New to linux.

I

Imhotep

Gawd
Joined
Feb 12, 2014
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I'm a complete noob , but would like to try Linux.
Would appreciate links, tips and pointers. I know this forum is used by well versed Linux users, so I'm asking at the right place. I would like something that will have a multi GPU support for mining.

Thanks in advance !
 
I'm a noob also, as I type this answer on a Linux Mint 18.2 x64 laptop that I installed back in March of this year. It was a spare laptop, a Lenovo T510, so I decided to try Linux. I decided in Mint 18.1, then upgraded to 18.2, as most said it was the best for those coming from Windows. The Linux Mint forum is probably one of the better forums for obtaining support. What is surprising to me is how fast it boots to the desktop. I don't have Wine installed, which lets you run Window apps. I don't have any AV installed, but I do have the firewall enabled. Mint comes with FireFox as the default browser, but I have Ublock Orgin, Lastpass, and adblocker untimate installed.
The only way to get familiar with it is to do what I did. Find a spare ring and install it.
 
The multi-GPU support will depend on your motherboard.

As for learning a distribution, as Executioner said, you just need to start using a distro. Mint is very beginner friendly, Zorin or Elementary (While not as functional as other distros, IMO) are also very beginner friendly. Zorin looks a lot like windows, Elementary looks a lot like OSX.

Google will be your friend as you learn.
 
Executioner said:
I'm a noob also, as I type this answer on a Linux Mint 18.2 x64 laptop that I installed back in March of this year. It was a spare laptop, a Lenovo T510, so I decided to try Linux. I decided in Mint 18.1, then upgraded to 18.2, as most said it was the best for those coming from Windows. The Linux Mint forum is probably one of the better forums for obtaining support. What is surprising to me is how fast it boots to the desktop. I don't have Wine installed, which lets you run Window apps. I don't have any AV installed, but I do have the firewall enabled. Mint comes with FireFox as the default browser, but I have Ublock Orgin, Lastpass, and adblocker untimate installed.
The only way to get familiar with it is to do what I did. Find a spare ring and install it.
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Mint is always a good option as a first time distro. (btw you should be able to install Chrome if your prefer, Chromium the open source chrome is in all distro packages at this point and you can easily add googles chrome if you prefer. About the only thing you may want to know if you choose Chromium over chrome is to also install a package called chromium-widevine it will allow you to use DRM stream sites such as netflix)

The different Ubuntu flavors are also popular do some reading there.

Arch based distros may be a good option for down the road. (do some research on it as I don't mine and haven't really looked into it myself). A distro using an arch base has access to the AUR which may be useful for your mining goals. Again do some research on that I don't have experience with crypt stuffs.
If you decide to look at arch as a base Manjaro and Antergos are booth solid new user distros. (although I agree if you need support the mint forums are going to be more friendly in general... its not that arch people are not, but they do tend to be long term linux users and will treat you on that level)
 
Arch is great, but I would not recommend it to a linux nooby. It will make them never want to use linux lol. Once you understand what you are doing in the terminal, then switch to arch and really learn about linux.
 
tacohunter52 said:
Arch is great, but I would not recommend it to a linux nooby. It will make them never want to use linux lol. Once you understand what you are doing in the terminal, then switch to arch and really learn about linux.
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Manjaro is pretty new user friendly.... antergos perhaps is a bit more standard arch. Still they have easy to use installers and will install with non-free drivers which is nice.

Still your point is taken. lol

I would look to Mint first ya.... from their I was simply pointing out that arch and the AUR may have some upside for him down the road.
 
The first thing you need to do is understand that this is all very new and alien to you and you will probably stuff something up. When you do, keep your cool, don't automatically assume the OS is at fault simply because it does not behave exactly like Windows and ask for help in a friendly, non attacking manner.

Second of all, if you want to install Linux Nvidia drivers, don't follow Nvidia's .sh method as outlined on their website, ask for assistance.

Enjoy your ride!
 
For a beginner I would recommend Ubuntu Mate. It's stable and has good support. For some reason I've never liked Mint.

For mining I suggest mining the latest thing: Bellcoin. Unlike other cryptocurrencies this one is backed by it's weight in taco's.
 
B00nie said:
For a beginner I would recommend Ubuntu Mate. It's stable and has good support. For some reason I've never liked Mint.
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I came back to Linux on Mint Cinnamon. It was good, but it does have a couple of annoying issues that are hard to rectify completely.
 
