I've been wanting to install linux on my second HD for a while now in a dual boot with windows scenario. I'm a capable computer user and I'm not too tied into using windows. I was wondering if any experienced linux users could comment (nonevangelically) on a few of the linux distro's out there and why they might be good for a new linux user. I'm not too concerned with what GUI i'll use, I'm mostly concerned with the distro supporting all of my hardware or easily getting it that way.
I've been looking at Suse, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Debian (although I'm already thinking no on debian)
My setup:
Intel p4 2.0 w/ asus p4t-e Mobo
1024 RDRAM
hd0 200GB WD2000JB NTFS (60/120 partition Windows)
hd1 120GB WD1200JB NTFS (70/40 partition target for Linux)
Regular old floppy
Pioneer DVD-116 (ATAPI)
Plextor CD-R PX-4012A (ATAPI)
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 w/ IEEE 1394
GeForce 4 Ti-4600
2 100/10 Network Cards (D-Link and generic)
Apple iPod (think I can get this one going w/ wine)
I'm posting my system information so that if there are problems with what I have we can discuss them before I start installing I appreciate any feedback.
I've got Mandrake Installed on mine. I like it so far. I picked it because Brandito uses it...and I needed someone to help me figure out what the hell I was doing. It's pretty easy ti figure out and use.
I'm considering trying out redhat because there are more binaries for it though. Its also supposed to be pretty easy to use.
Haven't really played around with the other two....
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Joined: Wed 02-20-2002 11:27PM Posts: 867 Location: No one's really sure what became of Castorite after graduation
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Heh. This would be a great topic for that LUG idea that was floating around.
Is this your first real experience with OSes outside of Windows? (No, gpunix and rocket/saucer don't count.) You'll find there's more Windows-isms in your understanding of computers than you previously thought. Just be prepared to have your perceptions stretched about your machine.
As far as I can tell, most of your hardware will be compatible with Linux. You may have a little trouble with the graphics card and/or the iPod, but since those are commodity items, there should be documentation somewhere on how to use them. The device drivers are in the kernel, which is fairly consistent across all distros. A list of supported hardware can be found at the Hardware-HOWTO. Speaking of which, the Linux Documentation Project and Google are your friends.
You never really explain why you didn't care for Debian. If it's just a style issue, I can understand. Being a slacker myself, I'm still convinced those Debianites are all some kind of freaks. On the other hand, if it's simply the overwhelming technical nature of a "first time", then that's exactly why you should look to this kind of a distro. It will teach you the lower levels of how the system is put together, what options trigger specific actions, etc.
I recommend starting with something like Mandrake or SUSE. Both are well-designed and "general purpose" enough that you'll have what you need when you need it. When you decide you need something more flexible or specialized, you can shift into a different distro. Just beware that configuration tools are not consistent across distributions. Learning to use a tool is not the same as understanding what the tool does. For this reason, I prefer Slackware for when you decide to develop the 'how things work' side of your experience.
Kinda dated, but this still sums up a lot of what's what in Linux-land. Quoted from the UCLA-LUG. Deletions made to fit the topic and recent times.
Quote:
If Linux distributions were Airlines...
Red Hat Airlines: The standard in air travel. Most people have flown Red Hat Air at one point or other. Some people like it and some people hate it and move on to one of the other airlines. Passengers are all treated the same; they get stuck in their seats and told not to ask questions -- everything will be taken care of for them. They should just sit back, relax, and not touch of the fancy controls under any circumstances, lest they send the plane into a tailspin. Red Hat Airlines is fabulously rich.
Mandrake Airlines: Mandrake bought a truckload of planes from Red Hat, put new engines in them, re-painted them, and now run their own airline. Considered by many to be the most friendly airline for first-time flyers.
SuSe Airlines: An airline out of Europe that tries to be everything for everyone and succeeds -- to a degree. Recently paid a huge sum of money to use a comic strip in its promotional material. (And after they finally named the lizard...)
SlackAIR: From a distance, their planes look just like everyone elses. But up close you can tell that they haven't been painted and little bits of wire stick out here and there. But onboard, the seats are comfortable enough and there are plenty of stewardesses available to help you readjust your seat if you manage to break it. There is no in-flight movie but if you get bored you are always welcome up in the cockpit. The pilots will be glad to let you try and fly the plane and are happy to let you push whatever buttons you want, even if you don't know what you're doing. Generally, novice flyers avoid SlackAIR as they've heard horror stories about newbies pressing the wrong button and causing the plane to explode.
Debian Airlines: They have a single type of airplane; a huge sucker weighing 2400 tons and carrying just about everything you can imagine. They've got kitchen sinks, massage parlors, a paintball arena, and 294 types of cheese for sale in the onboard, 24-hour supermarket. You can see from the terminal they have a huge team of technicians working on their fleet, poking and prodding. Debian Air is the only choice for some: everything onboard is built 100% by union workers -- no shoddy, possibly dangerous, imports here.
A few more recently popular distros include Gentoo, Knoppix, and LindowsOS. A good place to read up on what distros fill a particular niche market is at distrowatch.com.
Hope this is a good start. Anyone else wanna comment?
