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Which distro to install?

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by rexworld 2 views

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138 replies

by hal 9000

Quite often after someone has altered something unless they are willing to tell you exactly what they have done {and most are unwilling to admit that they messed it up in the first place} you just have so many possible entry points that it is almost impossible to know where to begin and quite often a lot easier to reload than fault find.

Currently I have one customer who bought a company computer for their son to design Web Pages for the business on and he has now reloaded the thing 3 times in the last 2 weeks. I've just got off the phone explaining how to format a HDD and then arrange the drives so that the opticals are at the end of the drive chain. "He'll be adding more drives within the next few weeks" so there will be another reactivation for M$ there as well.

Anyway the trouble with this guy is that he knows enough to be real trouble and I recently caught him trying to flash the BIOS through the command line in XP Pro "well it did give some interesting results" but he is just stupid and tampers with things that should never be touched. The last time I saw it running there was no Hyper Threading enabled the RAM was switched to the slowest speed possible, he had under clocked the 3 GIG CPU and had allowed 256 MEG for video when he has a 128 MEG card in place. But at least it worked even if the CPU was constantly showing 100% usage.

Col

by hal 9000

At the time and I just ran everything on DR DOS as you had far more switches and better commands available.

Granted they never reached the level of a bad Unix system but they made life so much easier that those who where stuck with MS.

Col

by peregrine

Actually, you're wrong. You can do just about anything in Windows from the command line. If you know what tools to use. Ipconfig is a tool for help desk. Not admins. The real meat is in netsh which you've obviously never used. ;) I use both OS's and find them very similar in terms of functionality from the command line. Both OS's have their good points and bad points. And just like everything else, which one you like is pretty much personal preference.

by apotheon

If you've got the right computing environment, there's no danger in following links like that, generally. Just make sure you use a computer you don't care about, are willing to immediately pull the plug on if need be, has no access over the network to other computers you DO care about, has all functionality turned off for cookies and dynamic content, and is behind an extremely restrictive firewall. Heh.

Being an IT consultant that has occasion to do a lot of very strange stuff in service to clients, I have such a system at hand, and I've discovered that the site in question is not even finished being put together. I'm thinking about loading up some new tools for evaluating what sort of traffic occurs between the client machine and that website to see if it's trying to load some Windows-based malware onto the machine. Should be fun.

by apotheon

Actually, I'm not wrong.

I compared ipconfig with ifconfig. I didn't compare netsh with any of about a thousand tools of similar usefulness in Unix. I didn't compare it with any of about a thousand tools of far greater usefulness in Unix, either.

Your statement that I've "obviously" never used netsh doesn't indicate your knowledge of the l33t h2x0r inner workings of DOS: it only indicates that you are "obviously" jumping to conclusions and making assumptions about what I have and have not used without any facts in evidence upon which to base your statements. I made a simple tool-to-tool comparison, based on the intended uses of those tools. I didn't say "the only tool in DOS for working with networks is ipconfig."

by joeshouse308

I was able to download a single cd iso installation disk for SUSE 9.1. Any desired additional apps are widely available as RPM's that install easily with YAST. I'm a Mandrake user, however, I found the install easy, hardware recognition perfect, configuration was very straightforward and attached to a windows network intuitively. In other words, I liked it

by bucky kaufman (mcsd)

I'm in a similar situation, and am giving NLD a shot. The other distributions are loaded with crap you don't really need in a desktop workstation (e.g. several database servers, web servers, telnet daemons, etc.). NLD is slimmed down to just the Kernel, OpenOffice and some basic operating stuff.

by hal 9000

You are given the option on what you want to install.

There are the basic questions like is this a Server/Workstation or whatever and then with every Distro you can chose the individual components that you wish to install.

I see this a a good thing rather than something that you want to avoid.

Col

by elliotl

Mepis, which you can pick up for a low cost at http://ztechshop.net/ is a Debian derivative with simplicity and ease of use as its main goals. It combines the best of Debian (package management) with an installation and configuration second to none. Boot directly from the live CD to test hardware compatibility or get accompanied with the operating system, then using the same disk, install it to a hard drive in a fashion that's easier than a Windows installation.

Integrate with Windows by mounting NTFS or Fat32 partitions by clicking on their respective icons, or connect to a Windows network seamlessly with Samba. OpenOffice is included for a complete office suite and all other basics a desktop would need are included as well. You won't be short-sided in extra programs; Mepis comes with well over 600MB of packages.

