find the right linux for you

after doing some looking in to linux i found this which i thought i would share with you.

it might help you make a good choice.

 

Thank you for the link. Its quite difficult for a 15 y/o too find the right Linux to run. I was gonna get Gentoo about 3 months ago, but I need more time to think.
This helped me a lot, I'm gonna go for the Mandriva. Thanks again.

 

@sinners
im 25 and i dont know which is the right linux to use so dont worry.if this thread only helps you it was worth posting.



iv spent the last few days downloading live cds to find out what works best for my rig, the currnet fav is mandriva as it made everything work stright off, but theres still a couple of others that haven't finished dling yet.

 

@ marsey99..

What a relief. Somebody with the sense to test things out before attempting to install heaps of stuff only to find it doesn't like your network hardware or something..

A few more names for you to google..

puppylinux, myahOS, dreamlinux, and for us really esoteric strange m*****... kororaa These all work well for me, or why not try FreeBSD? (culture shock time..doesn't even automagically install a desktop..lovely!)

That's my lot...outta here before I get involved.. good luck and happy hunting. You might find me on IRC at night...or if somebody is really, really nice to me I may just lurk in the linux forums again..seems like most everybody else left.

 

there is another distro that is reasonably user friendly, SUSE. i know you have had a look at it jan and i ran it for a while until i startd playing with Debian Sarge, i may go back to it if i ever get this pc of mine sorted out, triple boot(!)- XP with SUSE and Deb

 

i am very impressed with the remastered suse distro.. Most every bug has been cured now. It's just a little on the bloatware side for my liking and installs heaps of stuff most of us will never use. That's not a criticism of suse..more a general comment about taking up space with unnecessary apps and loading a lot of them at startup. We don't all have cpu cycles to burn and ram coming out of our ears. My winter project looks like a LFS project specifically for low memory p3 series machines.. Kind of like puppy, but with gnome instead of xcfe.

Suse is excellently newbie friendly, with good help forums to boot (unlike a few of the large distros I could mention) Most applications seem to be in the repositories and work first time. They seem to be further along towards a stable release of the next-gen than most.
The only reason I don't like it is basically..unfamiliarity with the packages, and I'm not keen on the menu layout with kde.. suse doesn't work well with gnome.

 

I respect people who are really good with Linux, because it's not an easy OS for someone accustomed to Windoze. Windoze withholds you certain things that Linux makes readily available. Getting "under the hood" in Windows could require an MCSE degree status of knowledge! If you are reasonably intelligent, tweaking Linux at the lowest levels is actually not difficult.

What I fail to understand is why hasn't any Linux company made a video guide, like a few DVDs worth, that describe how to use Linux in depth. If someone made such a guide, I would buy it in a heartbeat. You can buy lots of how-to Windows DVDs, but most of their OS stuff is either waaay over an average person's head, or a rehash of an average user's basic knowledge. A Linux How-To guide makes perfect sense. Someone just needs the b*lls to make one.

 

WOW..a huge post there creakster..

Just reporting that I spent most of yesterday "curing" my housemates deseased xp machine.. additional toolbars, buttons and lots of malware (as usual). Isn't there a lot of spyware on myspace pages? Nasty waste of bandwidth.....
I don't mind doing it every 2 weeks or so, never hurts to keep the hand in so to speak.. It's the biggest failing of linux.. no malware to keep us busy all day, and make us format and reinstall every 3 months.. XP really is clunky and basic isn't it..so retro as to be almost unusable..and what's with the single workspace..even slackware2 had 4 desktops... back in 94?

As for linux howto guides.. It's what the internet is full of.. linux guides, help pages and info for tweaking source code to do what you want it to.. Afterdawn isn't big enough to even deal with the basics (the beginners guide to unix runs to 4000 pages! That's just the kernal and console).
As no 2 linux machines are the same it's impossible to be more than general, and we have a culture of at least trying to solve a problem before asking for help.

http://old.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/Help/get_started/begidx.html

http://apps.carleton.ca/ccs/gen/howto/unix/unix.asp

http://library.n0i.net/linux-unix/tutorials/li-comref/

see what I mean?

 

Agreed.. It's not for everybody. BUT.. if you are at all interested in what your hardware is doing, and how things work it's the best fun (and the most annoying, stupid, hair pulling out, GRRRRR!! success satisfaction time) you can have for the price of some electric to run 5 year old hardware on.
Me.. I just like playing, and I can't wait to dig out another old 12" monitor tomorrow and get back to QNX fun..

I broke the windoze habit for my desktop..no more drm and other such garbage for me... Control is Mine!! I can do everything windoze fanboys can do..without running wine for windoze apps...without a gig of ram or a 2 gig cpu!! (though that would be nice..anybody feeling generous?) Mwahahahahaha...

