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Table of Contents
Tutorials and Help Materials
Help with GNU/Linux
- Getting Started - Check this page first!
- Win2Lin - Windows to Linux transitioning
Choosing a new computer
Obviously, this is a constantly evolving topic, and one that is critically related to personal and institutional needs. Given this site, the OS will be Linux!
2019: Specs for a new desktop/tower computer
As a concrete example for discussion, see
2019-6-4: My (John Nash) current primary “working” machine, called J6, is a Sept 2011 tower, which has served me well and is still a useful and well-balanced computer for my needs. These are:
- a lot of management of files, since I have a goodly collection of computer archives, having been involved with building and using computers since 1961, and I have managed to preserve many of the files, as well as materials from my academic career, my creative writing, folk dance, and personal and family history material.
- some computation (i.e., scientific computing), as well as specialized text processing, which can be intensive but is NOT gaming; I also do some scripting as well as programming for math/stat.
- much communication activity (web, email, video chat, ftp/ssh)
- some investigation of other distros (even –horrors– non-Linux) using VMs under VirtualBox
- some photo, audio and video editing, but mainly of the snip-and-glue variety
I like a fairly big screen. At one time J6 had two monitors, a 24“ HDMI and a 20” VGA, but I've found just the 24“ is fine. Smaller screens (as on my laptops) are not as helpful for writing and programming. I use headphones for audio – no fancy speakers.
J6 has the following very edited setup:
- Motherboard GA-890GPA-UD3H
- AMD Phenom™ II X6 1090T Processor
- 16GiB System Memory (4*4Gib DIMM 1600 MHz (0.6 ns))
- display RS880 [Radeon HD 4290]
- multimedia RS880 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4200 Series]
- RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
- 2 * 1TB WDC WD1002FAEX-0 in RAID (mirrored) – used as data storage
- 500GB ST3500630AS used for OS and home directory
- 250GB ST3250820A used for holding VM images and similar material
- BD-RE WH16NS40 optical drive (CD, DVD, BlueRay)
Slides from meeting presentations
Wiki help
Reviews etc
Connectivity Note
Carleton University VPN notes
uOttawa connectivity with Linux
- 2018 uOttawa changed from local WPA setup to eduroam (??link). Some notes on this would be helpful
- 2017 notes on uOttawa vpn??