Mepis avoids the bloat of Mandrake or RedHat, while giving you everything you need. Instead of packaging 6 web browsers and 9 text editors, you get the best of each category. Mepis arguably has the best performance of all the distributions with similar goals.

In the end, Mepis is a great choice for a newcomer who is faced with installation and all. Out of the box, it's one of the most usable operating systems around with very little fuss. I highly recommend it! www.mepis.org

by sdkarnam

If you have Windows 98 or even 95 install it. Then download cygwin from www.cygwin.com. Now you have linux functionality running on windows. Once you get familiar with linux then you yourself can figure out which distro you want to use. On older machine (pentium 266) CYGWIN runs really great on windows 98. Faster than native Suse Linux 9.1.

Note: Avoid windows 2000/XP they hog the resources.

Thanks
Karnam

by apotheon

Then you get Linux with all the stability, speed, and security of Windows.

Ugh.

That's certainly not for me.

by sdkarnam

Please read the thread and my comments in full. This suggestion is for somebody who is new to linux/unix and need some playing around before he decides which one to pick. I have installed cygwin on my old machine so that my kids get more hands on the linux/unix environment before I do a complete switchover.

I am running Open BSD running on my laptop and it is so sweet. I do not want get into a war over BSD vs Linux but OpenBSD is really really stable and secure inherently.

Thanks
Karnam

by apotheon

I have read the thread and comments in full. I was being "funny". Don't take it personally.

Why did you bring up BSD vs. Linux if you don't want to get into a BSD vs. Linux war?

I'm a Debian user -- also very stable, with more (and easier) access to software packages, more development support, and more up-to-date software. Debian works for me. I don't have anything against OpenBSD, though: it has its advantages as well. They're just not advantages for which I, personally, have much use right now.

by house

I've used RH 8 to Fedora 2...it's getting easier to use...but for a professional OS, try Suse or Mandrake. If you consider yourself an advanced user, try Debian. If you stray too far from the popular packaged distros, you are going to learn a lot real fast.

by gorto

As Hal put it there are a couple of options and possibly more. I ran Slackware for years, then Corel (Debian Based) SuSE, Redhat and Fedora and finally Debian. With Kernel 2.6 I went back to Fedora mainly for the hardware support (SATA and nVidia). It also has a very simple user interface (I prefer CLI myself). It's also dictated by what you plan to do with it. Debian is great if you have a bit of Linux know how. It uses APT for updates and installs and has a LARGE following. SuSE is slick, has great support for all kinds of hardware, and uses Yast! (easy to use) and is backed by Novell. Fedora is also quite slick, supports tons of hardware, uses rpm, APT-GET for rpms and YUM, all quite easy to update and install from. Fedora also looks and feels like the RedHat products just in case you get a job where RH Workstation or Enterprise is used. I suggest that you download 2 or 3 distro's and give them a try.

by gorto

It's been said repeatedly that Linux will run on slow PC's with blazing speed but that was when the GUI interface was lean and very simple. Today's GUI magic is just as complex and bloated as Microsoft XP and nearly kills anything that doesn't have 256MB of memory and a 500+Mhz CPU. On less than that I don't even bother with the GUI.

by apotheon

Don't use Gnome or KDE. You can still get the GUI working with impressive speed by using something other than Gnome, KDE, and similarly bloated desktops.

I use WindowMaker on every Linux system I use right now, including several that have processors slower than 400MHz, with the exception of dedicated servers (which have no GUI installed at all because there's no point to a GUI on such systems). It's faster than XP on a 2.4GHz system. That sounds like blazing fast GUI speed on a slow computer to me. Imagine how fast everything works with WindowMaker running on my 2.4GHz system.

by hal 9000

Dual Tyan 166 Pentium which is just too good a board to throw out. It can not take anything faster than the 166's but it does have 8 X 72 pin RAM slots per CPU they total 256 MEG all up.

Currently I have Gnome running on it because I use it as a demo for Linux and while not the fastest unit around it is still reasonable about the same speed to execute as a 2 GIG P4 running XP Pro.

