switch to linux

[druke]

greetings, i have recently upgraded my pc to windows xp, and have another pc with windows 98 on it, i was thinking about looking at linux, but i have no idea how to work/install it or even get it? can anyone help

And could i have to os\'s on a single comp if i like it enough?

[zaphar]

I\'ll answer your last question first. I dual boot win2k and Linux on my box with no problems.

As to install, The easiest way is to purchase one of the distributions from any software store. I recommend either RedHat or SuSE. I run SuSe myself and find it to be superior but thats more a personal preference than anything. The CD\'s are bootable and walk you through the install as easily as windows does. The hardest part is making sure you have the hard drive partitioned correctly.

The cheapest way is to do an internet install. Redhat lets you download the CD ISO\'s so you can burn your own install CD\'s and SuSE lets you perform an FTP install. If you wan\'t more info just give me a holler my email and AIM are in my profile.

[Antity]

I don\'t want to restart the old flame war, or anything.
But ever since I have tried knoppix and morphix, that is what i recommend to most newbs users, since  they are both cd based distro. Which means you put the CD in, boot the computer and poof you have your linux and desktop running. That is the best way i know to give someone a feel of linux. Afterward, if you want to install on your hard drive, you have an installer (both in knoppix and in morphix) wich will guide you through configuring your system to dual boot (careful though, I recommend reading a bit about partitionning first). Thay even configure your usb adsl modem for you.

My own laptop is morphix powered, I installed it on the hard drive and then since morphix is debian based, i just had to run \"apt-get update\" and \"apt-get upgrade\" to  reach the bleeding edge (well you could be bloodier with a gentoo but recompiling takes so much time )

you can get both isos for knoppix and morphix on the internet

[Kluger]

I work with Linux a lot and am becoming quite a professional.  I have 8 OSes on my computer right now, and I\'ve used about 30 Linuxes.  I declared my total independence from Windows over a year ago, and have found myself doing much much more with Linux, and all for free.

I\'d be glad to help with any Linux questions anyone has.  I guess my contact info is all available in my personal info, but just in case...

benjaminvanderjagt@adelphia.net
ICQ: 6730681
AIM: benvanderjagt
YIM: benvanderjagt

I also have a SourceForge project, and sometimes I am away and only have internet access but no email or instant messaging, so you can post messages on the forums there (but keep it in \"chit-chat\" unless it has to do with my project).

My project address: http://dlip.sourceforge.net/

[hook]

install:
every distro has it\'s own way of installation, and ususally a pretty good documentation of it.

i\'d recoment Mandrake (http://www.mandrake.org ) for the first ever distro. but my favourite (whit a GREAT documentation) is Gentoo (http://www.gentoo.org )
Mandrake has the easiest installation i\'ve ever seen, but i prefere to do everyting myself

two OSs?
right, no problem with it, it\'s called dual-booting ...and gentoo\'s page has some great documentation on it (in the install document)

[Kluger]

I\'m going to jump the gun on this one and say that the infant J.A.M.D. 0.0.6 is the best first Linux.  I have tried so many different Linuxes, hoping to find a nice one that would make new users happy, and J.A.M.D. really surprised me, considering how far it was down the list at distrowatch...

0.0.6 is based on the crap Red Hat 9, and 0.0.5 (which I have not used yet) is based on the great Red Hat 8.0.  Unfortunately, one of the Red Hat 9 bugs conveys (although J.A.M.D. does an astonishingly good job cleaning Red Hat 9 up, including installing a proper KDE).  That Red Hat 9 bug is that you can\'t mount more than one Samba (Windows) share without smbmount stalling.  (Pressing ctrl-c takes care of the stall, but if you have it as part of your boot sequence, the system will hang...

One thing that Linux guys won\'t like is that J.A.M.D. lacks GCC, but one of the great things about J.A.M.D. is that you can shove any RPM from the Red Hat 9 CDs into it...

J.A.M.D. has Synaptic preloaded, so installing most software over the internet is rediculously easy.  (\'course, my DLIP project will do one better, when it\'s done.  ;-)

I wrote a review on J.A.M.D.  If you go to DistroWatch (http://www.distrowatch.com/) and go to the JAMD distribution page (either use the pulldown navigator at the top right or find the name along the right side), then my review should be among them.  It should have my name (Benjamin Vander Jagt) on it...I\'ve received plenty of kudos for a review well written.  ?_?

Otherwise, a link can be found here.

I started with FreeBSD 4.7.....biiig mistake!  That\'s like jumping in the deep end...with bricks tied to my feet...  My next was Red Hat 8.0, which has served me the best of all my distros.

I also really like Slackware and Vector, but they aren\'t recommended for brand new users, since you would need to run xf86config and startx by yourself...

Anaconda installations (mostly Red Hat) have by far the easiest and most comprehensive installation process.  If you want to install everything, you just click \"Everything\", instead of having to click hundreds of times, only to find out that the installer doesn\'t handle dependencies.

Surrpisingly, Anaconda is one of the few installers that doesn\'t feature partition resizing.

