ATTN: All LINUX Gurus...You're Expertise is needed here!!

i'm not a guru but i used to dabble a fair old bit (mostly with Mandrake). i did a big Linux reply a while back so will paste it in ere.... hang on a bit...

 

finally found the thread i was after - http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/192843

snippet from there -


i've used a few, but prefer Mandrake (heard it's now called Mandriva). Dead easy to setup/maintain, really nice.
It's very good for fun stuff , ie you can find loads of great stuff, like from the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front), can also get Doom to work on it etc.

i find RedHat to be a tad corporate for my liking, hence why we use it at work. I have a second machine at work, it's had Mandrake 8 onwards thru til 10.1 so far for a few years now.
I've tried alsorts, like Solaris 8 and 9 for Intel, they're amazing, but not much funstuff, very corporate again. (i even had 3 spare intel PCs at work, all running different distros, but didn't use them all enough). So now i just got Mandrake, and rarely mess with it, other than installing half a gig of updates every week or 2. Once i build a box, get the update patch stuff sorted, nice terminals sessions setup for doing work stuff, i run out of things to play with, as then the machine becomes a work tool. I still prefer XP for ease of use. If i didn't do Unix all day at work maybe i'd want to do more Linux!

I didn't use Fedora, got a bit fedup messing with so many different distributions after a while. (I use Solaris 8 and 9 on big Sun & Fujitu servers for a living).

A guy i work with is Linux crazy, and has just finished installing Gentoo on an old 8CPU Sun server. He was itching to get Gentoo on a huge 20CPU Enterprise server, and was gutted when we dismantled it for parts for other servers.

(Gentoo is amazing stuff, just a little involved for me (i'm a bit goldfish memory so don't always remember the 1000s of command line switches in any Distro quickly enough). I'm gonna get him show me how it all hangs together when i got time. I hear Gentoo is a real Linux "man's" distro as you compile the entire thing from source) - so not what you're after!.

I guess i just feel more at home with Windows and Solaris. Our work would love to go Grid computing one day and have loads of Blade servers or whatever and distribute the workload that way (instead of big expensive Sun servers) or Linux clusters etc (i have maintained a Solaris Cluster in the past). If we were to go Grid i'd have more to get my teeth into than just building a mchine and using it.

Dual booting, while it works brilliantly, is pointless though as you have to keep rebooting. You can set them up to access Windows partitions etc and other way round when you're using Windows.

Good thing about Linux is most of 'em run really well on older hardware.

 

you're welcome, glad it helped. I had been Unix Admin (using Solaris) for a year or two (self taught i might add so if i can learn Unix/Linus anyone can lol) when one day my boss said he had an Oracle database they were gonna setup, but wanted to put it on Linux (which our firm hadn't used before, just Windows & Solaris). (i'd experimented with FreeBSD some years before i got into Solaris for a career but had no need to actually use it for anything so didn't progress it). Anyway, the boss sent me out to buy Linux, any Linux, so i went to PC World and bought the flashiest box on the shelf, it was Mandrake 8.0 or 8.1. i installed it didn't really do anything clever with it, didn't have time as boss wanted it in Production ASAP, we had the Oracle database chucked on top of it and it ran for literally 400 odd days nonstop in Production. In fact we even replaced our big Sun boxes and physically shoehorned the newer Sun kit in the computer room and this Linux machine was in the way so we just moved this Linux machine, desk it was sat on etc, and all without shutting it down and it kept running (no reason, just lazyness). It ran without one single hitch (on an old Compaq P3 800 with i think 384MB of ram) for those 400 odd days until the day the database was no longer needed.

Since then i tried loads of different distributions/flavours, then eventually we tried out Red Hat and settled on that for any corporate uses. I even had 3 Linux pc's on my desk as well as my normal work pc, but i only ever really 'used' one at a time so stuck to Mandrake. I still have Mandrake as my 2nd work PC on a Compaq P3 800 but don't mess with it anymore, it's just a tool now. (I'd love to have a PC with Solaris on it but as i have so many proper Solaris servers at my fingertips i've no real need. As mentioned in previous post one of my colleagues is really into Linux with a passion and has Gentoo'd a multi-processor Sun server - now that's geek stuff!

[blatant copy/paste to explain Solaris, it's explained a little better than i would have!]

