A few n00b questions

**bfree** · 01-13-2005, 02:22 PM

Originally Posted by 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?

That's nearly like asking a religious fanatic which is the true god!

I think unless you are interested in running enterprise products on a supported platform RedHat is useless!

My opinions of Fedora is just from random readings from various commentaries around the place, nothing has come close to convincing me to try it out yet. I think it is far too much of a beta program at the moment to really recommend to anyone.

Mandrake ... I haven't tried it in a long time. It's popularity seems to remain and I don't notice as many inane questions bouncing around about most other distros so either lots of people try and give up or it's reasonably polished.

What about Mepis, Suse/Novell and Ubuntu (Numbers 1, 3 and 5 respectively on distrowatches page hit ranking chart)? I think I'd be considering all of them first!

My personal preferences at this stage (for an installation) would be Debian, then Kanotix or I might try Ubuntu/Mepis, then Suse/Mandrake (well ok I'd probably keep finding Debian variants to use before I even got to them).

Horses for courses though, so if you can, try a few out! And even better if you can, partition your machine so you can share a home partition between two different Linux installs, so at any time you can have your current system and try out another systems without risking your main one, if you decide you like it you can switch and then install over the old one with the next one (or upgrade) you feel like trying.

**harken** · 01-13-2005, 03:05 PM

That's nearly like asking a religious fanatic which is the true god!

I was expecting something like that

You see, at the beginning I considered about 20 versions of Linux. After a while, especially after installing Knoppix, I kept as "valid" only a few (3-4). But it seems like each and every time I decide upon one of them, I see somwhere in a post that someone says something "bad" exactly about that one. Just a few hours ago I started downloading Debian, then I read that "Debian lacks a lot of graphical applications...it is not recommended for beginners".
Ok, I switched my attention to Mandrake and again..."Mandrake is only for beginners...you cant do much with it".
SuSE is supposed to be somewhat difficult to install (someone said the installation would last abou 1 day), also for experienced users.
Mepis...haven't heard many opinios on it.
Ubuntu would look like the remaining option, yet I saw on their site that they are planning a new release every 6 months and the support for the current version would be 18 months. Ok, what after the 18 months?

Now, I'm not worried so much about the installation process...I installed hundreds of applications (not Linux, I admit)...I think I'd get through. It's just I don't have right now the time and the patiente required for such things. Maybe next month I'll have more spare time.
Untill then I want to "collect" as many data as possible on different Linux'es to have an accurate image of what would fit me best. Therefore I hope you and others will help me out. After all, I think I'm not the only one in this situation and this kind of conversation could help many people out there.

Regards, harken.

**bfree** · 01-13-2005, 04:57 PM

Originally Posted by harken

That's nearly like asking a religious fanatic which is the true god!

I was expecting something like that

Ubuntu would look like the remaining option, yet I saw on their site that they are planning a new release every 6 months and the support for the current version would be 18 months. Ok, what after the 18 months?

A complete non-issue unless you are evaluating Ubuntu for long term projects. What they are saying is that if you want to stay back on this release and not go upgrading, they'll support you for a year (or is it 18 months) after they release the next version. So you install and you like it, you should get a choice of at least 2 more versions before you _have_ to upgrade to one of them or you can always switch the system over to debian. Debian doesn't really support old versions either, except in the main way they share in common with ubuntu, the system and packages is designed from the ground up so you can upgrade your system to new releases painlessly, all they are saying is that if you hate a choice they make in a release you should have over a year to decide what you are going to do and in that time they'll even have had another release out you might prefer! I like it, though as it is quite new it remains to be seen just how well it will work in practice.

I just hope that Ubuntu are either working on serving packages or groups of packages by torrent or have quite a serious mirror network because every six months they'll be seeing 95% of their users trying to download 500M to 1G (at a guess). They'll also have all their users smiling for days at the nice new computer they get for free every 6 months.

As for your comments on the others, Debian doesn't lack anything really, it just lets you setup what you want (as oppossed to Suse's, for example, yast which does everything by default and you have to pick things out of it's hands if you want to control it some way it can't handle). It's great in that software is usually very close to the original developers default settings and important differences are usually clear in the Debian.README so you can follow generic instructions from the developers aswell as all the information relating specifically to debian which is out there.