Ones to pick as a first distro:

Red Hat 8.0 (Maybe 9, but it\'s really packed full of bugs.)
J.A.M.D. 0.0.5 or 0.0.6
Mandrake 9.1

Ones not great as a first distro: (If you figure out how to install and use it, it\'ll serve you well thereafter.)

SuSE 8.2 (the installer can leave people scratching their heads...even me, as the stupid thing double-mounts most hard drives and refuses to install).
Slackware 9
Vector 3.2 SOHO (Slackware based)
Gentoo (misc installer problems, confusing installation instructions)

Ones not to choose as a first distro:

Debian 3.0 (I can\'t stress enough how hard it is to get a Debian box set up)
Lycoris/LX (it has some serious technical flaws.  my hard drive got 3MB/sec speed, and it doesn\'t have GCC, so installing software from source, as most Linux software is installed, is impossible)
FreeBSD (Okay, so it\'s a BSD, not a Linux.  I\'ve played Quake3 and UT2003 thru Linux emulation, and it was super fast....but setup can be torture)

Ones I can\'t recommend:

Lindows (why pay?  you\'ll get a better setup from a Debian-based Linux)
Yoper (lots and Lots and LOTS of bugs!)
Red Hat 9.0.93 (this new beta worries me)
Sorcerer (too many of the source download mirrors are dead, and the installer works intermittently)
Xandros (others are easier and more powerful...again, why pay?)
LFS (I know it looks like fun, but it\'s more of an educational or security tool)
Caldera (for the principal of it)

overall, I recommend either Red Hat 8.0 or Red Hat 9 for most people.  of course, the statistics seem to agree.  between the two, Red Hat 9 is easier to use, but has some serious bugs, mostly stemming from the Red Hat guys thinking it would be a *good* idea to backport NPTL into the 2.4 kernel!

[hook]

well, my linux (hi)story is a bit similar to kluger\'s ...only with some deviances:

my first ever distro that i tried was a redhat 5.1 that failed miserably. from then on i never was (or am!) in favour of RH.

next came slackware (6.0 i think, maybe older) which installed nicely, but since i was a complete noobie, it was a real shock-therapy to learn how to use it (that was the simplest!!), how to install (=compile from source!) apps, and the worst, how to administrate a linux system (REALLY unfriendly in slackware) ...i\'ve learned A LOT on my slackware install, since i\'ve been running it then for over 4 years. (it still lurks on my soon-to-be-router/mail-server)

i tried debian, because the guys at the (open-source) cybercafe i work at all use it, but it just didn\'t work out (not to mention that none of them successfully installed the b**ch on my PC)

so when i heard about gentoo from a freind of mine i checked it out on the forums and fell in love with it ....downloaded the latest version (1.4_rc1) and, being an ex-slacker, didn\'t have much problems installing it. i\'d recomend it for a first distro, but that\'s just how i am ...remember, my first steps were slackware!!! ...gentoo can be a bit difficult to install, but when you get through it, you\'ll be ever so glad :]

mandrake, as i saw it is the perfect REAL NOOBIE distro, but i doubt you\'ll ever learn anything more complex on it ...unless you put real effort into it

so (as i said in a different topic) my picks for a noobie distro still are:
1) mandrake - http://www.mandrake.com
2) gentoo - http://www.gentoo.org
3) suse - http://www.suse.org

[Kluger]

my first ever distro that i tried was a redhat 5.1 that failed miserably. from then on i never was (or am!) in favour of RH.

Red Hat 5.1 failed for me, too.  It was easier for me to get Debian to go into X than to get RH 5.1 to even *see* my video card, no matter what I set it to.

So far, Red Hat 8.0 has been the most consistently reliable (though they butchered KDE, and that has caused problems).  I do recommend giving it another try, Hook.  At least 8.0.  :-)

[hook]

Originally posted by Kluger
So far, Red Hat 8.0 has been the most consistently reliable (though they butchered KDE, and that has caused problems).  I do recommend giving it another try, Hook.  At least 8.0.  :-)

just to let you know: you\'re trying to convience a die-hard (ex-slacker now gentooist) lover of compiling everything from source to switch to a precompiled distro? ...no way :] ...i\'d rather try LFS!!

[Kluger]

haha, okay.  (-:

I\'m an OS junkie, so I don\'t really use source-based distros.  I would end up building my system, then getting bored and wiping it clean and in stalling another one.  (like I did with Sorcerer and Gentoo)

one thing I *did* do, though is rebuild all the Red Hat source RPMs for my architecture, which was a nice, streamlined procedure.  the guys at Red Hat say it doesn\'t make any difference, but I have numbers (including up to 100MB RAM savings) to prove otherwise...

I had recommended to Red Hat that they add a source-based option to Anaconda, but they say it doesn\'t jive with their plans...

[zaphar]

Hehe I am seriously considering switching to Gentoo Linux as I have heard nothing but good things about it.

but SuSE I think is a good all-around OS its easy to use for a new user but lets you tinker and compile if you want too. RH and Mandrake aren\'t as friendly that way I think.