Solaris is a multitasking, multiprocessing operating system and distributed computing environment for Sun's SPARC computers from SunSoft. It provides an enterprise-wide UNIX environment that can manage up to 40,000 nodes from one central station. Solaris is known for its robustness and scalability, which is expected in UNIX-based
SMP systems. An x86 version of Solaris is available that can also run applications written for Sun's Interactive UNIX.

[my version to explain] - Solaris is Sun's version of Unix that runs on Sparc machines (very large and quite small), but also on Intel machines. You know what, i've got brain fade, and i don't think i've ever thought about whether you can run linux on AMD chips (you can on Opterons though i think).



There are loads of 'live' cd's you can download that run the whole of a Linux distro straight off CD, some even write any config files off USB sticks. Live cd's ive used are Knoppix, Mandrake move etc etc. - this is a fantastic way to play with Linux, but then so is installing/configuring/fighting with 'em. Try out Knoppix, it's top stuff - it's amazing to be able to reboot a work pc, use Knoppix to do games, or whatever you want to (it'll even network real easily), then when you're done, reboot the pc and it's back to a boring work pc.

My boss would love to go Linux in a big way one day but it all depends on if our Billing system (we're a Telecoms firm so Billing is our lifeblood) ie ever supported in 'grid' systems on Linux, ie bog standard PC's running Linux clusters. For now we are still running Solaris on big Sun servers though we're hopeing to move to
big Fujitsu servers that run Solaris code exactly the same way that Sun servers do. So far we've been quoted 2 million pounds to do that which we haven't got so we gotta rethink but it'll still be Solaris for some time to come. So until such time i don't mess too much anyway, but i'm a bit of a geek i s'pose so would like to do the Gentoo thing just to see why it's considered "a man's Unix"

Anyway, it's late and i'm probably rambling so this reply may well be a tad disjointed by now and i've gone into Solaris overload, but basically Linux is just Unix and as time goes on, compaines are trying to make Linux more user-friendly but i still think it's a long way off yet, hence why i only used Mandrake at home for a while. if i just want stuff to work without faffing for ages i love Windows (or Solaris for that matter!) cus Linux requires a lot of faffing.


Maybe tomorrow i can be more coherent as i'm retiring for the night...

 

No worries, I'll do what I can. Most detailed things in linux I never remember off top of head so whenever I have problems I usually use google groups to get to alt.os.linux.mandrake (I think that's the one). Then I send myself emails with the specifics. I find linux too faffy as I said before. I find proper unix a lot better and for some reason easier to remember the gazillion of specifics

One thing you'll notice very quickly about linux is there are far too many real geeky people who defend linux to the death and are far too up their own wazoo's to help without being condescending (here's the perfect example and one reason why i only look for the info i need from Linux google groups and don't participate - http://groups.google.com/group/alt....992/d5725d2b7e87dfcf?hl=en#d5725d2b7e87dfcf). I rarely come across that in the solaris world. Funny that

I'm just glad Afterdawn isn't like that, stream after stream of 'pi** off wintroll' and other such insults yet there's infinitely less help given to actual problems. Maybe it's cus a lot of those guys use Newsreaders and are able to filter out the crap instead of accessing via google groups. I tried the newsreader thing but because i don't frequent the groups very often now, the newsreader idea just doesn't work for me anymore.

Do as much as you can via command line from the get go, its by far the best way to learn/retain knowledge..

Have a look thru google groups for your 2monitor question and I'll check the thread in the morning

 

i only found out this week why Mandrake is now known as Mandriva -

.
Mandriva has since acquired Lycoris, a US maker of user-friendly desktop Linux distributions. This is probably why www.mandrakesoft.com et al don't work anymore..

Need more info re the dual monitors..


fantastic site for confguring the updates, every now and then (once a week or so i go manually looking for updates via mandrakeuppdate or whatever it's called. if there are no new updates for ages it usually means the defined update sites no longer work - this site is excellent and easy for finding new ones) - http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/

other good links (haven't visited most of these for ages but just checked they're all still working/up to date for you -

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&group=alt.os.linux.mandrake
http://distrowatch.com - very good site
http://linuxtracker.org - haven't used this yet as anything torrent-related is banned at work
http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-lin-soft-en/table.shtml - very good albeit 2yrs old
http://www.pclinuxonline.com/
http://osdir.com/
http://linuxtoday.com/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/index.php/