A few n00b questions

[Harry Kuhman]

...Why on Earth isn't there a board that would decide which is best for each segment of users? After all, we have "the most beautiful women in the world", we have the "Oscars" for movies, Emmy Awards, MTV Awards and so on...but no one knows which Linux is best?....

Many people know whick Linux is best, just like many people know which religion is best.

[harken]

You're fast! You have a point there! But is it so hard to tell the people: THIS is best for begginers, THIS lacks something, THIS is best for advanced users, etc.? All I get is use THIS 'cause I like it, use THIS 'cause on my PC it works...
Come on, people, get to a consense! Some beginners in Linux might (and I think some already did) give up in their effort of entering the Linux world...which would be a pitty.

[CrashedAgain]

I think I'll go with green1's suggestion: I have somewhere in the house an older HDD (10 GB) which I hope it's still working. If so, I'll try several versions of Linux and...what will be will be!
Yet firebyrd10 put up a serious problem. Indeed, I see that Debian has 7 cds. If I think that I've spent three days downloading 1 iso (Knoppix), well, 7 isos would put my patiente to a challenge. Another way to do it would be buying the CDs from my local vendor. Yet I'm not decided with what should I go first. I hear Debian is great but it lacks a user-friendly installer and it's not designed for beginners; Mandrake is said to be good for beginners and has a good update system but it's not so powerful; SuSE would be "so and so" (some say it s*cks); RedHat seems to be nice yet I heard it has some problems regarding hardware support; Slackware is, I hear, definitely not for beginners, etc.

Why on Earth isn't there a board that would decide which is best for each segment of users? After all, we have "the most beautiful women in the world", we have the "Oscars" for movies, Emmy Awards, MTV Awards and so on...but no one knows which Linux is best?

And right now I'm also quite busy to afford myself spending 1-2 weeks for each verison (I think this would be the minimum amount of time in order to decide if you keep it or not).



But I see that here (and in many other places) are persons willing to help out the beginners...I hope there will be other suggestions as well.
Thanks to all of you who already gave their best to "enlight" a noob. Keep it up! (I think I will be the founder of the above mentioned board ).

Debian has 7 CD's but only the first 3 are necessary; the rest are extra applications which you can get off the net as your need them. and your comment about Debian is accurate. Mandrke is an easy install & will autoconfigure for your hardware but in a month or two you will want to upgrade to the latest version of KDE or something & will have a devil of a time. Been there done that, in my case Mandrake 9.2 & wanted to upgrade to KDE 3.2. Tried for a month to compile from source, finally someone smarter than me posted rpm's so got it installed but then Mandrake 10 came out so no more rpm's for Mandrake 9.xx ever. With Mandrake you must have version specific rpm's; with Debian a .deb is a .deb is a .deb. Haven't tried SuSe, but being an rpm based distro I can virutally guarantee it will be nowhere near as convenient as Debian.
Apt is so good 'they' are now trying to adapt it for rpm's but the adaptation lacks 'finesse'...for instance if you want Kpat (Kde's solitaire game) you have to install the whole kdegames package.

Harry Kuhman: Try a Kanotix HD install.

Gotta go..I'm at work, boss is calling!

[harken]

So far I've managed to install succesfully Knoppix on a 2nd HD, keeping XP on the 1st one and having LILO as dual-booter...it works fine. And I've also narrowed my list to just a few *nix flavors: Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, RedHat (I've also heard something nice about Ubuntu).
Any suggestions?

[firebyrd10]

I think I'll go with green1's suggestion: I have somewhere in the house an older HDD (10 GB) which I hope it's still working. If so, I'll try several versions of Linux and...what will be will be!
Yet firebyrd10 put up a serious problem. Indeed, I see that Debian has 7 cds. If I think that I've spent three days downloading 1 iso (Knoppix), well, 7 isos would put my patiente to a challenge. Another way to do it would be buying the CDs from my local vendor. Yet I'm not decided with what should I go first. I hear Debian is great but it lacks a user-friendly installer and it's not designed for beginners; Mandrake is said to be good for beginners and has a good update system but it's not so powerful; SuSE would be "so and so" (some say it s*cks); RedHat seems to be nice yet I heard it has some problems regarding hardware support; Slackware is, I hear, definitely not for beginners, etc.

Why on Earth isn't there a board that would decide which is best for each segment of users? After all, we have "the most beautiful women in the world", we have the "Oscars" for movies, Emmy Awards, MTV Awards and so on...but no one knows which Linux is best?

And right now I'm also quite busy to afford myself spending 1-2 weeks for each verison (I think this would be the minimum amount of time in order to decide if you keep it or not).

But I see that here (and in many other places) are persons willing to help out the beginners...I hope there will be other suggestions as well.
Thanks to all of you who already gave their best to "enlight" a noob. Keep it up! (I think I will be the founder of the above mentioned board ).

The netinstall might be better for you.

You download and burn an initial 8 meg iso that boots the system.
The cd then downloads what it need will would save alot of download time. Of course the modem or netowrk connection has to work with linux.

Total download? I'd say about 300 megs with GUI, (downloads both Gnome and kde)

http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dis...mages/netboot/
Just get the mini.iso
and even though it comes with a paritioner, use qtparted to shrink your ntfs if needed.