I actually started out on slackware myself then tried RH 5.1 and like the rest of you hated it. Switched to SuSE and never looked back.

[Muzzle]

Red Hat is awful.  Maybe useful for big companies who want a support contract and have an irrational fear of IBM.

Debian is ok if you don\'t mind being three years behind the bleeding-edge.

Mandrake is a decent option for newbies who want things to Just Work.

Gentoo rocks my butt.  Any Linux user who doesn\'t mind getting their hands a little bit dirty and owns a reasonably fast computer owes it to themself to try it.

[Kundalf]

Hey,

to have a look at linux I can recommend http://www.knoppix.org/

to use linux and leard about it I recommend a package Dirtribution. like SuSE,
RedHat or Mandrake.

I liked SuSE very much, the latter one (Mandrake) has the big benefit for Win2k, WinXP users, that it includes a NTFS-partition resizing tool since their latest version! But either one should be ok)

[Kluger]

I\'ve been using Linux intensively for over a year, and I\'ve tried several source-based distributions, including Gentoo 1.4, and while Gentoo is clearly the best source-based distribution, I still stick with Red Hat 8.0.  (Red Hat from 9 up is awful.  Try the 9.0.93 beta for a good laugh.)  Mandrake is consistently developing, while SuSE is pretty stuck on themselves and won\'t take any sort of correction from the market or their users.  I wouldn\'t be surprised if Mandrake becomes the standard-setter within the year.

Many reviewers and users would have me believe that I\'m the odd one; that once you\'ve learned Linux and know how it all works, obviously you\'ll switch to Gentoo.  (I\'m not pointing at anyone here.  It\'s something I hear in various places.)  However, Red Hat Linux 8.0 is a much more established standard and a more refined package.  I, an OS junkie, a technical nerd, a die hard \"throw away that .i386.tgz and gimme the source\" user, appreciate that.  None of the standards have been circumvented (other than KDE) like they have been in SuSE and Mandrake.  Instead, the tools that come with Red Hat Linux properly use the Linux standards, like init scripts and config files.  YaST2 is a mess, and as of a month ago, I don\'t see any way to install nVidia drivers on a new SuSE installation (at least, following the SuSE instructions or following the nVidia instructions).

If you want to stay up to date, don\'t need bleeding edge, and want to update the binaries for your system, then just rpmbuild the RPMs for your favorite RPM-based distro.  That\'s what I did, and now if I decide to wipe out my system, I don\'t need to rebuild everything from scratch...just dump a couple gigs of RPMs in.

Because of some arguments I had with some of the guys at Red Hat, I ran some benchmark tests and found on average a 1% to 2% performance improvement.  While from the standpoint of a Linux distribution, compiling once for a few different target processors may save the world billions and billions of dollars, having each individual computer (the few majorities of which optimizing exactly the same) compile everything means that you would have to use the distribution 50 to 100 times as long as it took you to install it for it to be useful.  (Granted, this doesn\'t account for newer versions of software available to source-based distros, but that is most often a reliability hit as well as software bloat.)  Imagine it takes you 3 days to build your Gentoo system (a conservative estimate).  You would have to use the system for 150 to 300 days straight (I don\'t mean a few hours each day) before you break even.  Now, how likely is it that you will continue to use the system completely unchanged?

Consider the alternative.  Get almost new everything and just download and build the one or two new packages that you need to stay on the bleeding edge for.  If you want to optimize everything, use a little 3 line script to rebuild all your source RPMs while you\'re not otherwise using your computer.

For me, at least, this is why I currently use Red Hat 8.0.  I may switch to Mandrake, but hopefully my DLIP project will make it so that I can truly use any distribution I want.  (Ironically, one of the main uses for DLIP is source-based software installation.)

Just a word of warning, Mandrake is virtually impossible to configure PlaneShift for.

\"Debian is ok if you don\'t mind being three years behind the bleeding-edge. \"

Yeah, \'cause it\'ll take you three years to get it configured.  ;-)

\"Mandrake is a decent option for newbies who want things to Just Work.\"

Funny you should mention that.  I have a K6-2-500 system, and I\'ve tried building my own kernels, making an LFS, using RH 8.0, RH 9, and yes, even trying Gentoo, SuSE, and Slackware, and only Mandrake with its own kernel works on this system...and fast, too.  And here I thought \"Just Works\" was the unofficial Red Hat slogan.

So shall we take a few votes?  For best live CD, it sounds like Knoppix or Gnoppix.  For best source-based, it sounds like Gentoo.  For best precompiled, it\'s sounding like Mandrake *grumble*...

[Osgroth]

Hey hey hey!!!!!

It\'s true that I can\'t build PS on a Mandrake?
...
Well, I\'m a noobie, more or less, and I wanted to put my hands into something a bit more \"bloody\"... but now that everything runs smoothly...

Anyway, if someone has run PS over Mandrake (9.1?) let me know, I will be trying a bit more, and if I can\'t... well... nothing, I will spend a week (or two) becoming a bit less noobie while I compile Gentoo  :-)

Osgroth