# Looking for an alternative to Windows

Category: Geeks r Us

## Post 1 by Beach Boy (Generic Zoner) on Monday, 28-Apr-2008 23:25:15

I'm bored with Windows XP, and Vista can be a major pain to work with... I need a new playtoy when it comes to an operating system for my PC. My problem is which OS should I try? Ubuntu 8.0.4 looks good, but FreeBSD 7.0 will give me major geek cred... There's so many choices, but what's accessible, and what worth the time & effort?
I plan to keep a Windows setup around, because I need a way to access stuff quickly that's accessible, but I also need the flexibility of a server without shelling out the major bucks for Windows Server 2003 or 2008. I have two hard drives, and the 160 GB drive is where the new OS will go.
Any thoughts, experiences, or otherwise from my fellow geeks on the Zone?
-- Greg

## Post 2 by ¤§¤spike¤§¤ (This site is so "educational") on Tuesday, 29-Apr-2008 5:24:06

I'd personally try Ubuntu 8.04, if you can get it to run off of a live cd with Orca, you should get it to install, easily enough.
FreeBSD isn't accessible, I don't think, though I might be wrong.
Server 2003 is Jaws friendly, 2008 may or may not be, unsure, haven't played with it.
Have you thought about buying a mac mini and getting into Leopard?

## Post 3 by Beach Boy (Generic Zoner) on Tuesday, 29-Apr-2008 10:33:02

My only concern with Ubuntu (due to pervious experience) is that Orca is very limited in it's functionality... It sounds horrible, and trying to do both something involving sound and Orca seems to be impossible. I hope Ubuntu 8.0.4 fices most of these issues, otherwise I might be wasting my time.
FreeBSD is what the underpinnings of MacOS X is based on... Of course, it's been heavily modified by Apple, renamed Darwin, and had a pretty interface slapped on top of it. Not bad, as it seems to work well.
My most important requirments is that the OS will support my sound cards, the video card, and most of my add-ons (printer, scanner, etc).
-- Greg

## Post 4 by hamster (Zone BBS Addict) on Tuesday, 29-Apr-2008 17:26:57

well,
My friend is working on project blindubuntu - it's based on ubuntu 8.04, but it has some great features, such as virtual consoles are spoken, emacs is added and more.
But I think, it's only for czech, But Maybe I'm wrong.
I'll ask, If all these features will work for english localisation, and if yes, I'll post link - blindubuntu pages are in czech I think.

## Post 5 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Tuesday, 29-Apr-2008 21:48:55

I upgraded from ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04, but I am not getting any speech out of orca. It will come up fine, but no spech from ESpeak. I don't know if that's just a bug that they haven't worked out yet, or if its just me.

## Post 6 by The Lil Dark Piggy (This site is so "educational") on Thursday, 01-May-2008 17:46:32

Hmm, could be something with your sound card, but dunno. But I'd try Ubuntu, I like Ubuntu a lot. You can use Wubi, a installer that will let you install Ubuntu with out having to make any partitions, change any bio settings, just is a virtual disk that adds an entry to Windows. You can You can also add/remove Wubi like a regular program in Windows, go grab it from Ubuntu Wubi website

## Post 7 by Squiggles (Account disabled) on Friday, 02-May-2008 7:16:04

In post 3 there is a lot of confusion going on here. Orca is very flexible and you can script it to work the way you want. You could use wubi however I'm not so sure this is the route you'd really want to chose, since it is merely a virtual disk that it creates. Orca works yes I have heard of issues that it has, but it is doable if you give it some thought, it takes more than 20 minutes or however long ou spent on it. I've used ubuntu completely at one point for a few months without windows, however school forced me to come back to Windows so I had no choice in the matter.

## Post 8 by ¤§¤spike¤§¤ (This site is so "educational") on Friday, 02-May-2008 15:09:10

To post 5, were you root on your box when you did the install, did Orca itself work when you put in the live cd, after you burned the .iso?
Can you go through all of the steps you went through to install Ubuntu 8.04 with Orca?
Do you have logs, if so, could you post the relevant info, that way, we can try to help, or do a google search on your specific issue...:)

## Post 9 by Squiggles (Account disabled) on Thursday, 08-May-2008 7:20:51

I recommend when dealing with Ubuntu that you don't upgrade, and the reason is because when you run apt-get upgrade then apt-get dist-upgrade the name of the operating system doesn't change - there is a file in /etc which just states the name of the o/s and even after upgrading this still shows the previous version of ubuntu you had. I don't know if it actually upgrades or not, but I prefer doing a clean install.

## Post 10 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Saturday, 24-May-2008 18:17:53

Ok, spike, I fixed the problem. Cody showed me how to do it. To post 9, all I had to do was run the Update Manager from the Administration menu, and it upgraded just fine. No need for a clean install, plus I don't know how to do it on virtual box. What I had to do was go into run, and type "gnome-terminal" no quotes. Once the terminal came up, i did "sudo su", "my password" "orca -t". According to Cody, this causes u to run the accessibility windows to pop up as text in the terminal window, and from then on, once I had redid the accessiblity, Orca ran just fine. the only other thing I am noticing, is that Orca seems to randomly just crash. Sometimes, it will just stop talking, and I have to go into the run dialogue, and type in "orca" to get it working again. Any thoughts on this? l8r, Mike.

## Post 11 by The Roman Battle Mask (Making great use of my Employer's time.) on Saturday, 24-May-2008 20:09:13

Why does a server need a sound card to run properly? If you want a true server take any server OS such as ubuntu server, centOS, freebsd, openbsd, etc.

## Post 12 by Eleni21 (I have proven to myself and the world that I need mental help) on Monday, 26-May-2008 11:49:49

I thought that Leopard was based off of Unix not Free BSD, unless the latter is another form of unix. Does anyone know if freedos-32 is still being worked on or if it's accessible with things like Vocalize or JAWS for Dos? It seemed to have alot of promise, since it worked with modern applications, but it looks like they've discontinued the project.