Thinking Penguin, Please HELP !

[jerryhussain]

Sitting Idle for the next two days as I dont have anything else to attend to so I am desperate as I dont know how I am going to spend the rest 2 days.

Been sitting here idle now for a hour staring into the 'Bliss' wallpaper of XP. Since windows is too stale for me now, thinking of experimenting with other OS.

Searched the net and found out quite a lot flavors of Linux. I'm a complete newbie to linux so looking for the easiest and powerful flavor. Here are a few of them:

1. Yoper.
2. Mandrake.
3. SuSE.
4. Red Hat.
5. Gentoo.

Still unable to decide which one I should go for.

Please help & ofcourse suggestions from the linux gurus here,

Thanks !

Jerry Hussain

[Zippity]

1. Yoper.
2. Mandrake.
3. SuSE.
4. Red Hat.
5. Gentoo.

I'm a linux n00b, so don't take my word as gospel. Hell, I just figured out that you have to sync a USBkey to get it to work right

Yopper -- cool in that it supposedly handles all types of code packages (rpm, etc...)

Mandrake just won't die. 9.1 just came out w/ several new features -- cool tools that windows doesn't have.

SuSE -- my fav, but not very widely used here in north america -- a little dated too, unless you have the pro version.

red hat -- lotsa new users, chosen for many users new to linux. great help and support. .RPM packages couldn't be easier.

Gentoo - I have absolutely no clue.

[jerryhussain]

thanks for the info Zippity, that was quick !

[Defiant]

I wouldnt mind taking the plunge with an old celery 366 I have kicking around....LMK what you pick and if it was easy to get going.

[jerryhussain]

We can install the linux distro on another partition, isnt it ?

[dealforme]

I'm no Linux l33t but most packages out there are fairly rock solid.

Red Hat the most publically know package
Mandrake - a derivitive of Red Hat but made things better
SuSE - Zip already explained.

I'm playing with Mandrake right now and thanks to Zip I guess I'll be downloading a bunch of updates tonight to bring it up to 9.1. That's if I'm really ambicous (SP)...NOT...well maybe. :?

Other alternatives to play with is:

OpenBSD - the most secure OS right now
FreeBSD - fronted by a Calgary-ian (well at it use to be)
Solaris 9 - it's free for home users

[jerryhussain]

dealforme, your mandrake is installed in another partition isnt it ? How long does it take to install ? Also does Mandrake include all sorts of programs like for entertainment, programming, etc., ?

[Zippity]

...I'm playing with Mandrake right now and thanks to Zip I guess I'll be downloading a bunch of updates tonight to bring it up to 9.1. That's if I'm really ambicous (SP)...NOT...well maybe. :?

Other alternatives to play with is:

OpenBSD - the most secure OS right now
FreeBSD - fronted by a Calgary-ian (well at it use to be)
Solaris 9 - it's free for home users

WOOO!!!!

so long as i can add to the congestion of the web, i'm happy. Actualy, i forgot that I had the solaris DVD..hmmm... mebbe i should check it out.

Although, I beg to differ about the *BSD flavours. BSD isn't quite linux!!!! *ducks* I would've thought that SELinux would've been most secure?

[dealforme]

It was a 3 ISO disk download and it's loaded with more stuff that I'm willing to play with right now. I actually have it loaded on another drive and used WinNT boot loader to boot to it (Do a google search in how). You have to be careful of LILO it still has the 1024 sector limit (something like that, my brain is getting mushy and can't think of the right terms right now). Therefore if your planning to install on a seperate partition on your 20+GB drive that may cause some probs.

[Defiant]

How well does Linux cope with crappy hardware? The PC I want to use I aquired from a friend and its got a POS PC Chips motherboard in it(and its an AT with the most screwed up connection scheme I have ever seen).

[dealforme]

How well does Linux cope with crappy hardware? The PC I want to use I aquired from a friend and its got a POS PC Chips motherboard in it(and its an AT with the most screwed up connection scheme I have ever seen).

You can check the hardware compatibility FAQs but I think Linux will work on most things. You're talking about an OS that will work from two floppies. :shock:

ya ya, I know about DOS and it's single disk. :roll:

[Zippity]

It was a 3 ISO disk download and it's loaded with more stuff that I'm willing to play with right now. I actually have it loaded on another drive and used WinNT boot loader to boot to it (Do a google search in how). You have to be careful of LILO it still has the 1024 sector limit (something like that, my brain is getting mushy and can't think of the right terms right now). Therefore if your planning to install on a seperate partition on your 20+GB drive that may cause some probs.

gawd, i wish that someone had told me that 2 years ago.... i spent like 4 days booting off a floppy trying to figure out WHY it wouldn't load.

linux loads on damn near anything. its just less convenient to install, but most of the new distros have a bunch of extra crap with them.

http://www.toms.net/rb/

[Bunch]

You may want to try out Lycoris, it's a Windows clone.

[bob.sherunkel]

dealforme, your mandrake is installed in another partition isnt it ? How long does it take to install ? Also does Mandrake include all sorts of programs like for entertainment, programming, etc., ?

If you want to try it without committing a hard disk or partition, why not try Knoppix? It is an ISO you can boot off of CD and play around with ...

ISO: (1 CD)
http://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/unix/linux/...03-01-20-EN.iso

Home Page:
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Penguin Bob.

[siriuskao]

Sitting Idle for the next two days as I dont have anything else to attend to so I am desperate as I dont know how I am going to spend the rest 2 days.

Been sitting here idle now for a hour staring into the 'Bliss' wallpaper of XP. Since windows is too stale for me now, thinking of experimenting with other OS.  

Searched the net and found out quite a lot flavors of Linux. I'm a complete newbie to linux so looking for the easiest and powerful flavor. Here are a few of them:

1. Yoper.
2. Mandrake.
3. SuSE.
4. Red Hat.
5. Gentoo.

Still unable to decide which one I should go for.  

Please help & ofcourse suggestions from the linux gurus here,

Thanks !

Jerry Hussain

If you want to learn linux, try gentoo redhat and ignore SuSE/Mandrake..etc(Never used Yopper)

Gentoo will be hard to install for a newbie, but it's a good learning experience. Redhat is very easy to install and most company out there uses Redhat so might as well get familiar with redhat-specific commands

Mandrake/SuSE/Lycoris has simplified install process, all you need to do is click NEXT->NEXT->DONE type of installation.

So I guess the main question you want to ask yourself is do you want to learn how linux works and use it or just want to use it?

there are many other interesting distros, you can look at
www.distrowatch.com
or have questions during installation? ask at
www.linuxquestions.org