h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Probably! I'm sure AMD won't want to neglect the server market - and in fact, the server market is probably why they want Linux to run on x86-64 in the first place.

Hi! You seem to be discussing a lot of Linux stuff in this thread, so i might as well use this one for my question.

I have never used linux, and wish to start. I plan to run it on an old Pentium PC, to see what it is like. What version do you recommend, and where do i get it?

Thanks.

Tango

Hmm, well, I'd normally recommend RedHat but on an old pentium the graphical stuff would fall over...

If nobody else can come up with anything better, have a look at http://www.linux.org/dist/ -- they probably have pretty much everything

(oh, but you may want to give Knoppix a go -- boots and runs from CD, so no effort installing it...)

Hmm, do you have a fast internet connection and a CD burner? That's by far the easiest way to get Linux...

The computer i'm using now is a Pentium 4, with 56k modem and cd-burner, the one i want to run it on has a cd-rom drive, and not internet. I was planning to dl it using this one, burn it to cd and then take it upstairs to the old one. I'll check out that link, thanks.

Tango

if you have plenty of free disk space, an interuptable ftp client, and an unmetered connection then you can download an iso image in about a week. (I know, because I have done it ).

as to which one I would recommend, I would try the low resource ones, like peanut linux, or slackware or debian and install only what you need.

failing that, find your local linux user group, and get a copy of something like redhat 6.0 or mandrake 6.2. while definately showing their age, they do let you get a feel for kde and gnome.

avoid more recent mandrake versions, as they seem to like being a bleeding edge distribution, and seem to be a bit hasty in removing support for older hardware.

good luck with the install, and don't forget we have a linux user group here on h2g2 at A458228

Sounds about right. Slackware or Debian will be quite suitable, as their base systems are both fairly light on the hardware. Of course there was a time when that spec was considered top-end, but as in other environments, the gizmos have kept up very well with computing power available. Avoid the latest versions of KDE and GNOME (3.x and 2.x respectively) as you'll probably find they don't get on very well with a machine of that spec. You'd actually be better off avoiding both of them entirely and going for something light, like WindowMaker, Blackbox or one of its derivatives (Fluxbox or Openbox), Afterstep, something like that. You may also be okay with Enlightenment 0.16.x if you don't mind losing out on some eye candy.

Have fun! Don't be afraid of breaking stuff, as it's not your main machine you can probably recover from just about anything you could do, so muck around and enjoy yourself and you'll learn a lot.

I think I'm going to install a new version on my main box, it's anoying me now, nVidia TNT Riva2 M64 Chip, Says it has suport in both SuSE and Mandrake, even when I download the nVidia Kernel and GLX, I still can't get it to work. pile'o crap in that regard, I'm going to see about Red Hat this time...

so thats SuSE, debian, Mandrake, LOAD...

-- DoctorMO --

I've always found it very easy to get the nVidia drivers working on every distro I've tried them on. Admittedly that's only Slackware and Gentoo...

Yes, in the last few hours I stumbled again onto Gentoo, and scince I'm not very partial to Red Hat as an organisation, I think I'll try that first, it looks quite in depth to install, but it's got some lovly documentation of what to do...

-- DoctorMO --

Indeed it has. All you really need is some time and bandwidth and a little attention to detail. Make sure you print out the instructions before you start!

I got all the instructions on my other computer and my palm, just incase , took me 6 hours to download the CD and compile the system into a workable OS, kernel and everything, then it took me 48 hours, basicaly all weekend to get XF86 and KDE running, it takes an AGE to compile, but the speed gain is INCREDABLE in comparison to SuSE or Mandrake fixed binaries,

plus it's all the latest cutting edge versions because it's downloaded, and installing things it easy. I Gentoo, many thanks goto your recomendations.

*wanders off to install more servers*

-- DoctorMO --

Yay!

I'm finding installing things a breez, even stuf thats not in the tree, if the source needs anything, it's normaly in the tree....

-- DoctorMO --

Yup, and actually writing an ebuild is pretty simple for anything that uses autoconf/automake for its build. Getting it to handle all the USE flags properly can be difficult, but if you're just writing it for yourself rather than to give to the community (although of course that's what you should do) that's normally not too much of a problem as you only need to implement the things you're interested in. I would recommend at least looking into ebuild writing, because then you can install pretty much anything with the benefit of Gentoo's package management and dependency checking, plus uninstallation of course!

The documentation on it's pretty good, and looking at existing ebuilds for similar types of program is usually quite enlightening too.

I've only installed two things so far without the PT, and thats CrytalSpace and FreeCraft CVS, probly not a good idea to ebuild a CVS, but I've heard CS is being added anyway.

-- DoctorMO --

There's a special eclass just for CVS ebuilds - see, for example, the recently-become-even-more-complicated enlightenment-cvs ebuild, or winex-cvs, or galeon-cvs - they basically download a snapshot tarball then CVS update it before compiling. Very clever!

There are some unofficial KDE CVS ones as well which one of my housemates uses, thankfully they're parallel-installable with KDE 3.1 because as is normal for CVS, it breaks a lot!

yea, Question: what projects are you involved with if any? do you know about sf.net ect... (i'm sure you do, just checking)

-- DoctorMO --

I'm codeveloper on Towel - http://towel.sf.net - but that's currently in stagnating mode as neither of us have much time. Hopefully in the summer we can get it fairly stable and make a release.

I've contributed some example code to gtkmm2 - http://www.gtkmm.org - which got my name on the 2.0.0 release notes I want to do more there as well, but again no time

There's some other stuff I do as well, but most of it's personal or for friends at the moment. I'm interested in GNOME hacking, and am working on a little thingy which I hope will prove useful, but that's taking me ages as well - time again! Damned university, will be happy to graduate.

Well, ok so you do less work at home, but work's no pi\xNic

I want to get involved in some projects so I can streanthen my C and/or C++ coading, it's just poor compared to my Perl/VB/Asm/Tk/Scripting ect, shame realy.

-- DoctorMO --

Nice towel project

-- DoctorMO --