I also have several 200 MMX Pentium's with 128 MEG of RAM running different Distro's and while by no means the fastest things around they do work well. Personally I believe that because Linux is written in a better way without the Code Bloat that M$ has in Windows that is where the idea comes from that it is possible to run the newer versions of Linux on older hardware.

While this is correct you do not get to see the full advantages of what Linux has to offer and it is one thing that I tell everyone what the hardware is only after they have had a play with the OS and its related applications. So far everyone that I've allowed to have a play doesn't believe me when I tell them that they are working on a 200 Pentium and insist that it must be something far faster. Most have 128 MEG loaded but because of some of the old RAM that is used in these things it gets hard to find the larger RAM Sticks and the one with Knoppix loaded only has 64 MEG as at the time I could only find 8 MEG sticks. That one without doubt is the fastest of the fully featured Linux units that I run here although the Lycoris Desktop LX works quite well but in all honestly I only consider this as a learner unit which has the look and feel of Windows XP so that a first time user isn't scared away from Linux.

Col

by praxxxis

Granted, I'm not a Gnome user, but I wanted to give 2.8 a spin and I'd been hearing a lot of glowing praise about the distro, so I gave it a whack.

Setup was easy and I don't think Granny would have any trouble using it for web browsing and email (once Evolution was configured for it), and I'm sure that Linux gurus would love it too, but for me it was not too user-friendly once I tried to configure for my needs.

I couldn't get SAMBA running; other distros I've used make this an easy matter of using a GUI, but the share browser didn't ask for a user name or password and I didn't see any way to enter it in the network config tool. I don't want to read a bunch of man pages and edit an arcane .conf file. I want GUI interfaces that work, like LinNeighborhood or smb4k that made this process painless with MEPIS, Vector, Mandrake or Yoper, to name a few that I've tried recently. The only apt-get package they seemed to offer was some WWW interface that also didn't work for me.

You can't easily boot in to a root window manager. I couldn't access my W2K as a normal user, and even when I mounted it by command line as root I couldn't so much as edit a text file in Windows (I didn't have that problem with other distros).

I broke X when trying to edit my XF86Config-4 file to work with two monitors (I never succeeded; some distros like SuSE recognize two video cards on setup and set up Xinerama for you). So I tried to edit the file from the root command line in a terminal. Guess what? The command 'vi' doesn't kick up a text editor, just gives you a 'command not recognized' feedback. Of course, there is a vi-like program, but to start it you have to type the whole non-mnenomic name (which I kept forgetting). There should at least be a sympbolic link for 'vi' to the program.

All in all, the least pleasant Linux experience I've had in a long while.

by apotheon

Wow. What a laundry list.

I've never configured samba except by way of smb.conf, and personally I prefer it that way. More GUI just means more resource overhead and more complexity to create possible stability and security issues. It's in part the desire to get away from that nonsense that I moved from Windows to Linux.

I don't like Gnome, either, which is part of the reason I haven't bothered to try out Ubuntu Warty Warthog yet. If you're looking for vi or vim, though, you might want to just apt-get install it (either one, though I recommend vim).

Or . . . you could go with a distro that hasn't given you the same trouble. Use what works, I suppose. I'm typically baffled whenever anyone has a strong aversion to the CLI, but if that's you, then you might want to just go back to a more GUI-intensive distro. If you still want a "serious" Debian-based distribution, but want it to be more GUI-intensive than it sounds like Ubuntu is, you could try Progeny Debian. It, too, uses Gnome by default, but should have a lot more of the GUI tools you expect than Ubuntu does.

by praxxxis

Rexworld is looking for something easy to setup, configure and maintain. The CLI is a powerful interface, but it has a steep learning curve. Switches vary from app to app and documentation is not Newbie friendly (man pages, for instance). They are rather cryptic to those who aren't members of the priesthood and they never give examples, it seems. None of this comports well with my notion of easy to configure.

I'd never been on a Linux system that didn't respond to the command 'vi.' Once I learned what the command was I made a symbolic link and everything was OK (actually, I was able to fix X enough to boot a single monitor).

I just don't have a very good memory, so it makes using the CLI difficult for me unless I constantly use it. Sue me, I'm not an ?bergeek and never will be, but I'd like to use Linux because I like the idea of open source software, not because I am particularly enamoured with the user-friendliness of unix. So I entered this thread while looking around for something a little gooeyier to help ease me in to Linux. I'll DL Progeny and give it a whirl, though I haven't completely given up on Ubuntu.

by jdclyde

Really can't make a recommendation either way without knowing what the old system is.

