Give me your reccomended Linux distro choice:

Monkey34

Monkey34

Supreme [H]ardness
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Apr 11, 2003
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I'm a complete Linux noob, but willing to try something new. Any chance I can get your choices based on ease of use, and minimal system reqirements ? I've got a couple of older boxes to play with, and want to dive in. ;)
I've got a celeron 667/192mb ram box I'm gonna use. I've also got a pentium 200/128mb ram box that runs win98se/MS office 2000. It would be nice to see some Linux choices for THAT one.
 
hold old? if you have a decent sized hd install suse( yast uses some space), is great for linux rookies, thats what I learned on. ( i am still a rookie at linux ) mandrake , redhat ( fedora ) are good distros for you to try.
u_DR_K13
 
Ubuntu, it's finally everything I wanted in a distro. Polish, ease of use, everything just works, based on rock-solid Debian, bleeding edge software, repositories with tons of apps to pick and choose from, you can update your entire system (without touching the command line), the CD isn't full of programs you don't need, etc etc.

This is the first respectable desktop Linux I've seen.
 
The best way to learn is to use it, and distros like SuSE and Mandrake immerse the user in a colourful gui environment and don't really give you a clue on what's going on.

Slackware and Gentoo are great distros, but require a bit of research. The documentation is all in front of you if you know where to look, especially for Gentoo.

Try out some LiveCD Distros as well, like Knoppix :)
 
hold old?
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I've got a couple pentium 200 boxes (128 + 192 mb ram), and a celeron 667/256mb box.
I think the pentiums have like 2 gig hhd's, and the celeron has a 10 gig.
Try out some LiveCD Distros as well, like Knoppix
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Thanks. I noticed on the Suse website, you can do a liveCD on this one too......might as well try both. Does'nt Suse require more resourses than some others?

On another related note, will I need to download a web browser/office app/etc.seperately? Alot of these OS' are just the OS right?
 
Also:
Read:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=567412

And in there my post says:
Hi:

Being somewhat new to Linux I have found SuSE 9.1 to be a very good starting point. I use the Command line prompt more than anything and I feel that I am learning about the OS. Though, I suppose I am not in comparsion to what other people are saying. However, you must realize from a new persons perspective to Linux, diving right into compiling kernels and madly learning command prompts can be a bit overwhelming. I have found that SuSE 9.1 offers the best mix of GUI and Command Line Interface for a new person like myself. Where the Command Line fails, the GUI can be helpful (YaST for RPMs) and the where the GUI fails (Installing programs i.e. Make/Make Install) the command line takes the day.

However, I also do not see myself diving into the OS any further than SuSE offers. For, at this point, I see no need to learn about the OS in detail nor do I have any reason to. Being a Native Windows user, making this change has been easy to do with SuSE.

All in all SuSE for me, offers the best mix of an easy transition from a Windows based user to a on-and-off Linux user. If there is one thing that I 'love' about SuSE was the extremely easy install. Though windows has certainly come a long way from Windows 95 installing it always seems scary at first. You never know what might go wrong. Though I had no clue what to expect from SuSE, I was pleased when it simply recognized, installed all my Hardware and booted up nicely.

If there is one thing I 'Hate' about Linux/SuSE is upgrading hardware. For instance, according to Nvidia the new Linux Drivers add support for 6800 series, yet when YaST/YOU found them/installed them it added no support for my 6800. And currently I am very very annoyed with the Wireless drivers/installation of drivers. For the Love of god I can't get my LinkSys Wireless internet to work on SuSE.

And there you have it. My 2 Cents on SuSE 9.1 and why its working for me.
 
Sorry, was just reading throught the stickeys..........thanks for the help.
 
For the most part, linux distributions and those on livecds should have a browser and office app included.

LiveCDs are great in that you can try out a distribution before you decided to install it onto your system. If you don't like the distro on the LiveCD, then hey, you are only out a cd or 2.

Definitely try out something friendly at first, ie) SuSE, Mandrake.
 
Agreed, try a live cd first (Knoppix is one of the best ones IMO)

If you decide to install 'nix I'd suggest debian for the machines. I'm a debian fan, but its so scaleable to your hardware; you can install just what you want based on the hardware specs.

For starting out, I learned on Mandrake due to the installation process, once I got familiar, I went with Debian.

Debians advantage is also its achille's heel: You need a fast internet connection. The package installation is online. for an isolated system, you will need a more traditional cd-based package. The advantage to debian is that it resolves dependancies and installs stuff automagically.

I like it, but its not the best to start with.
 
Isn't there an entire thread on what everyone's favorite distro is?
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Yea, I was reading it, but I also had asked about min system requirements too....which I cant find. IE: I went to the Mandrake site, DL'd the maual, searched site,and cant find it.
 
Monkey34 said:
Yea, I was reading it, but I also had asked about min system requirements too....which I cant find. IE: I went to the Mandrake site, DL'd the maual, searched site,and cant find it.
Click to expand...

Looking at your specs, most distro's will work on it. Some might be a wee bit slower than others, but hey :p Its the price you pay for not upgrading hardware ;)
 
Looking at your specs, most distro's will work on it. Some might be a wee bit slower than others, but hey Its the price you pay for not upgrading hardware
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Yea, problem is, I dont plan on using it on this rig........I've got a celeron 667/192mb ram box I'm gonna use. I've also got a pentium 200/128mb ram box that runs win98se/MS office 2000. It would be nice to see some Linux choices for THAT one.
 
Linux will run fine on both on them, it's just with the slower one, you might want to throw out the Desktop Environment (Gnome, KDE, etc.) and just go with a standard window manager (Fluxbox, Blackbox, etc.).

This was really easy to do with Slackware.

Just download the first CD, and just do a normal install.

Sure, it pretty much just comes with Mozilla, Netscape, Gaim... and some other norms you find with other Distros... but Slackware, in my opinion, wasn't a hard Distro to use.

But, yeah, like I said, any distro will work fine. The primary concern would to save as much Memory as possible, and that can be easily accomplished by getting rid of Gnome, KDE, etc.

Mandane
 
Ehh... I guess DSL could work... but I hope you have a better go than what I did.

That stupid XVesa or whatever it was... I couldn't get the resolution... Color Depth... Etc. working properly with that thing.

I only spent like a day or two on it.. but that's crap.

Mandane
 
Mandrake would be happy on the Pentium; Mandrake's major problem is with RAM, it tends to get wiggy during installation with less than 96MB or so, but 128 is plenty. Dunno about any other distro, I'd imagine most would be fine.

bullitt: "The advantage to debian is that it resolves dependancies and installs stuff automagically."

So does virtually every other distro nowadays (certainly Mandrake, Fedora with yum, SuSE, Gentoo and all of their derivatives - in fact, the only distro I can think of that DOESN'T do this now is Slackware). It's no longer an advantage of Debian. If I were you, I'd cite range, stability and interoperability of packages as Debian's main strengths, plus its free and cross-platform nature.
 
Linspire!!!!!!!!!

BS aside, I have this live distro SimplyMEPIS, and from my experiences I'd say it's pretty nice
 
I recomend Mandrake, its more of a home PC interface where as redhat and suse are more geared toward the buisness/networking side of things
 
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