What Do I NOT Need?

[soundchaser59]

I don't need anti-virus like AVG?

Don't need a special browser? Do you guys prefer Chrome or Firefox? Or......some other?

I assume the main reason to install as a dual-boot is to preserve my files from my Windows os? I don't have any special affinity for Windows here at home, other than making sure I get my personal files over to Linux. I haven't tried opening spreadsheets and word docs in Libre yet, but I'm assuming it will work without any conversions or mods to the original files?

Does Adobe Reader work in Linux? Or is there some world class pdf reader specially made for Linux?

I've already gotten drivers/codecs and been able to play music and video clips.

All my email at home is web based, mostly gmail, so that already works. Favorite bookmarks have been exported to html.

Already replaced my old ps/2 mouse with a wireless usb mouse, so the scroll is working now.

What other things might I be overlooking? What things did you guys overlook when you first made the jump to Linux?

What about specifically doing code things like php, jquery, small development for personal web pages, etc? Is there a rocket powered text editor that automatically recognizes languages and syntax? anything that does auto complete? My short term goal is to develop a juke box to play my tunes online. (hosting at 1and1) Nothing dazzling, maybe the most glamorous thing might be a shopping cart. Does everybody just default to PHP and MySQL for online web site stuff? Maybe I wouldn't mind learning something extra like Python..... suggestions?

[GreyGeek]

I don't need anti-virus like AVG?

NO! They are a waste of CPU cycles and HD space.
Some basic security rules:
1) A default firewall, ufw (user friendly firewall) is already installed but not active. Install its GUI, gufw, and using it turn the firewall on - one click. It's easy to add or remove rules for various things because the gufw comes preconfigured for loads of games, apps and other needs, plus some templates.
2) NEVER download and install an app from an unvetted source (until you gain Linux experience the only source you should consider vetted is the repository). If you have a question about an app ask about it here.
3) Social Engineering is the number #1 security hole in Linux. To fall prey you have to do three things:
a) Download a binary (or save an attachment to an email, especially one you didn't expect to get)
b) Give it the execute permission
c) Run it.
Don't do those three things and you won't get infected.
There are holes that are reported at various times but most involve local exploits, i.e., someone has to have access to your box.
Go to ShieldsUP! and test your lower 1,024 ports. You should get ALL GREENS. No handshaking at all. If you get a blue box then you have an closed port but it partially handshakes. IF you get a red one you have an open port that will complete handshaking and open a door to what ever is knocking. All your ports can still be green but if your laptop or router echo's a ping it will fail the test. GRC claims that all greens means your box is "stealthy" or invisible on the Internet. That's debatable, but it beats being partially or totally promiscuous.

Don't need a special browser? Do you guys prefer Chrome or Firefox? Or......some other?

Nope. It's a matter of preference. I prefer FireFox because it allows me to download videos, something that Chromium tries to block. I've made lots of about:config setting changes which makes it pretty fast and immune to most ads, java and popups without adding add-ons. I've posted about it in another msg.

I assume the main reason to install as a dual-boot is to preserve my files from my Windows os? I don't have any special affinity for Windows here at home, other than making sure I get my personal files over to Linux. I haven't tried opening spreadsheets and word docs in Libre yet, but I'm assuming it will work without any conversions or mods to the original files?

I've used LibreOffice since it was StarOffice in RH5.0 in 1998. LibreOffice will do 95% of everything that Office does WITHOUT planting a GUID in every document you produce with it. It also includes a database interface similar to Access's Jet Engine. I've had no problem opening WP or Excel or Presentation documents from Office running on Win7 or earlier. I haven't had a document sent to me or downloaded made with Win8 or 10.

Does Adobe Reader work in Linux? Or is there some world class pdf reader specially made for Linux?

Okular works perfectly for every PDF I've ever encountered.

I've already gotten drivers/codecs and been able to play music and video clips.

All my email at home is web based, mostly gmail, so that already works. Favorite bookmarks have been exported to html.

Already replaced my old ps/2 mouse with a wireless usb mouse, so the scroll is working now.

What other things might I be overlooking? What things did you guys overlook when you first made the jump to Linux?

You might want to check passwords.gmail.com to see what Google has on your passwords. I found URL's, login names and passwords going back 10 years. Even my router user and admin names and passwords! If you export your gmail to mbox it will import nicely into KMail, which is what I use. I had a gmail account for over 10 years but closed it when Google announced that they were teaming up with Twitter and Facebook to censor their sites. However, some people like Kmail and some don't. You can install Kgpg and create a 4096 byte encryption key which adds perfectly to KMail and allows you to sign and/or encrypt emails easily.

