Party Vibe

5 years ago this may have been the case, but its evolved a lot since then for most purposes…. with todays distributions you can now get something a kid could use in junior school and make pretty graphics/multimedia as well.

OTOH I can see where someone like yourself may hit problems if you have a lot of specialist hardware such as multi-channel sound cards and advanced music software.

This doesn’t happen because Linux is incapable of supporting this hardware (far from it) but because the manufacturers of it and Microsoft have made a pact to develop drivers together and (they hope) to protect each others trade secrets (source code gives away what chipsets are used), plus not all companies are prepared to release stuff like music software (with an extremely high profit margin) as open source where they don’t immediately gain revenue (although its not impossible to make money from open source!)

Its this profit motive, rather than lack of expertise that stops Linux from working for some people. Some distributions do not immediately include stuff as “basic” as MP3 encoding because there are legal issues with using it in some countries!

If you are building a Linux machine from scratch you need to select the hardware to run with it, or be content with basic multimedia (the old Dell did make sounds pretty much “out of the box”, but it took a bit of tweaking to get it to connect to partyvibe radio).

Even so I was surprised by how many music/multimedia applications are actually provided these days!

linux has always been good for servers and embedded systems. Its only very recently its becoming useful for the desktop.

If configured correctly and users are not logging in as root it becomes a very robust and useable basic desktop (web, office, maybe some multimedia) for a bunch of shared non-techie users. As an example I could think of a “cybercafe/info-shop” at some sort of activist camp, making use of “obsolete” PC’s.

you can trash a windows install just as easily or leave yourself with a system that “works” but is suboptimal if you are not careful when installing/uninstalling applications. That said its always better to have a “spare” PC to experiment on if you are doing anything drastic with operating systems….

You’re doing stuff like this and claim you are not a “hardcore geek” :laugh_at::laugh_at:!

(I had to look up what you were on about!)

What you were doing is some fairly involved data collection/gathering involving high speed acesss of a piece of hardware at kernel level, which is always risky.

TBH it may have been a Good Thing this didn’t work, as cracking WEP keys to get “free” internet is going to be viewed a lot more harshly than “accidentally” connecting to an insecure router – its the difference between walking in through an unlocked door an picking the lock.