To Mr Gates...you own microsoft! you do not own the internet, the film and music companies, the hardware makers (though it seems intel are in your pocket) my computer, or the electricity I use..so BUTT OUT!!

Justr a thought..huge monopolies that behave in an anti-competition way like M$ and Intel will fall apart hard one day..and then where will all the spoonfed one click wonders be?.. Yup.. Knocking on our doors begging us to teach them how to use a keyboard, and what a basic command line is.. I remember having to type "win" to start windows 3.1..not my first experience with pretty graphics on a computer..can't remember what the desktop was called, but there was a lovely Berkley unix GUI back about 82 that was multitasking and for the day really fast. The windows spun away on close..now what was it called...

 

Sounds like you may be talking about svr4. There actually where a few spunout around that time. SGI developed Irix, IBM developed AIX, and Hewlett Packard built HP/UX. Each had its own graphics and windowing system. There was also sunOS, Sun converted their SunOS into Solaris.
Sun was being hounded by players like M.I.T and OSF to move on to x-windows. Sun forced the issue with their Network File System. Then in the later 80s it all broke loose.

If you can believe it, I still have my original Big Bill's 1.01 that could only be picked up in Seattle back then.

 

Linux is a great OS, built on the greatest of them all (UNIX). Windows users are all spoonfed & naive into thinking that Bill Gate$$$ has their best intentions in mind. Only open source can be secure & free from malware/spyware & FB1 backdoors. Someday, if some terrible world event were to take place over the Internet, it would either be initiated by or against Windows computers. UNIX/Linux is just too reliable & better programmed to be compromised like Windows. After all, MACs are also Linux-based thanks to Steve Jobs

 

Now, i might be a big linux enthusiast, but i have to step in here.
In the end, linux has just as much security issues as windows.
Wanna know why?
BECAUSE PEOPLE GET LAZY.
Your setup is only as secure as you make it, and since a lot of people only do half @ssed jobs on their security, there's always a way to get in.
Not to mention there's always someone smarter than you who will find ways to break your software, or to make it do things it shouldn't *exploits, stack overflows, buffer overflows*.

And as for Steve Jobs, he's currently up there on #2 on the list of uptight MPAA and RIAA buttboys, right behind Billygoat Gates, with his DRM schemes, and his bullsh*t attitude.
Linus Torvalds FTW !

 

That's my issue exactly with the distros.. I can find out, at least a pretty close guess what OS is running on a computer connected to the internet. As the distro's all tend to set up in the same way that's a security issue for starters. I have always done things a little differentlt, but 100% security is impossible, the best you can hope for is to make things just too hard for your average script kiddie who will go and find an easier target. A determined and malicious hacker will get in eventually no matter what you do.

 

Just thought id add to this thread

Ive been looking at linux distros for a while. I never run live cds. Just dont like them which tbh is a really big mistake but hey!

Well ive been looking for ages and ages for a linux that supports well wireless internet. And i went through soo many linux distros such as:

Suse
Ubuntu
Puppy
Fedora

All of them didnt work. Thats when of thise forum someone told me about mint linux. Which is a modded ubuntu. It has an embedded programme in it called mintwifi which sorted me out straight away!

And all i can say is once youve got linux working with the internet you can kiss your windows goodbye!!

Mint linux for ever! hehe

Lecsiy

 

thank you all, for your input and advice.

i spent a couple of weeks playing with live cds (i think i have about 40 disks now) and have installed a couple of distros on an old harddrive to realy try and get my head around them (still baffles me but im getting better, i think ).

i have finaly plummed for mandriva.

thing is i now want to put my old hdd in my sons pc (xp based as its what he uses at school) as a data drive but cant format it, can anyone point me in the right direction please.

 

Installing a drive in an xp based machine. I bet you downloaded damn small linux in your travels as a live cd..

Put the spare drive in the case with a cd drive and boot..

when to get to the boot prompt type

dsl 2

and wait..
at the next prompt type

cfdisk

then follow the menu at the bottom..make one large primary partition (if it's going to be a data drive..if it's for an XP os you need really 2..one about 20 gig and all the rest as another) you will need to delete the existing linux partitions first.. format both NTFS and write changes..
Exit the program and put the drive in the xp build machine.. there you go..done with no tears and no pain.

 

i couldn't make up my mind on Linux but a weird thing happened a few days ago...
...i registered for college (again) don't ask my age!!

I'm going to buy a MAC. Right now picking out a good system, then the $100 educational discount through Apple & have it shipped to a state that doesn't have an Apple store (sales tax). I'll probably drop a little over a grand but save the $70 in sales tax. Since Mac OSX (or maybe it was 9?) going forward, the OS has been based on Steve Jobs' old company NextStep. Which of course is UNIX.
So one way or another, i'll be getting into using Linux pretty darn soon. Funny how life works sometime