How much memory do you have?
HardDrive size?
Processor/

Low of any of these and forget about a graphical machine for the most part.
May also have to pick and choose what to install so it will fit on your disk.

What do you want to use the system for once it is going? If you wish to become an admin then go with a corporate brand, RedHat or SuSe. Otherwise look at dabian or mandrake.

by jaqui

have you check mdk 10.1 to see if the bluez will support the wireless nic?
bluez being blue tooth wireless device support.

either way send the device data from harddrake to mdk and they will try to get support into the distro.

by bluecollargeek

I have been playing with the new distro since November. It is amazing how well it works on older machines.

Based on Debian / Ubuntu, this is an excellent basic distro.

From the website http://www.watsky.net -

BeatrIX Linux is a free, compact (Less than 200 megabytes), operating system aimed at both office and home users who want something simpler, safer and superior to Microsoft Windows, and that will run on just about any IBM-compatible PC made in the past 10 years.

The new BeatrIX 2005.1 contains the latest Linux stable kernel (operating system) a Windows-like desktop (Gnome), Web browser (Firefox), e-mail program (Evolution), office suite including an outstanding word processor compatible with Microsoft Word (Open Office), instant-chat program (GAIM) and everything else necessary to get things done with no problems. You can also add almost any program to BeatrIX from the world's largest Linux library -- everything from Web servers to Web editors. Free.

NOTE: This is NOT a multimedia / gaming system - but a working desktop platform. I have deployed dozens of systems running BeatrIX in the past month - all on hardware that was heading for the recycling center - and the users of those systems love them.

There is an active user/developer community in their forums.

If you are looking to recycle an old machine to a usable system, check this distro out.

by oskarku

We talked to the developer -- incongruously a journalist -- who helped us deploy BeatrIX on 50 seats. He did it for free, using his words, "for fun." Linux needs more people like this. He showed us how to configure our seats to eliminate Web browsers and deny Web access to anyone who didn't need it.

Thumbs up to BeatrIX!

-- John

by apotheon

Linux "has" lots of people like that. Join your local LUG and get to know a few.

by tracyf

...but once on it's was great! It's installed to a 4GB older drive on an EPIA-itx 5000. Once installed, I added music/video player- now I'm good to go.

T

by camalfa

Yes nice question , How old is your computer (486or 386)how many memory and how many space for your HDD. because if you install a new technologie linux it wont work on old system.

Shure you receive a lot of sugestion about madrake( now mandriva)and ubuntu or debian bout you must have a linux distro that is x86 , not 586 or whatever, for my own test on old computer (486 dx2 66, 4,5g HDD 128M) the old mandrake works well (version 7.0 or 8.0)

then, i tried newer linux on a pentium 111 550 and tried with a amd slot1 550 and now i am currently using a pentium 111 800 without any problem. I am on linux Xandros open circulation 2.o and it works with winmodem, without installing any drivers.

I am not shure if i repat someone else of this discution, but with so many reply, i didn't read them all.

by shanghai sam

I've been using 9.1 and 9.2 for a good while now. Both installs worked w/o any problems. I'd give that a try. It even worked fine with my dlink wireless card in it.

by pantherbigcat

I tried to install several Linux distros on an old Pentium II-400 box rescued from a bank trash bin. After putting in a 10Gb hard drive, 128Mb of PC100 RAM, a sound card & hardware PCI modem, I found that Libranet to be the only distro that would install sucessfully. It offers an embarrassment of options to play with as well. Have fun!

by icealex

I also think SUSE-Linux is the easiest distro for newbe's. With the setup and administration tool yast there is no problem to install and configure Linux.

You can choose your partiions, hardware config software packages and so on.
After installation you can use YAST to configure your services and everything else from the OS in a GUI-environment

Cheers, Alex

by camalfa

I've an idea for you my friend, why don't you just try a live cd from a distro and check it out if it's working???

after that you just have to take that distro and install it!!

you have a bunch of cd to try example:

knoppix " most popular debian , and you can insatll it from the cd"
mandrake move "no comment"
ubuntu " they got a live cd too"
and many more but be careful because you can catch a live cd with only one language on it..like french only : like kaella

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