The Geek Forum
Main Forums => Hardware, Software, and Other Imperialist Crap => Topic started by: Crystalmonkey on June 15, 2005, 03:35:34 PM
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Alright guys I hate to ask a tech question given all the people lately but I'm going to anyway.
I'm going to put linux on a spare machine that I have and as I don't need it to run games I figured it might be good getting a little experiance with some form of Linux. The question I have is which distro should I use? I know there are a billion of them and it varies from person to person, but how about the most supported? The one with the most drivers available? Where might these drivers be?
Thanks,
Your friendly neighborhood monkey made of crystal
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I've used Red Hat, and an old version of Mandrake, but the distro I've had the best luck with (by far) has been Slackware (http://www.slackware.com).
I'm currently running it (Slackware 10.1) on my AMD64 desktop, and on my Toshiba Satellite (http://store.acsestore.com/tosaa7nopsp45.html), and it works great.
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Slack 10.1. So easy to set up, so easy to use.
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And it goes well with just about any side dish. Mashed potatoes, Rice-A-Roni, Stove Top stuffening, vegetables, noodles.
You name it.
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Slices, dices, AND makes Julienne fries!
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It can saw through this aluminum can, and still slice cleanly through this ripe tomato.
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And look! It cleans up so easily!
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It can cut through armor, and still cut a tomato!
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It can cut through armor, and still cut a tomato!
Well let's not get ridiculous here.
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It can cut through armor, and still cut a tomato!
Well let's not get ridiculous here.
Warcraft 3 line, very funny game (if you look anyway).
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Is gentoo any good? I've been thinking about setting it up on my secondary hard drive. *was going to put a relevant tech question in here but decided against it*
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Never tried gentoo... though I heard it's a bitch to set up by comparison to other distros. Everything is compiled specifically for the machine on which you install it.
Seems like too much work, but if you're into that kind of thing, the end result is a very fast, stable environment.
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I use SuSe 9.1 Pro & Salckware 10
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Dual boot? Or on different b0xx3s?
EDIT: Whoops, never mind... just read your post in the setup thread.
And did you get the Salckware from http://www.salkcware.com?
;)
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Dual boot? Or on different b0xx3s?
EDIT: Whoops, never mind... just read your post in the setup thread.
And did you get the Salckware from http://www.salkcware.com?
;)
:shock: OOPS
note to self..posting with dangerously low levels of caffine causes poor grammer
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note to self..posting with dangerously low levels of caffine causes poor grammer
You mean 'grammar' don't you? :lol:
In before catwritr.
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note to self..posting with dangerously low levels of caffine causes poor grammer
You mean 'grammar' don't you? :lol:
In before catwritr.
dieplzkthx.
:P
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Zing! :lol:
(http://www.guildhaven.org/images/smilies/flame.gif)
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Slack and FreeBSD have been my favs, though I have limited experience with both. =(
When I need a nix kick I use KnoppixSTD; bootable from CD, with all the nice little dark programs you may need.
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i'm going to install ubuntu on my pc soon :D
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I keep hearing about Ubuntu... but nobody has yet been able to tell me what's so great about it.
Anyone got any good clarifications on why it's suddenly so popular?
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i like the name...but other htan that i don't know anything about it....which is why i'm gonna put it on my pc and check it out....theres also kubunbu
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its official..I have been converted...I downloaded the .iso for Vector Linux (based on Slackware) and have been running it for about a week now..
this is one wicked fast OS...and this is on older hardware...
Vector Linux Officially ROCKS!!!!!
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Sweet.
Give us a review. Details, man!
What's your hardware? How was the install process? What was it like? What did you do for partitioning? What window manager are you using (if any)?
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Sweet.
Give us a review. Details, man!
What's your hardware? How was the install process? What was it like? What did you do for partitioning? What window manager are you using (if any)?
the install was very similar to Slackware yet slimmed down a bit (based off of slackware 9.1)
Partitions were from a previous install
swap - 512mb
/ - 1.5 gigs
/home 7.988 gigs
hardware I installed it on
AMD K6-2 400MHZ
256MB ram
10GB hd
Geforce2 video
SBLive Audio
CD-ROM
it comes with 3 GUIs..XFCE4, Fluxbox, & IceWM
I seem to use IceWM the most since I haven't used it before..and was very impressed with it. Vector Also doesn't have all sorts of packages installed by default..its pretty slimmed down, which is good for older hardware.
I'm still tinkering with it so I don't have alot more to add as of yet...but the overall experiance has been good
http://www.vectorlinux.com/
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I see Vector Linux still uses XFree86... that's kind of a dead end, given XFree86's incompatability with the GPL. Do they have plans to move to X.org then, like everyone else?
IceWM is nice.... out of those, I'd probably use Fluxbox, myself. I've been using KDE lately on my Slack machines, but Fluxbox is still my favourite wm.
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I see Vector Linux still uses XFree86... that's kind of a dead end, given XFree86's incompatability with the GPL. Do they have plans to move to X.org then, like everyone else?
IceWM is nice.... out of those, I'd probably use Fluxbox, myself. I've been using KDE lately on my Slack machines, but Fluxbox is still my favourite wm.
I probably will upgrade to X.org eventually...I don't do a whole lot of graphics anyway, so the switch isn't that important to me..as far as if Vector will...I have no clue yet...would be nice..makes less work for me.
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Installing Slackware as I type this. Wish me luck with my first adventure in Linux!
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Woo!
Well if you run into any problems, do let us know. Though I suspect you'll probably have an easier time than you are anticipating. Slackware has always been the easiest distro for me to set up and use.
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I'm just worried about drivers.
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Alrighty, here's my first problem so far.
No Operating System.
Supposedly the install is done and everything, but I get a message that the machine can't find an OS.