Joined: Mon 09-01-2003 4:09PM Posts: 318 Location: Blah blah land
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Redhat is usually the newbie's first pick. I switched to Slackware after I got used to Redhat and the transition was not bad, been running my laptop and other computers, including a few Sparcstations. It's pretty flexible and allows you to make a pretty tight configuration.
cant go wrong with suse, mandrake, or redhat (fedora). a few things ive noticed though:
fedora's graphical package manager sucks. of course you can still use rpm from the command line, but they've also added "yum" which is a much nicer command line package manager. oh, and they finally made the rhn updater work without having to sign up for an account, thats kinda nice for automatic updates.
suse's package manager is much better imho, but there arent nearly as many precompiled packages available. another downside is that you cant find suse on umr's ftp. but i did like suse.
its been a long time since i used mandrake, dont have much to say about it. i do know that they have tons of precompiled packages available.
oh, and while im here: why doesnt the umr ftp have boot disk images to go along with the fedora stuff? i was doing a network install and had to download the whole thing from off campus because i couldnt find boot images to go along with umr's fedora files. tried getting the boot disks elsewhere, but it said they didnt match the files on umr's ftp.
This is some great feed back. Thanks for all of the input. I figure I'll install somthing later next week after I gather all of the necessary hardware files that might not be implemented in the distro.
As far as debian or slackware goes, I'd be interested in using a bleeding edge package if it weren't on my critical system. The thing is, I still have to keep my windows files safe for the most part untill I can throw together a bare bones system (or buy a brand new one) and set up a linux gateway on the older or crappier of the two. I'll be a lot more comfortable when I know I can't screw something major up on my Win box. That's pretty much why I wanted to stick to a stable distro.
And yes, I'm backing up all of my important stuff as I type. Even though linux will be installed on a seperate disk, I can't be too careful :)
You should take a look at archlinux. It's not a really well known distribution, but it's pretty spiffy. It has a package manager, named pacman that automatically updates any package you have installed on your computer, or installs it if you don't have it. It's fairly easy to install (about on the same level with slackware), and comes with all the features necessary to do just about anything with linux. You have to know your basic commands though, because one thing this distro doesn't do is hold your hand. You'll learn a lot, from trial and error mainly (the way most of us learned Windows back in the day). Check it out at http://www.archlinux.org
I just installed a debian based distro called gentoo . It is a little more complicated the red hat to install but far more customizable and it is very easy to update the system. Oh, and as far as installing a GUI desktop.. It took one command, changes to 2 lines of a text file and Gnome was installed... Check it out http://www.gentoo.org
Joined: Sat 04-06-2002 5:55PM Posts: 165 Location: Carbondale(ish), IL
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pksyn wrote:
I just installed a debian based distro called gentoo . It is a little more complicated the red hat to install but far more customizable and it is very easy to update the system. Oh, and as far as installing a GUI desktop.. It took one command, changes to 2 lines of a text file and Gnome was installed... Check it out http://www.gentoo.org
please tell me you don't really believe gentoo is debian based....what the hell gave you that (incorrect) idea?
it was only a matter of time before an excited gentoo user joined the discussion. dont get me wrong, i like it as much as the next guy... but he specifically said that he is a NEW linux user. not a good idea.
im currently running gentoo on both systems, but there is a reason i didnt suggest it in my previous post.
Joined: Wed 04-17-2002 3:51AM Posts: 370 Location: On campus.
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I've heard scary things about gentoo.
Not to really distract from the original guys post, but kind of along the same lines. I have a K6-2 400 that I'm running 2k on currently, and since its my secondary machine I wouldn't object to killing 2k and installing some flavor of linux on it. But I'd need something pretty userfriendly for a 2nd timer (I've used redhat 7 and mandrake 7 before but never found anything that I could do in it that I couldn't do 10x as fast in windows).
So basically, any recommendations for an old machine? Oh and it needs to fit on a 2 gig drive if possible, I have a 7.5 I could use, but I would really prefer to keep it on this 2 gig.
Joined: Tue 08-19-2003 11:22PM Posts: 470 Location: Somewhere in Missouri
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Gentoo is a nice distro, but not very friendly for first time people because you (ick) have to choose which kernel to configure and compile, or if you wish to cheat, use the genkernel script that comes with it. But somehow, it always managed to break the network driver... which is pretty much required.
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Joined: Mon 09-01-2003 4:09PM Posts: 318 Location: Blah blah land
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For an additional choice, you could do a Slackware 9.1 installation (make sure you have all of the CDs) and pick the FULL option. Then, fire up KDE and it doesn't get any easier than that. Slack is a pretty tight setup and once you get comfortable with it you can go back, wipe it out and configure it more precisely for a custom setup.
i thought i'd add to this thread rather than make a new one.
i just compiled the 2.6.3 kernel from gentoo starting from stage 3, and i'm amazed at how fast it is, i've used redhat 8, 9, mandrake 9.1, 9.2 and suse 7, 8.3 and gentoo is by far the fastest by a long shot, it starts faster, in about half the time as redhat 8 (and i tried to get rid of as much crap as i could from all the runlevels) took and because i've compiled everything from scratch (openoffice and kde took a good 15+hrs.) the whole system is twice as fast as any of the other distro's.... and i'm not exagerating. it could just be the 2.6.3 kernel. it's definately worth the compile time. and it's been stable so far. i'd recommed gentoo to anyone. their install instructions are clear, you just have to sit down for 2-3 hrs to install it. but it is worth it. the compiling for a processor and speed flags in cc do amazing things.
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I appreciate any feedback.
On the other hand, if it's simply the overwhelming technical nature of a "first time", then that's exactly why you should look to this kind of a distro. It will teach you the lower levels of how the system is put together, what options trigger specific actions, etc.