What about specifically doing code things like php, jquery, small development for personal web pages, etc? Is there a rocket powered text editor that automatically recognizes languages and syntax? anything that does auto complete? My short term goal is to develop a juke box to play my tunes online. (hosting at 1and1) Nothing dazzling, maybe the most glamorous thing might be a shopping cart. Does everybody just default to PHP and MySQL for online web site stuff?

My preference for dev tools is the Qt API and its GUI RAD tool called qtcreator. Qt (pronounced cutie) is an awesome cross platform, write once, compile anywhere tool. It uses C++ and the g++ compiler. It's all in the repository. Install qt5-default, qt5-doc, qtbase5-dev-tools, qtbase5-doc, qtcreator, qtcreator-doc and the examples packages.
Or, you can go here and download the qt5-sdk using the online installer. The offline installer (700+MB) can be downloaded from here and you can save it to a USB or burn it to a CD or DVD. Qt is a fantastic dev tool.

As far as databases I prefer PostgreSQL because it is very compatible with 95% of Oracle's stuff. and it has more power than Oracle,IMO. I like its price point too! When I first began using PostgreSQL 15 years ago I tried MySQL and found most of its functions were merely stubs but, over the years, it has improved a lot. It is, IMO, no where near PostgreSQL but is is good enough. If you are already familiar with how to use it then that is what you should use.

[soundchaser59]

Thank You. Very comprehensive info. Might take me a while to experiment with some of those things. My biggest block of free time coming up is the week between Christmas and New Years, which we get off from work by using floating holidays, no vacation leave necessary. I'll be taking a few extra days anyway, so I'll a good 2-3 week stretch there with nothing else to do and nowhere else to go! LOL!

Until then I'll be getting familiar with my first go-round with Mint. Also checking and comparing to Kubuntu. Once I get confident with more CLI stuff I should be able to better evaluate another distro for my home office use. Last night I finally got enough hard drive crud cleaned up and distilled that I think i am finally ready to do an actual install to my hdd, instead of running from the jump drive. I just need to test a few things to make sure they are migrated ok. I don't want to lose the common everyday things like bookmarks, a few words docs, a few spreadsheets, music clips, etc.

I'm seeing mixed reviews regarding Libre Office, and somewhat for Open Office. But those reviews I noticed were 2-3 years old. I'm not too concerned. I don't do anything muscular or dazzling with home office stuff.

Once I'm confident in the migration, I think I would prefer to simply install to my hdd and not keep anything Windows at all. My home office hdd is only 160gb, so if i can have that whole thing for the Linux install, that's my preference.

Why is it so uneasy to let go of Bill Gates Ware? The most telling thing is when I'm using Mint, especially when I'm getting my old files to work and run, I don't even think about Windows or what OS I'm working on. I don't miss it.

Thanks again, I'm sure I will refer back to your post above several times before I start to feel dangerous! LOL!

[Qqmike]

I agree with about everything GreyGeek said.

I prefer Firefox. But I also keep Chrome loaded and ready if the need arises. For example, if a certain web site works better on Chrome. E.x.: An AARP "good driver refresher" course I took (on-line, 2013) was interactive (question--response, with subsequent branching) and worked better on Chrome than Firefox for me (perhaps one could configureFirefox better than I had it).

LibreOffice works great for me (formerly a Word guy, and pre-formerly a WordPerfect guy).

[TWPonKubuntu]

GreyGeek,
Thanks for the link to ShieldsUp. I'm running it over my system now.

I too prefer Firefox's Browser, Libreoffice word processor and Okular for PDF's. All are available in the repositories.

I do have other Linux browsers installed, in case I need an alternative route to the 'net. Midori and Konqueror still work.

I specifically avoid all Google products and services (to the degree that I am able). Some websites seem to use Google services for everything... Bad PR if they do.

I use Thunderbird as my email client, again it is from the repositories and works for multiple email accounts.

[GreyGeek]

@soundchaserf59, I realized that I forgot to answer one of your questions: "a rocket powered text editor".

Let me introduce you to ... Kate! It is a power house of editing capability. I first started using it in 2003. I was tasked with writing my first Qt program on WinXP. The tool was Visual Studio with C++ 6.0 and a Qt API plugin for it. It was slow and cumbersome to use. I exported the source files to my Linux side (dual boot) and used kate as the editor, Kdbg as the debugger and g++ as the compiler. I found I could compile and test 2-3X faster on Linux and still have the same step-through debugging that VS gave me.

Kate is HIGHLY configurable. It has almost 200 modes settings and nearly as many lanuage/script settings. It supports projects and sessions. I can't even begin to describe what it can do in this short msg. But, as an example, I downloaded the 2009 FOIA CRU whistle blower file containing the emails the Climate Research Unit in Britain had on its Linux servers from 1999 to Nov 5th, 2009, a week before the files were released. At the CLI I could have (and did) use
grep -B3 -A4 hide /home/jerry/Documents/FOIA/FOIA/mail/* someexpression
before I used Kate.

