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

Right, it's about time I got round to setting up a more "politically correct" system on my home pc. I'll still retain my winXP partition 'cause I know how it works and I need it for running various games and programmes, but having recently freed up some space on my harddrive, I reckon I could make it a linux-based partition, just to see what it's like.

However, I need to know what I need...

a) Which Linux distribution can you recommend?
-as this is strictly freeware, I think RedHat and SuSE are out of the question, but which other options are there?

b) What other software do I need?
-I'm thinking OpenOffice and Mozilla, but apart from that? What do you prefer using?

c) What about non-English versions?
-I have no problem using interfaces written in English, but if there are equally efficient Danish versions, that would of couse be preferrable.



in advance

cheers
~Bistro

Redhat does have a community based free version called Fedora. Debian is free, and probably the most 'politically correct' one of the lot (or at least used to be with all the software being open source). However it is Slackware that is my fave. A bit more work required than the others to get up and running, but it was my first and you always remember your first

Most distro's will have all the software you could want, and stuff on top of that too. Hopefully slightly helpful, but prolly not Until later...
BCNU - Crescent

Debian is, from what I have seen, a kinda expert mode distro, you really need to know whats what for setup.
SUSE used to, not sure if it still does, supply the CD ISO images for free if you wanna download it. The pay for option is to get the CDs, the extra software, the manuals etc.

You could look at BSD as well if you were so inclined.

I must admit I havnae played with Debian yet. All downloaded and ready to burn, just havn't got round to doing it Until later....
BCNU - Crescent

Most of the big 'for sale' distros have iso images available for download which contain the free stuff.
It's been a while since I last looked at Debian so I'm not sure what it's install is like but as it has been said it's the most philosophically pure of the big distros.
From a link at the linux documentation project http://www.tldp.org/links/nenglish.html I found http://www.linuxbog.dk/ which is in Danish. Both Gnome and KDE have internationalisation support and projects working on it and I assume the other big projects (Mozilla, OpenOffice) also do this.

Well, as a complete Debian convert, I have to say it's actually not that hard to use. The initial install is a bit of a pain, because the new installer hasn't quite been finished yet and the old one is, well, *old*. But once the core stuff is in there, it's extraordinarily easy to install new software - just about everything you could want is packaged and installable with a command like "apt-get install mozilla".

The only down-side is that Debian is very strict about what they call "stable", so if you run a "stable" or even "testing" version of Debian, you'll find a lot of it's rather out of date. You can run "unstable", though, and still use their packaging, but then it will tend to get a bit, um, unstable...

SuSE does provide free ISO images for download but I recommend Mandrake Linux any day. You get all the software you would need and more (2 office suites, 2 3d modelling programs and 20 media players or so) and the installation is very easy. Most hardware configuration is automated and it fits seamlessly alongside your existing Windows partition.

You might also want to try out some Linux distros that boot from the CD before you install one. Knoppix, MandrakeMove, SuSE Live and FeatherLinux are all examples of free downloadable versions that boot entirely from the CD.

I have to concur with BB - MDK is probably recognised as the n00b's Linux, but it works, and it's based on Red Hat (So you can use the RPM (Redhat Package Manager) files to easily install programs - a bit like apt-get, I suppose, if you already have the RPM file to hand [I'm not sure how apt-get actually works])

Currently, and since it's release, (bar a small period of time for which I was bereft of Linux) I have MDK9.1 running all the time, and for a first Linux distro, you can't go far wrong - and when/if you do, since a lot of people use it as their first 'stepping stone' to Linux, a helluva lot of people ask for help in discussion groups, fora, et al - All it takes is a quick Google of 'Mandrake Linux help ' plus whatever your problem is to sort it out.

I've heard of Knoppix and other from-cd boot options, but not tried them yet - I'm also planning on using SuSE for my next distro - but that's for another time. I've heard good things about it, but Mandrake is probably the way to go.

I've tried SuSE and there doesn't seem to be a big difference apart from a slightly smaller amount of included software. Mandrake Linux comes with 7 CDs!

Just to clarify "how apt-get actually works": it does use packages underneath (".deb" files), but it automatically retrieves them, and anything they depend on, from a given source. Ideally, this is the Debian FTP site over a nice fast Internet connection, but it can also be from one or more of the CDs.

I think the current stable version has 7 or 8 CDs, and the next one will be more like 12 - but rather niftily they put the stuff on in order of popularity, so for most people the first 2 or 3 will have everything they need, and by CD number 6 you're looking at the really obscure stuff...

Mandrake has a system similar to apt-get, for automatically fetching and installing dependencies but based on RPMs rather debian packages.

I'd agree that Mandrake's a good distribution to start with, I've been using it for a couple of years with few problems. The free download version also doesn't contain any commercial or non-free programs, as far as I know

"Mandrake Linux comes with 7 CDs!"
WOW. I'm glad I didn't burn ALL of them when I downloaded mine. I didn't know it had that many.

Yeah - there was something about Real player being excluded from the list of packages to make it a fully opensource distro. But why would anyone want to use Real Player anyway?

"To use the BBCi Radio Player?"

Wow, thanks for the advice, everyone.

Having no previous experience with neither Linux nor Unix, I think I'll go with Mandrake for now. Once I get more acquainted with it, I may want to try something more complex, but for now, I'm going for general newbie-friendliness.

I tried the Knoppix from cd version the other day, it was actually what convinced me to give Linux a go. It didn't look as daunting as I had feared, though I may never fully understand the command line...

Oh, and cheers for the link, Phil, looks like it may come in handy.


Once again, I'm indebted to the unsurpassed wisdom of the hootoo community...


cheers
~Bistro

Re: Command Line...
Don't be too scared of it. Once you learn the 'man' command (manual) you can dig yourself out of any situation.

I do pretty much everything via Konsole, the shell window in KDE, just because I can. It's all basic stuff, like...

cd /home/~~username~~/Documents/
kwrite amusing_quotes.txt

Now, considering Kwrite is a text editor, can you work out what this does?

aka,
"Once you learn the 'man' command (manual) you can dig yourself out of any situation. "

Don't you mean 'into' ?

Hah. Well. That depends on the simplicity/complexity of the command itself.

Alright. I'll rephrase.

Once you've figured out that Google has a Linux Search Engine, at http://www.google.com/linux (or simply "x query" in Opera ) into which you can submit the command plus the word 'help', to find many, many forums on the subject, which is usually the case, you can easily dig yourself out of most any situation.

*pauses for breath*

There. How's that?

Oh, and by the way, when you do get sorted with a Linux box, get it kitted out at http://www.kde-look.org - if you're going to use KDE. I've spent about 3 days now just re-customising my machine from system sounds to a plush GDM theme (Yes, there's a Gnome theme on a KDE site. )

And, once you have it all installed and working perfectly, recompile the kernal from source, that should get you thinking