The Mandrake for Beginners mantra seems to stick with it. I've never quite figured out why, but I have stayed clear of any non-deb distro for a good while now (bar brief periods playing with some source based distros). I like a distro I can at any time say "f*** it, it's turning debian" and then I can go and change the /etc/apt/sources.list to debians and apt-get update and then apt-get -u dist-upgrade. I'm not going to end up with a perfect debian box, and I may have to force a few packages, but I will end up with something I can take then treat as debian enough, and use debian to fixup any differences I discover that bother me. The Debian package archives are superb and provide a huge range of software all designed to work together without dependency problems, I love it.

SuSE is slow to install? Are you sure you aren't thinking of Linux From Scratch

Seriously I haven't heard that complaint before (perhaps I just don't listen in the right places) and I would not have said it was for experienced users. I would have said it was closer to Mandrake in the for Begineers stakes, but it is, or was anyway, a bit individual so you learn it's ways. As for being for experienced users ... I don't see it, but I do see experienced users using it so it is good enough for them. If only it was debian based I'd say give it a go first, but it's not so I won't.

Mepis, I've not heard too much, but generally it's been good. The good thing about it is you can boot it like a live cd to try it (in fact I think like Knoppix you always boot to the livecd to install it). I'm not too certain how good it is at working with the debian repositories though or whether it suffers any of the same potential pitfalls that installing Knoppix does.

I really wish I could say just install Knoppix but I'd install Kanotix rather then Knoppix if I was thinking that way as it gets more attention/design towards working as an installed system. The only problem, in the context here, is it is based on Debian sid/unstable which means you have to be ready to deal with what that can lead to (running lightly tested packages and possibly ending up breaking your system and having to manually downgrade and force things to repair it). Probably not for people new to Linux unless you change your apt sources to sarge after you install it, but not so many people do that so ymmv.

The important thing to remember is they are all far more alike then different (especially the debian derivatives) and there's no disaster in picking one now and deciding on something else down the road. In fact I'd repeat my recommendation to plan to expect to want to install other distros to try them. No matter what you pick, there's often features that can tempt you, sometimes they suceed, sometimes you just figure out what they did and add it to your system, sometimes they fail, everytime you make yet another choice that means you are that much more in control of deciding what software you want to run.

The choice is yours! I'd suggest they are all good and will do the job, perhaps one will make you happier then another but without living with them a bit you'll never be able to be sure. Partition and install and see where it leads you, enjoy the trip, give thanks for those who's work you are using and if you find some way you can help be generous with yourself and do it.

The only "challenge" to installing any of these Linux versions (providing Knoppix runs ok on your hardware) is partitioning/making space for it, if you have to shrink a partition just make sure you have a good backup of anything important no matter how you do it, but everyone always has good backups right. You can't just install it into your C: drive, you need to give over some of your hard disk to Linux, if you can do that now, I bet you will be stunned just how quick an install from cd is (if you grab a full 600M+ install cd a net install obviously will depend on bandwidth). Should be done it 15 minutes even if you do have to reread a lot of questions to be sure, to be sure. What throws people usually (imho) is making sure they are putting the installation into the right place so just make free unpartitioned space on your hard drive and use the installer to create the partitions and install there. Other then that you will generally just have to answer 4 to 12 basic questions (a password, computer name, regional settings, probably your normal username and password, where to install and where to install the boot loader). Install into the mbr (master boot record, the start of the hard disk you boot from, usually called /dev/hda in Linux) and let Linux take care of dual booting your machine (if you do it) and that should be the only other possible confusion covered!

Welcome to Linux!

Wow that's along post, hope it's worth it for someone!

**harken** · 01-13-2005, 05:37 PM

Wow, that looks like a mini-tutorial to me. Thx! Let's see: about Ubuntu I'm not sure what to say; Mandrake is one step closer to be wiped off the list; Kanotix, for the same reason you mentioned (based on debian sid) is already gone; SuSE...I heard pros/cons as in 40/60%. As for Debian, from the reviews from
http://www.linuxquestions.org/review...hp?product=139 here it turns out to be quite out-of-date and the updates are rather difficult to install for newbies. I'll have to think it over the night.

Wow that's along post, hope it's worth it for someone!

It sure is!

