Linux

Fresh Water Fighters · Tue Jul 11, 2006 1:53 pm

I have been thinking about installing Linux on my computer for quite a while.
I just don't know which one to install as there are so many different versions.

Which one is the best one for a home user (me) who just wants to mess around with it.
It has to be free, as I am almost broke. (Whats new?)
Any thoughts?

Post by **windhound** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 3:04 pm

it depends on your hardware which is best
the 3D accel drives for my laptop's card (ATI Mobility radeon 9600) arent quite working for me w/ fedora, but work great in ubuntu (better than in windows). ubuntu's raid drivers arent quite up to scratch though. it'll run on the raid, but wont show properly the other drives in the raid. given that fedora is based off redhat, which is one of the more used linux-server distros, it should have decent raid support.. will try later
ubuntu also setup my scanner and wirelesscard automagically

Most of the differences center around package management. how it installs software

Fedora uses yum
SuSe uses yast
Debian-base, inc. Ubuntu uses apt-get
Slackware uses tarballs (I guess)
Gentoo uses portage

all of thoes are completly free and all the software is completely free (mp3 player, video player, dvd player, openoffice (like msoffice), browser, email reader, graphics program, etc) some of which you pay for under windows unless you get a version of the *nix app.. openoffice, gimp, gaim are availible for windows as are others

good starters are ubuntu, fedora, and suse
ubuntu has a strong userbase and any question you have can be answered quickly on their forum.. its also shiny and built for usability
fedora is redhat. so you have strong app support, most redhat rpms will work in fedora
suse is novell and has a nice control panel (yast) Beatles and I think Devari are/were useing SuSe, so either can give better info, as I havnt tried it (I use both fedora and ubuntu)

http://www.ubuntu.com
http://fedora.redhat.com
http://www.opensuse.org

edit:mandrake?
does anyone use it anymore? it had a pretty good start, got some attention, but seems to have died away.. mandriva anyways

Post by **The Beatles** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 3:31 pm

I use SUSE, so does Devari currently, and while I am only speaking for myself (and a limited circle of IRL acquaintances, one of which has run it since version 3.0), I can say that in terms of polish it quite stands out among all the Linux distros. I suggest you install SUSE 10.0:
http://opensuse.org/

(Note, use the Evaluation version, and don't get 10.1, as it isn't stable yet.)

Post by **windhound** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 3:37 pm

?
http://en.opensuse.org/Download

they're on 10.2 alpha beatles, and they list 10.1 as stable..

Post by **The Beatles** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 6:41 pm

They may list it as stable, but it isn't, trust Devari.

Post by **Devari** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 7:38 pm

Package management on 10.1 is an absolute nightmare.

Fresh Water Fighters · Wed Jul 12, 2006 11:44 am

Thanks, but it seams that http://opensuse.org/ is only offering version 10.1, because 10.0 was no where to be found.

Floppy_Drive · Post by **Floppy_Drive** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 2:19 pm

Suse is nice if it works with your video card.(mine didn't work) Ubuntu is very, very nice. I would _not_ use Mandriva/Mandrake I've tried it and it was very buggy. You might want to try this test. It will give you a list of distributions that it thinks you'll like. If you want to learn about Linux you might want to try Slackware. I'd only use that if you really want to learn though. It's a text based setup, and it's hard to find Slackware packages. One warning about Ubuntu I wouldn't use the liveCD installer. It hasn't worked on any of my computers.

Post by **windhound** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 3:53 pm

ubuntu livecd installer worked fine on my IBM T-42 Thinkpad (~2 years old) and my IBM Netfinity 5100 (~6-7 years old)

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... /10.0/iso/
the mirrors almost always have the old version still on it, just look at the url and chop where needed.. (ie, http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... suse/i386/ )

I wouldnt bother with slackware or gentoo for your first linux distro, as they just arnt as easy. gentoo takes three days to compile itself, ubuntu installs in under 20 min

Post by **The Beatles** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 4:37 pm

Ubuntu isn't bad, but a few packages are broken and wireless support is dodgy. SUSE outshines it in both, which is why I recommend it. You can find the 10.0 DVD here:

ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/suse/i386/10.0 ... 386-GM.iso

Just burn it to a DVD, stick it in your DVD-drive, make sure you can boot from optical media, and restart your computer. (The process is ditto for other Linux distributions.)

Post by **windhound** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 5:54 pm

my Netfinity refuses to boot off DVDs

(it also refuses to boot off hdds larger than 32gigs, and its firmware is up to date)
ubuntu installs off a single cd, which is nice. it doesnt have the sheer amount of packages that other distros put in, but its enough for a working system... and the rest of the packages are in the repos

and yeah. ubuntu isnt perfect. I was messing with the gnome-panel yesterday, rebooted, and everything froze. took me a little while to figgure out the problem, as I thought it might be my xorg.conf settings. but then I removed (renamed) the panel, rebooted, and it was fine. *shrug* removed the panel and its settings file, reinstalled, and everything worked again, with the panel set back to default. just an oddity

wireless has worked fine for me, much better than fedora's.. and I can play ut2004 again

fedora broke the 3D accel for my laptop's card, as it worked fine in core 3 and early core 4.. an update broke it and to my knowledge its never been fixxed

curious though, which ubuntu packages did you find broken?

Post by **The Beatles** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 10:23 pm

I don't remember. I think I was trying to install XFCE, which was in a Debian repo, so I added those and got a lot of conflicts, then I removed them and tried manually. Eventually, I succeeded but the file manager wouldn't install. So maybe it wasn't the Ubuntu packages but the interoperability with Debian. But if that's the case then some of the appeal (zillions of packages) is gone.

Fresh Water Fighters · Thu Jul 13, 2006 2:14 pm

The Beatles wrote: Ubuntu isn't bad, but a few packages are broken and wireless support is dodgy. SUSE outshines it in both, which is why I recommend it. You can find the 10.0 DVD here:

ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/suse/i386/10.0 ... 386-GM.iso

Just burn it to a DVD, stick it in your DVD-drive, make sure you can boot from optical media, and restart your computer. (The process is ditto for other Linux distributions.)

I don't have a DVD player let alone a burner.

*laughs*
I can't afford them and I have to pay for any upgrades to my computer myself, and I will only have it for another year then after I graduate I hope to get another computer (I can't take this one to New Zealand

), so I see no point in spending too much on this one.

Post by **windhound** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 3:49 pm

you can get a DVD burner off newegg for ~$36, but thats still a little much for a computer you're plannin' on droppin' anyhow

I've used quite a few debian packages and they'ved worked fine..

Xubuntu is now availible, and the packages are in the repos if you want to install it alongside Ubuntu or Kubuntu.. but yeah

SuSe also comes on 5 cds
Fedora comes on 5 cds
Ubuntu comes on one cd :*laughs*:

Fresh Water Fighters · Sat Jul 15, 2006 11:57 am

I downloaded SUSE's 5 CDs and have burnt them to CDs, are there any tips you can give me about installing?

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