PCA Forums

hello all i have been fidleing arownd with my duel pIII and im to lazy to make windows work so i ventured in to the world of linux my brother has much exspierence with most OS platforms so when i told him i was going to try linux on my computer he told me about the new fedora core so i tryed that... i am a kid with to much time on his hands and wanting to try new things so if u have any sugjetions on linux OS's to try please let me know.

thank you,
Danny

Linux itself is only the kernel, the thing that makes the OS tick.
A distro adds a packet management tool, an installer and some admin tools plus thousands of programs.

- Mandrake or SuSE are some nice and n00b friendly distros, they install almost as easy as WinXP.
- Fedora is the former Redhat that's targeted at private users, not as n00b friendly as the two above.
- Debian has a very nice packager which takes care of dependencies of programs that you're installing, it has a stable tree (older program version) and anothewr one with many of the latest program versions in the test tree. You install it once and then keep updating it forever (unlike the ones above that often requires an updated distro version or even a new installation)
- Gentoo is my favourite one, it installs programs by compiling them from the source with your own preferences and it also features a packager that takes care of dependencies. It often offers all the very latest program versions for you to try when you want to risk it (they're also devided in stable and test tree). This one will keep yer busy and you probably learn more than from using the others. This is something for the more advanced user who got frustrated with the other distro for whatever reason.

Gentoo is comparable to Debian, install it once and keep updating it easily forever. The only time where you had to re-install it was when the GCC version changed from 2.95 to 3.x since those were not compatible and a recompilation of your whole system was quite troublesome back then.

There's a nice and detailed howto for the Gentoo installation and the IRC community is great but don't expect to be treated well for asking n00b stuff like "how to compile my kernel". The IRC support is meant for more special or unusual problems, you should first google, read the man pages or howto and search the forums.

My only reason to keep my Win2k desktop is games. You can make many work under Linux, especially older ones, but there're many more that don't work, especially newer ones.

Oh yeah, you could search this forum for Linux, I think I replied to a couple other threads like this and posted some more useful links to a howto page etc.

so u sugjest gentoo over the others? i dont minde complicated OS's becasue my brothere can exsplane it all to me...

If you're a beginner, you should probably stick with Mandrake. Gentoo is excellent, but depending on the spped of your machine, you could be compiling for a while, a.k.a sitting around bored while your machine is working. You could probably even go to compusa and buy a boxed Suse distro.

Hmm....
I'm looking to get a P133 box for the purpose of learning Linux. Does anyone know of an inexpensive, easy to use, GUI based version of linux? Prefferably one for REALLY old machines?

myabe something like Redhat 6.x or a bootable cd of knoppix.