Linux

[bencallis]

Hi I am thinking of running my spare pc on linux . The specs are p3 700mhz 128mb ram 20gb hardrive. Which version do you recomend? I have been recomended ubunta. I am after something quite easy to use and nice to look at. Thanks

[craig]

I am running Ubuntu at the moment and its great, very easy for new users to install and use.
Why dont you try the live cd first to see if you like it ?

BTW - It has a hideous brown theme, just dont let that put you off.

[bencallis]

I am running Ubuntu at the moment and its great, very easy for new users to install and use.
Why dont you try the live cd first to see if you like it ?

BTW - It has a hideous brown theme, just dont let that put you off.

Have done and do like it , was wondering if there is any better though. saw one that looked very sleek it has a blue desktop taskbar at the bottom , does anyone know which version this is :wtf: Thanks

[craig]

Are you talking about a different theme for Gnome or a different desktop enviroment, KDE ?

[jakeee]

I think Debian is the best distro at the moment but I'd recommend Ubuntu for new users. It has the best parts of Debian and is slightly easier.

[craig]

Ubuntu is based on Debian.

[Mr_Odwin]

Vector Linux is aimed at older systems so it should fly with those specs.

[Schpickles]

Have done and do like it , was wondering if there is any better though. saw one that looked very sleek it has a blue desktop taskbar at the bottom , does anyone know which version this is :wtf: Thanks
Gentoo is a lovely distro too (mmmm.... portage).

Thing with Linux is that its totally customisable bencallis, so you'll be able to set it up with whichever window manager and whatever skin and configuration for that window manager you choose. Linux is only the system core stuff, with X11 on top of that doing basic windowing functionality, and then shells like KDE, GNOME etc on top of that.

I always loved Enlightenment (http://www.enlightenment.org) although there are many that are nice. Painfully slowly, enlightenment is becoming a window shell like KDE and GNOME, but for now its a window manager that runs on top of these.

Hope this is of help

[Charlie]

SuSe 10.0 is coming out in a week or so I think. Maybe try one of the older Suse's to see what you think of it?

[Schpickles]

Yeah SuSE's pretty sound. Great multi-language support.

[Grebe]

I have ran 'small linux' on a 700mhz laptop with a 2gb hd. Well worth it.


Slackware i am running atm although I dual boot and often find myself using windows over linux. I should really start getting back into it. Gentoo is also another good distro. Debian is ok in parts.

[bencallis]

http://beta.mandriva.com/en is that any good?

Can you tell me the good ponts and bad point about linux. It seems very good.

[Grebe]

Good points:

awesome command line gets you more involved and gives you kudos points for being able to work a command line

supposedly more stable

gnome is awesome

better software comes with it

its free

its open source

its not microsoft

Bad points

Its harder to use/get use to

there are less application support

[Schpickles]

Good points:

awesome command line gets you more involved and gives you kudos points for being able to work a command line

supposedly more stable

gnome is awesome

better software comes with it

its free

its open source

its not microsoft

Bad points

Its harder to use/get use to

there are less application support

Yeah - what he said :)

It's a lot more stable than windows, by design. You will be more reliant on GNU/GPL/BSD software than commercial stuff (but at least it's completely free!). Another downside is that if you are a PC gamer, there's only a small subset of windows games that make the port over to Linux (quake-based and unreal-based stuff, mainly).

One thing for the "pros" column is the configurability - Linux is completely open source, as are most of the programs that run on it. This allows anyone to get hold of the source code, modify it and produce their own improvements and enhancements. As such, you'll find scores of projects out there that allow you to customise all aspects of your operating system, plus even the more core components of your OS are constantly being enhanced and upgraded. You chose when and what you upgrade. You chose your security setup, your hardware profile.

This comes at the cost of a bit of a learning curve. I've heard a lot of people here say that it's pretty difficult, and I guess coming from a Win95 onwards background, it could be a bit wierd. Growing up using DOS and AmigaOS, I personally didn't find Linux too much of a problem, as there are so many great help sites and so much documentation for the OS - much more so than for any other operating system. On the commandline, typing "man" followed by the command you are interested in will tell you all about that commandline program and how it works, for example, and projects such as The Linux Documentation Project (http://tldp.org) are real fonts of knowledge.

Stick with it, break it and fix it a few times and you'll start to get the hang of it. It took me about a month before I was compiling my own graphics drivers, installing my own window managers and so on. This sounds incredibly complex, but often is as simple as typing "./configure" "make install" on the commandline. Gentoo and others streamline the process even further by offering package managers which get all the dependency libraries as well as the library you are trying to install, when you get new software.

The only setup I've found better than linux is OSX, which I use at home, because it still gives you the power of the open source OS and commandline control, but also has a fantastic operating system on top, with some excellent software from Apple. I certainly wouldn't have thought it impossible that I might be on a Linux OS again in the future.

Hope this helps

[RoadKill]

That's not a bad system, it just doesn't have much RAM.

Both of my servers are P3 666 and they run everything just swell. (Although DC++ hashing kills things).