[bfree]

You do not need to download even 3 cds for debian. You can download one, and that could be a netboot cd (about 30M afair), a cd with just the base system (about 120M) or the normal first cd (650M or 700M). I'd generally go for the second option, as that way you can use it to install a working base system without a network connection. That all being said from the sounds of it straight debian may not be the best initial choice, I'd look at Ubuntu first.

Also I have no idea why a Radeon 9200 based card could have problems, this is pretty much the best possible chipset for Linux if you do not want to use closed/binary video drivers. As for the suggestion that NVidia provide documentation and ATI don't, I think the situation is far more complex then that but the bottom line is neither supply any information (afaik) about the 3d sides of their cards and both now supply binary drivers for their cards. So I guess your video problem is slightly more complex ( and presumably specific to the Asus card). Perhaps you will need to use some cheatcodes to force it to use the correct X setup for your card.

[green1]

harken,

It's good to see that you've installed something.
You say you want concise answers. Easier said than done, you'll figure that out after you've played around a while, but here goes. This is tuff for me because I'm a distro slut.

DamnSmallLinux

DamnSmallLinux (DSL) is only 50MB and runs Live on CD, or on USB pendrive, or on CF card, or embedded in Windows, or embedded in Linux, or on hard drive, or..... (i installed it to a digital camera and use the camera for taking pictures AND booting DSL)

Knoppix

I have set up Knoppix for young people (pre-teen as well as teenagers) as an alternative to windows. They like it, i love it.

I'm a two timer, DSL and Knoppix. I can't live with just one, but if I had to, DSL is the one.

[harken]

Thanks Firebyrd10, bfree and green1!
Green1, you say about DSL and Knoppix. While I'm not an experienced Linux user I can't contradict you yet I can't help myself thinking the "old-fashioned" way: if it's small, it might not offer you what something bigger can (after all, you can't compare a Mini Morris with a Lexus, even if each one is good-looking; I really like the Minis btw).
So far Debian has been recommended to me by several persons in this forum so I think I'll give it a shot (of course, first I'll play with Knoppix so I can accommodate with Linux).
Yet, at my local Debian ftp mirror there are 2 directories:
-/debian-cd/images/3.0_r4/i386/ which contains 7 isos named debian-30r4-i386-binaryX, where X ranges from 1 to 7 and 2 isos named debian-update;
-/debian/dists/ - here are several other directories among which: Debian3.0r4, sarge, sid, stable, woody. They all have the same structure: /contrib,/main,/non-free. Hoping it's common sense, I followed the path:
debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/20041118/images/netboot. But from here it gets weird: there are only a few gzipped files and a few txt files; only one 8M iso called mini.

Now, should I get the first iso from the 7 ones mentioned first or should I go with the mini? Or I'd better get the CD set from the local vendor (all the 7 CDs are around 6 euro)?

Oh, and the video card isn't much of a problem...after all the desktop looks quite fine in 1024x768/85Hz. And for video applications (when I have time) I have the XP. BTW, I can alter the resolution and the refresh rate but I haven't found the way to modify the color-depth...anyone?

[bfree]

So far Debian has been recommended to me by several persons in this forum so I think I'll give it a shot (of course, first I'll play with Knoppix so I can accommodate with Linux).
Yet, at my local Debian ftp mirror there are 2 directories:
-/debian-cd/images/3.0_r4/i386/ which contains 7 isos named debian-30r4-i386-binaryX, where X ranges from 1 to 7 and 2 isos named debian-update;
-/debian/dists/ - here are several other directories among which: Debian3.0r4, sarge, sid, stable, woody. They all have the same structure: /contrib,/main,/non-free. Hoping it's common sense, I followed the path:
debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/20041118/images/netboot. But from here it gets weird: there are only a few gzipped files and a few txt files; only one 8M iso called mini.

Now, should I get the first iso from the 7 ones mentioned first or should I go with the mini? Or I'd better get the CD set from the local vendor (all the 7 CDs are around 6 euro)?

The 7 cd set is the current debian stable release called woody. You probably don't really want debian stable, it is quite old and the next release was expected before now. The next release is called sarge and is also (currently) known as testing. Then there is the third version, unstable, otherwise known as sid (the kid from toy story who broke all the toys).

What you most probably want to download is an iso image from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ which is currently the second release candidate preview for the new installer which is making it's debut in sarge. Check the errata on the linked page to see if anything might impact you (note the warning about windows partitions and installing with the 2.6 kernel all the others are non x86 problems or non-issues). Then you probably want to just grab the netinst image, though you have the option to grab the first cd or as many as you want (there are 15 cds for the next release and that's not bloat, it's choices and also the splitting out of non-us and contrib to seperate cds adds one or two). The netinst cd is enough, if you are likely to install it a few times (reinstalling or on other machines) then perhaps it's worth grabbing cd1 if you don't have a fast network connection (from a netinst cd to a desktop is probably going to one to a few hundred MB of downloading, I'm not sure how much you will save with cd1 though I'm sure it will be significant and the contents of the cds is mainly ordered by popularity).

I wouldn't bother with the local vendors discs unless they have sarge/testing or sid/unstable.

[harken]

I'll think on it, bfree, yet I'm not sure 100% whether to go with Debian or something else. I'm also considering MDK and RedHat.
What do you think?