**green1** · 01-14-2005, 03:12 AM

Originally Posted by 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?

harken,

DSL is small. That is true. Yes, it does not come with a lot of the stuff that Knoppix does, or especially the big ones (Debian, Red Hat, etc.).
However, DSL is expandable, and this can be done very easily. I must say that DSL in it's current state on my machine can do anything I need Knoppix to do. It is different, tho, but that is what I like about it. The window manager is called Fluxbox, it's tiny and clean and easy. Not at all like KDE or GNOME. One of the reasons DSL appeals to me is that is has the best hardware detection I've ever seen. Yes, it's a dirivative of Knoppix/Debian but even those two do not compare with the isolinux or syslinux versions of DSL. I like old hardware (although I do have newer stuff) and DSL is the King of the Hill when it comes to older hardware. As long as I have my 50MB business card size CD and my pendrive with me, I'll have a full operating system that includes all the things I saved the last time I used it, no matter what PC I'm using (the library, wal-mart, microcenter, buddy's house, work, etc.) If you like the windows clone type window manager (KDE, GNOME, etc) then maybe Fluxbox isn't for you, but you could try ICE or something similar. The learning curve with DSL depends on how much you want to put into it. If you don't put much into it, it'll still do what you need it to do. But if you like to learn, then there is much to learn and DSL is a good way to learn it.
As a side note: I shy away from any distro that requires or "is better" with more than one CD. I'm of the opinion that for anything I want to do, it shouldn't take 7 CD's to do it, or a chock full DVD, otherwise I'd stay with windows.
At any rate, it's good to have another person join the Linux fray regardless of which flavor you come to live with. Welcome.

**harken** · 01-14-2005, 08:28 AM

Thanks for the greetings, green1, in the few days since I registered here, I really felt I'm welcome: many, prompt (and competent) answers. It's nice to feel that way.
As you can see (if you read all the replies so far), I considered several versions of Linux. With each day that passed, I removed them from my list one by one (while talking to you guys, I also swepped through several other forums and LUGs). So I have decided to give Debian a chance (although I understood that it might have a steep learning curve, I'm willing to "climb" it). Therefore, right now I'm downloading the iso with the Debian sarge netinst.
I'll go with Debian first because I found an older HD to use as a second one so storage space wouldn't be a problem.
Also, I will (be assured of that) try several distributions of Linux among which I won't forget to include DSL. But, each at its own time. Btw, I used Fluxbox with Knoppix and it's ok. Might not look much at the beginning but you get used to it.

Now, a question for bfree (or any of you who know the answer): after installing Debian's netinst, what should come next? An apt-get?

**firebyrd10** · 01-15-2005, 03:58 AM

After installing the base system, Debian should then ask what you want to install, it will first give you a few general catagories(Desktop, printing, file server, etc) with an option to fine tune it if you want.

**pureone** · 01-15-2005, 05:02 AM

well i thought i would chuck my 2 cents in here.

im a newbie to linux my self and have only installed it twice on my pc first distro was suse 9.1 pro . i did not like this distro that much it would of taken me months to get all the programs i wanted installed so i uninstalled it.

i first started testing out live cds a few month ago i now check www.distrowatch.com daily to see if theres any new distros so far ive downloaded about 30 or more differnt live cds tested them all for a hour or more. out of all of them the main one i like is knoppix this is because of the programs that come with it its look and auto hardware detection. the only thing that knoppix has failed me on is my sound card. i wanted to install a distro to my pc so i could just learn how to maintain a linux box, after i tested out kanotix i found that the sound card worked perfectly so after a while or reading and a few questions on the kanotix forum i went for a install everything went perfectly and im still using kanotix today i havent even booted back into windows (other then to check its still there) since i installed it. i love apt-get, and all other things linux brings and i dont think ill be moving back to windows anytime soon,

as for finding the linux distro for you it all depends on your needs and what you want to do with it.

http://kanotix.mipooh.net/viewtopic.php?t=180

**harken** · 01-15-2005, 08:08 AM

Hi Pureone! I think we "know" each other (if you're indeed the moderator from a site I know, or maybe you just borrowed the name?!). Check out the members list for my name.
Ok, currently I'm using Knoppix 3.7 installed on HD. I was thinking to switch to Kanotix, but since it is based on the unstable Debian sid I dumped this option.
Right now I just got my hands on a Debian sarge netinst iso, burned it on a CD and I'll go try install it.
BTW, nice site you got out there!

bfree, one more question. You said:

...where to install and where to install the boot loader). Install into the mbr...

When I installed Knoppix I already put LiLO into the MBR. Should I let Debian put it again?