Being a computer tech I am starting to get more questions about Linux. I do not know this OS and feel it is time I learned it. Of the 1 time I am asked if I know MAC I had been asked 10 times about Linux. So I go and look it up only to find out there are many versions of it. The price is right. So I am wanting to know which Linux to d/l and install. Can it be set up as a dual boot with XP? I guess I could install it on its own HD and just change boot order when I want to use it. With that said If a HD is formatted for Linux can I also put XP files on it? I am sure it will not take long to learn. Check out my system specs in sig to see if my Hardware will work with Linux. How much different from UNIX (I dont know this OS either) is Linux? Thanks, -Del I have made an attempt to post this earlier but either something went wrong on my end or Afterdawn went down. The problem Happened right when I clicked post then the dreaded file not found error. I made sure the first attempt did not take before making this post. So, if I overlooked it and this ended up being a double post then you know the reason.
Hi Del, I'm a complete Newb at Linux, so I may not be of any help here Choosing a Linux Distro can be a tough choice. I have tried about 4 maybe 5 different ones. My favourites have been Mandrake and Suse. Now, I didn't like these over the others becasue they were functionally better, the reason I preferred them was my GFX Card. I play quite a lot of games on my PC and thought I would take a bash at Linux, but rather than switching between XP and Linux, I was going to seriously try to make Linux my primary OS. I have an nVidia card and installing the drivers was a nightmare, but finally I got Suse (9.2) I think to work with it. I took it off because I needed my HDD space back The way I partitioned was a 20gig section off my main drive and left the rest for windows. Most of the distros I have tried will automatically partition the free space into the Linux file system for you. XP will not see this file system!! As far as I know it is based on unix, but the only time it feels unixy (<< nice word) is when you use the shell, kinda like a dos prompt. Your hardware will be fine for Linux and theres even 64bit versons for a lot of them too. Looking around the Linux forums, there seems to be people who struggle getting ATI drivers to work satisfactorily, but as always there are plenty who say its an easy job too. If you have a slight interest as I do, I say get one or two distros downloaded (the first may not be for you) and give it a go. Learn it, all its tricks, how to install programs ect, how to troubleshoot and then........teach me ) Have fun Del. Cheers.
I'd go with Fedora Core 3, and im not sure about games, you might just want to set up a dual boot so you can use windows and linux. P.S. If you are concerned about hardware problems you might think about trying a VMWare trial for a whiel wiht a linux on it to see how you like linux, but for vmware, i reccommend you have at least 512 MB of RAM.
@Auslander The only games I tried were ones that had linux versions, Quake 3 mods, Enemy territory, Americas Army and Unreal games. A friend of mine used Winex for emulation and got Steam working so he could play CounterStrike, but that's all I can tell you. Cheers.
looks like until there's an easy way to play the games on Linux, i'm going to remain an XP guy, lol. thanks, dmw
@Auslander yep me too, it was the main thing that always made me go back to MS. @Daemon404 Totally agree on the dual-boot, thats what I did, but it's a bit of a pain to be using Linux for internet or e-mails and then decide you want to play a game and have to reboot, then finish playing and reboot again for Linux. That was the thing on every distro I tried that made me stop using it. I'll have another go soon, I always do lol. Cheers guys.
to me, dual booting isn't worth it. plus, think of the stress that restarting constantly can put on your rig. meh, not for me right now.
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.