Using Kate I selected all 1,072 emails and loaded them into the left panel. Selecting them I did a search for a term using Kate's search bar. It broke the right hand panel into two parts. The lower part had a listing of all files with the desired search term in them, with a listing for each occurrence. When I left clicked on an occurrence in the lower right panel that email appeared in the upper right panel with the term highlighted. I could copy and paste into another document I was writing at the time, showing what those researchers thought about their own weather database. Search for the "F-" or the "Sh-" words and you had what they said about their own temperature data and its sorry state. And also, how they threw out the 1960-2000 data and replaced it with their "synthetic" (i.e., made up) data, resulting in the hockey stick.

Since then I've used Kate to search the 5,292 emails that were in the 2011 FOIA whistle blower release of the CRU, all at one time. I haven't seen or used another editor that can hold and search 5,200 text files at once, and produce an interactive linked listing of search hits. It's amazing. I retired just as qtcreator was released and never got a chance to use it for coding at work. I promised myself that when I retired I'd write the programs I wanted to write, but never did. Had a great time playing Minecraft with my 5th grade grandson last night, on his Minecraft 11.2 server!

I did play around with qtcreator to edit and compile some of my work programs and found it good, being able to do something that Kate can't: debug an app within qtcreator. So, if I were still at work using the Qt API to write Qt apps I'd use qtcreator, beyond a doubt. For all other text editing I use Kate.

[TWPonKubuntu]

...
What about specifically doing code things like php, jquery, small development for personal web pages, etc? Is there a rocket powered text editor that automatically recognizes languages and syntax? anything that does auto complete? My short term goal is to develop a juke box to play my tunes online. (hosting at 1and1) Nothing dazzling, maybe the most glamorous thing might be a shopping cart. Does everybody just default to PHP and MySQL for online web site stuff? Maybe I wouldn't mind learning something extra like Python..... suggestions?

To expand on my first reply, I do use PHP and MySQL for website design. I use the CodeIgniter PHP Framework (Version 3.1 is current). All Linux compatible.

I have the Apache file server installed on my laptop, with PHP 5.x, MySQL 5.5 as a development system (Kubuntu 14.04.1).

I've also installed PHP 7+ and MySQL 5.7, on a separate hard drive, to test CodeIgniter Version 4 which is still in development (Linux Mint 16.04).

All of these work, pretty much seamlessly.

And I do use the Kate text editor for writing all code. As GreyGeek said in his previous reply, it is very powerful and suits my needs well. It will work just fine with javascript, although I avoid that can of worms as much as possible. Kate will handle other languages (they're just text files after all).

[soundchaser59]

It will work just fine with javascript, although I avoid that can of worms as much as possible.

My boss at work is a js fanatic, and is nudging me to learn everything I can about js and jquery. Every Windows programmer I've ever worked with insisted that I need to use js as much as possible. Why do you avoid it?

[GreyGeek]

My boss at work is a js fanatic, and is nudging me to learn everything I can about js and jquery. Every Windows programmer I've ever worked with insisted that I need to use js as much as possible. Why do you avoid it?

For the same reason that I don't drop my pants and hang my fanny out of an open window (and I am not talking about "mooning" but personal safety).

[soundchaser59]

For the same reason that I don't drop my pants and hang my fanny out of an open window (and I am not talking about "mooning" but personal safety).

Whaaaaaaat? You mean to say that javascript is not secure? Awwwww.....come on....

[TWPonKubuntu]

For me, js represents an open door into my website. Yes, it does allow some things which HTML does not (even HTML5), such as easy user interaction without using bandwidth to the server. I expect (Hope) that HTML will take up the challenge and give us these functions in the next version(s).

If my website needs high user interaction, such as numerous forms or dialog boxes (such as chat an social media) I will, reluctantly, consider using js, but I do my best to convince my customer that it is dangerous FOR THEIR USERS. I try my best to design with minimal bandwidth between terminal and server, but I would honestly rather pay for more bandwidth than accept the vulnerability which js opens.

YMMV, and you get to make the choice. Do your research and be prepared to justify the design to the customer.

[TWPonKubuntu]

Whaaaaaaat? You mean to say that javascript is not secure? Awwwww.....come on....

You got that right.

[GreyGeek]

"" is why I have no hair above my eyebrows!

[TWPonKubuntu]

Try the Capt. Picard fingertip method...

[GreyGeek]

Whaaaaaaat? You mean to say that javascript is not secure? Awwwww.....come on....

I wrote some beautiful HTML code that employed js to enhance functionality and db connectivity. I love it. But those web pages were for inhouse applications that never saw the other side of our routers.