file, so it'd be like having a whole different disk. I'd want to be able to load Windows in the box from my actual hard disk, do something there, save it, close the box, actually boot into Windows, and see those changes.)

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It's only feasible if the emulated hardware is the same as your real hardware; else Windows will be hell in the virtual machine, and even if you don't think you did anything, it'll be even more hell once you boot it again on the real machine (trust me, I tried )

The best you could do is use Qemu with KQEMU; it's the same speed as VMware, but absolutely free (well, KQEMU is proprietary; you could use qvm86 if you want free software only virtualization, but it's a bit slower). Yes, you'll use a hard disk image, but if you use FAT, you can still access files inside it with mtools (do not do this at the same time as running the machine).

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Originally posted by Millenia

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Ace is posting?

What color is the sky again? I think this must be a mistake.

Happy 23rd, by the way.

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