General Linux Question

DirtyMagic · Post by **DirtyMagic** » Mon Jan 26, 2004 7:38 pm

Think I'm finally take the plunge and make my system dual boot WinXP/Linux. There seem to be quite a few Linux-saavy people here so I thought this'd be a good place to troll for opinions.

What's the best Linux distro for a computer-smart but Linux-dumb person to use?
<Like this won't start arguments....>

peteyg · Post by **peteyg** » Mon Jan 26, 2004 7:46 pm

For your first try at Linux, I would go with Mandrake. Graphical setup, most everything is autodetected and autoconfigured, and it's pretty pain-free to install.

The big drawback for that is that you wouldn't really learn as much as you would going through your first lengthy and painful command line install process of distros like Gentoo or Debian.

If you want to go that route, I would recommend Gentoo (http://www.gentoo.org). Its installation instructions are very thorough and detailed, and it has some pretty good forums for asking newbie questions. But you should really only go this route for your first time if you want to jump in head-first.

Oh, and make sure you back up anything sensitive that you have on your windows partition... just in case.

richard · Post by **richard** » Tue Jan 27, 2004 4:57 am

I agree with the Mandrake call. The distro has been my fave for a number of years now. Any problems, and you can use their forums to get help, which I've always found quite responsive.

Post by **dandandaman** » Tue Jan 27, 2004 5:03 am

I'd check the hardware compatibility lists for each of the distros you are considering to make sure your stuff will run on them. I would also recommend staying away from debian/gentoo .... unless you want to turn your head to mush and come out remembering nothing except linux commands

But yeah, mandrake is good, and although it's still old, I run Redhat 9 (I've haven't tried Fedora, the Redhat successor, yet)

Dan.a

DirtyMagic · Post by **DirtyMagic** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 8:37 pm

Bundles of thanks for everyone that replied. I am now a happy Mandraker.

Figured I'd give Gentoo a whirl first just to get a handle on the "tough way to do things" (I displayed this same sort of logic in Oklahoma once... "Don't eat that red pepper," she says, "It's just there for show." MAN was that thing hot...). Went not too bad but emerging all the packages took forever. Their detailed instructons make it great for learning how to get around (and use a boot disk to recover from various attrocities) but I think it's probably a bit above my current abilities to maintain Gentoo for any length of time, as evidenced by my "let's try installing the nVidia drivers now" travesty. I've actually included a pic of me installing Gentoo.

<----- DirtyMagic installing Gentoo.

With a reasonable grasp on getting around a shell, I then bravely ran like hell and got the latest dist of Mandrake. That went pretty well, though I've got a few minor things left to work out like dual monitors and such. Here's a picture of me using Mandrake:

<--- Dirty Magic, having just installed Mandrake

Thanks again for the advice! Owe you guys one!

peteyg · Post by **peteyg** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 9:27 pm

Haha! Well, congratulations! There's still a lot of interesting Linux stuff you can do with Mandrake. It doesn't really matter how simple a system you have, you still have to dig into it a bit to do some of the really interesting stuff.

Post by **hurleybird** » Sun Feb 01, 2004 9:33 pm

the 2.6 kernel will be really awesome compared to 2.4, looks like it should beat MS for performance hands down, especially in SMP, and with 64-bit systems.

http://www.infoworld.com/infoworld/arti ... nux_3.html

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Sun Feb 01, 2004 11:00 pm

I tried it on a barton, well, it really rocks. I wanted reiser4 filesystem but does not seems released so soon
http://www.namesys.com/v4/v4.html

Post by **dandandaman** » Mon Feb 02, 2004 5:28 am

cool

Dan.a

Post by **hurleybird** » Mon Feb 02, 2004 6:21 am

The cool thing is that opteron destroys xeon and itanium on every test but one, where it ties itanium.

I so wish I has enough money to buy a couple of 248's

silverslayer · Post by **silverslayer** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 8:34 am

Though this thread seems to have died out slightly I figure I'd take the chance to voice my (completely unbias of course) opinion as to what one should try out if there looking for a Linux distro.

I can't argue with Mandrake any, that is what I started out on about 3-4 years ago...was very nice. Have to agree it was a great way for me to get my feet wet. however after a few monthes I moved to RedHat and have been with it until recently when they announced the Fedora project.

From there on I went to SourceMage GNU/Linux. (here's where the completely unbias portion comes in) SMGL is by far teh best Linux distribution that I have tried so far. I have personally never used Gentoo. However I hear a few people drawing comparisions between the the two ( Gentoo and SMGL). so if you are planning on going the way of Gentoo go ahead and give SMGL a look over if nothing else ^_^

Post by **dandandaman** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 9:11 am

silverslayer wrote:I moved to RedHat and have been with it until recently when they announced the Fedora project.

may I ask why? I still use RH9, but will be upgrading to fedora2 in april...lots of people have dumped RH because of fedora, but I don't understand why...it seems to me that fedora 1 == redhat 10? The only difference being that I can now use mirrors to get upgrades? I can understand some businesses not liking having no *guarantee* of security patches, but I can't see the lack of a guarantee (at least in the medium term) meaning they won't be supplied..........any other reason? or maybe you just wanted to change

Dan.a

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 9:22 am

well, I suppose it was a bit of both. Even before Fedora came out and I learn about it I had been looking into other things to try out, software, OS, different thigns in general...I like to have a bit of an idea of what is out there, and even though that in itself is an losing battle it is fun to try (for me at least

).

Secondly it seemed IMO that the folks at RedHat were using Fedora as a testing ground for things to work out kinks so to speak before moving it to teh retail versions of thier server applications. That just seemed to leave a bad taste in my mouth and I figured than that it was time to move on to something else.

I had a chance to try out VS (with little success unfortuantely) than but liked where the project was going. Now tha tI'm a developer for the distro I'm currently using it has brought me back here to VS once more LMAO, and I'm not given in this time til I get this thing working HAHA

silverslayer · Post by **silverslayer** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 9:23 am

logging in has always plagued me it would seem LOL

Post by **dandandaman** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 6:33 am

Anonymous wrote:Secondly it seemed IMO that the folks at RedHat were using Fedora as a testing ground for things to work out kinks so to speak before moving it to teh retail versions of thier server applications. That just seemed to leave a bad taste in my mouth and I figured than that it was time to move on to something else.

fair enough.....seems to me though that this is exactly what was already in place with normal redhat distros (new tech included in these)....it just wasn't formally said

Dan.a

silverslayer · Post by **silverslayer** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 11:25 am

dandandaman wrote:...it just wasn't formally said

LMAO...perhaps I was just living in a state of denial. Of of those "say it ain't so" moments. in any case I suppose it was good. I did like Redhat while I was using it. No complaints here. it was a damned good distro not counting my personal feelings about working out kinks and what not. I figure though that it was time for a change anyway. so here I am as my sig would say, with Sourcemage ^_^

I loved Mandrake and Redhat, but at the same time I don't miss them. If that makes any sense.

Post by **dandandaman** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 1:02 pm

Dan.a