Ok this is getting helpfull. I see there is a debate on multi booting. I am only having a 35 second boot after post with XP Pro on the top listed machine. From what I hear Linux will boot faster. So what I am getting at is that the boot times are very fast so that would not be a bother. Now instead of making a Dual boot I was thinking of throwing in this SATA I have, laying arround doing nothing, and makeing it a Linux only HD. Then when I want to switch from XP to Linux I change boot order in BIOS or F-8 in post. Select the HD with Linux and get a Linux only boot with no XP files on it. Just to see. I will research the 2 mentioned Distros to see what is being said about them. Thanks -Del
it's just that you'd get more familiarity from Linux if it's up and running all the time. You'll find what works best for you. Plus it's designed like a mini Unix, ie to be up and running as opposed to Microsoft's "something's crashed so can you reboot to see if that fixes it please" attitude!. (saying that my home Windows machines have always been fairly good to me and i've been using nearly all versions since the 3.11 days) I'm no geek (well a mini geek!) but when i first built a Linux machine at work about 3yrs or more yrs ago, i went to local PC world, bought the first thing i saw - Mandrake 8.1 (boss wanted a boxed version instead of the downloaded version as it was quicker and they wanted it in Production asap). Anyway, i chucked it on on old Compaq P3 800 (corporate desktop) and it had an Oracle database on there for our Call centre in Production. The machine had a consecutive uptime (ie not single outage) of 18months before we stopped using it.
Perhaps the easiest way to play around with Linux is to use Knoppix. It boots and runs from CD without touching your existing Windows installation. You can get it at http://www.knoppix.net/ Some things run a little slower since they have to load from CD instead of the hard drive but it is a good way to try it out. It is based on a Debian distibution. As far as other distros go, Mandrake, or Mandriva as it is now known, is probably the most newbie friendly coming from a Windows environment. Red Hat isn't bad but a bit more of a learning curve than Mandrake in my opinion. Another alternative is Free BSD. It is derived from Berkely Unix, the branch that was split off ATT in the 70s. I find it even more stable than linux and it can run most linux programs as well with the compatibility libraries. Linux is still not ready for the average user yet. For example, I went to upgrade to the newest version of KDE a while back. It took hours. It required new QT libraries in order to install and run. So I download the code for QT and try to compile the binaries. Wrong version of GC++, so had to update it as well. This is called dependency hell, and is still a big problem in linux. One program depends on another program which has to have a particular version in order to run. You can easily get into a vicious circle and it is one of the major causes of frustration for new users.
@Xian - nice point, i forgot to mention Knoppix, i've played with a few version of that, and similar distros. Knoppix was my fave, i found it the most stable and useful one myself. I used FreeBSD way, way before my Unix-employed days and it was very easy to understand. I even got as far as recompiling the kernel to miss out things i didn't need. But at the time i didn't have any actual use for Linux-type OS'es after installing them, so gave up on it. Not sure if i mentioned it in previous replies above, but i find there's far too much messing to do in Linux than in Solaris for instance. Maybe that's because stuff like Solaris is big money so is super stable and supported (and i rarely ever have to mess with any aspects of it once installed, whereas the Linuxes of the world are more homegrown and more messing is required. Just my opinion though.. My bosses answer to that was "well you'll have to support it then!" - lol!
Hi Del, I too am a nooobie to Linux. Just switched over to Xandros 3.0 Deluxe, a Debian type of Linux. It works similar to WinXP as far as the KDE Desktop is concerned. Xandros is a little pricey at $80.00 but so far it runs just fine. Seems just as stable as I expected Linux to be. Here is what Xandros has to say: Xandros Desktop OS Version 3 Deluxe Edition - www.xandros.com Xandros Desktop OS version 3 is the ideal Linux distribution if you're migrating from Microsoft Windows. It's an intuitive graphical environment that works right out of the box and offers unrivaled compatibility with Microsoft Windows. Xandros Desktop OS assures rock-solid stability and security, along with the freedom that an open environment provides. Many years ago, I first started on UNIX, then switched to DOS, then to Windows, and now to Linux.
when you say "unrivaled compatibility with Microsoft Windows," are you referring only to networking, or to MS programs as well?
that'll surely be networking as running MS programs in the Linux environment is usually done thru Wine, and that's for all Linuxes, not just Xandros...
I would just stick to Windows 98 or XP cause there campalibilty is better than linux and also there are less bugs just makes life easier