Any idea what I can do to remedy this?
I chose to skip Lilo or something similar, if that helps anything.
Edit: I am going to reinstall, and do the Lilo thing. Let's see what happens.
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Lilo can be a bitch. It took me a couple tries with Lilo setup before I got it to run properly.
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Any tips? It hasn't reached the point where I need to set it up yet, it's still installing.
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Lilo is your boot loader. Let it set up automatically.
Do you have a floppy drive installed? For whatever reason, Lilo freaked out over the fact that I didn't have one hooked up.
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I don't, I say to hell with that-which-must-always-fail-when-there-is-an-important-assignment-and-then-I-as-the-resident-techie-must-explain-to-the-crying-junior-that-floppies-are-really-really-bad.
What a name.
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Ok it works...but I can't get the GUI up.
How would I go about this?
I think I have blackbox or something close to that, fusebox, I don't know.
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Once you get to where you can type commands, type: startkde or startx or startgnome. These will launch your gui's.
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Ok it works...but I can't get the GUI up.
How would I go about this?
I think I have blackbox or something close to that, fusebox, I don't know.
have you configured X yet?
commands to get into the X Configuration tool differ from distro to distro & X.org to Xfree86.
what Distro are you installing?
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If he just chose the "full" install, he probably shouldn't have to do anything special to configure X unless he wants a goofy resolution or has a really oddball vid card.
Crystalmonkey, Slackware by default starts in runlevel 3, i.e., it's a command-line distro. Don't be scared of that, it's actually a good thing if you like to bounce back and forth between GUIs easily without having to play around with restarting X-windows.
Once you're done installing, log in as root and the first thing you should do is this:
Type adduser and hit enter.
Answer the questions that come up and make a userid for yourself to use that's not "root". You shouldn't be logged into a linux box as "root" unless you have to.
After that, as inverticle mentioned, to fire up X just type "startx" at the command line after you log in as the new user you created with the "adduser" command.
If you picked fluxbox as your default GUI, there's a little bit of a learning curve, but if you've gotten this far, you're probably okay. Fluxbox is really simple, just a little tricky at first. I've used it a lot though, and catwritr is pretty familiar with Blackbox (which is almost exactly the same thing), so if you have any questions about how to do stuff in it, I'm sure one of us will be able to help.
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I am by no means a Linux super user so I tend to like the distro's that hold your hand a little more. Suse was definitly a favourite with my last version being 9.2 Pro. But I didn't like dropping the $90. So my new favourite is Mandrake 10.2. Right now I am running their 2005 special edition. It's almost identical to Suse in it's ease of use and features and is absolutely free, (as many distros are). And I tend to be a KDE fan. I love 3.3. When I get better aquainted with the Linux Kernel, file system and scripting capabilities I will venture off to other distros.
By the way, I like Slackware 10.1 as well. But still prefer Mandrake right now.
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I'm posting right now from DSL. I've got it on my thumb drive. It's quite usefull and just plain neat! I love being able to go any where and on practically anybody's computer and plug my little Sandisk in and boot right into my Linux.
By the way, while downloading the files for DSL, I noticed one of the servers was 'thegeekery'. :D
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Alright, going to work on getting it going.
I had heard that you shouldn't log onto root, but I didn't know how to create a new user. I thought it might be something like "adduser Username Password"
Woot, it's starting X. Yay!
And it was Fluxbox I think, because this is a very gimp computer and I heard KDE and Gnome weren't going to be nice on it.
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Ok...I got X to work, I've fidled around with different window options.
How the hell do I shut it down? (From the console I mean)
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Ctrl + Alt + Del is the simplest way.
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Won't work.
I used halt.
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I don't shutdown. Well, on my desktop machine, anyway. It's up all the time.
But when I do:
> su
> <enter root password>
> shutdown -h now
And that does it.
BTW, if I want to reboot, I type "shutdown -r now" instead of "-h".
Also, be sure to check out Fluxbox.org (http://www.fluxbox.org). They have excellent documentation there and lots of great themes for Fluxbox that are pretty easy to tweak if you are into that kind of thing. The great thing about Blackbox and Fluxbox is that everything is done with simple, straightforward text files, so editing your menu and other options is as easy as firing up a text editor and editing away.
inverticle, isn't Damn Small cool? I keep that in my utility kit in case I need a fast Linux live CD. The hard drive install is pretty slick, too.
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Demosthenes, I love it! Just for fun, might sound corny, but I will completely unhook the hard drive on one of my desktops and then boot up DSL from my thumb drive. It's just really nice how it's completely independant from the hard drive. I want to build a small computer that's completly memory based. No hard drive, cd-rom or floppy. Set it up wireless and do network installs if necessary. Just a hobby type idea. It might not have any real practical point to it. I just think it would be neat. :D
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Actually, it occurred to me to leave a hard drive in a machine just for storage, but boot DSL or some other live distro from CD or a USB drive.
That way you could still store documents and files and such, but don't have to worry about an OS partition or anything.
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Of course your way makes much more since and still exhibits the simplicity that I'm going for. I just like the idea of pure memory. The whole no moving parts thing. And you could still store documents. The main prolbem is that the price of space goes from about $.75 a gig to about $75 a gig. :shock:
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I've been messing around with a bunch of distros over the lase week or so on my desktop and laptop. And I have found a new favourite. It's Ubuntu and Kubuntu, depending on you gui preference. I have KDE on my laptop and Gnome on my desktop. The main thing I was looking for, other than a clean and efficient distro, was one that would work with my integrated wireless without any modifications. And also one that is based on the 2.6 kernel. And other than SUSE 9.2/9.3 which cost money, K/Ubuntu was the only other one. And it was so quick and easy to install. I really like it!