Try Ubuntu or one of it's forks and boot off a live usb install. From there, you can see which one you prefer and expand out. Just remember, enjoy all computing experiences and do not let yourself get into a this is better than that type of stuff, it just makes it not as much fun. (I usually just run Ubuntu 16.04 in a virtual and it is very fast but, that is just me.)
 
Imhotep said:
Thank you for timely replies. The hardware is all based around intel x58 chipset and various X and L Xeons all 6 core parts. All of them running windows 7 at the moment. I have some free time lately , so Linux seems like a cool challenge.
What do you guys think about this. http://www.cryptobadger.com/2017/04/build-ethereum-mining-rig-linux/ it seems like a pretty good guide at first glance.
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The x58 chipset is one of my favourites, still powerful to this day with an affordable price tag. I run an X5675 myself, used to be dual X5675's, but I've removed the second CPU daughtercard and haven't noticed any real difference relating to anything I specifically do so I'm leaving it out for the time being.

However, if your mining a second CPU may be useful.
 
Pick a distro - any distro really to get started, although one of the bigger ones will have a lot more documentation and support available. I'd recommend Mint/Fedora/Ubuntu, but it really doesn't matter that much. You can always try other ones once you get your feet wet and get a feel for what you like/dislike. Distros that have LiveCD's are awesome - you can run them from the install media to get a feel for it, before you dedicate a hard drive/partition to installing.

Linux can be installed as a Virtual Machine - meaing you can run it on top of Windows/OSX/whatever. It's really easy with free tools like VMWare Player or VirtualBox. That lets you run Linux, and still have Windows/OSX running to fall back on - at the same time. Which is a lot easier when your learning than dual booting back and forth each time you need to.

Don't be afraid of the command line. The commands do have a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, are invaluable, and for the most part will work with ~any~ version of Linux and even Unix in general.

And, as was said before, Google is your best friend (or Bing or whatever you favorite search engine happens to be).
 
I would just start trying out distros on a Live CD to see which one you like. Everyone has different tastes. As for the mining I don't mine myself so I can't help much there. Some basic pointers I would give is to use propreitary drivers for Nvidia GPUs and the open source ones for AMD GPUs.
 
Brian_B said:
Pick a distro - any distro really to get started, although one of the bigger ones will have a lot more documentation and support available. I'd recommend Mint/Fedora/Ubuntu, but it really doesn't matter that much. You can always try other ones once you get your feet wet and get a feel for what you like/dislike. Distros that have LiveCD's are awesome - you can run them from the install media to get a feel for it, before you dedicate a hard drive/partition to installing.

Linux can be installed as a Virtual Machine - meaing you can run it on top of Windows/OSX/whatever. It's really easy with free tools like VMWare Player or VirtualBox. That lets you run Linux, and still have Windows/OSX running to fall back on - at the same time. Which is a lot easier when your learning than dual booting back and forth each time you need to.

Don't be afraid of the command line. The commands do have a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, are invaluable, and for the most part will work with ~any~ version of Linux and even Unix in general.

And, as was said before, Google is your best friend (or Bing or whatever you favorite search engine happens to be).
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Good advice but I wouldn't run linux on a windows host. That's ass backwards completely. It's like building a bunker on quicksand.
 
B00nie said:
Good advice but I wouldn't run linux on a windows host. That's ass backwards completely. It's like building a bunker on quicksand.
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I agree that VMs are not a good way to get a feel of the OS. I've tried to do that and really hated the experience each and every time just because the performance I was getting out of the VM was a far cry from what it would be on bare hardware. Even running a live CD/DVD was a huge difference and I'd recommend that route at first. Just mess around with some things using the live CD/DVD of different distros and find something that you like which you can then do a normal install with.
 
SmokeRngs said:
I agree that VMs are not a good way to get a feel of the OS. I've tried to do that and really hated the experience each and every time just because the performance I was getting out of the VM was a far cry from what it would be on bare hardware. Even running a live CD/DVD was a huge difference and I'd recommend that route at first. Just mess around with some things using the live CD/DVD of different distros and find something that you like which you can then do a normal install with.
Click to expand...

That depends on many factors such as does your host machine support VT-d/x extensions and they're enabled. A VM can get very close to bare metal performance (at least on linux).
 
I think running vms to get a feel for linux distros is fine, as long as you realize graphical performance is going to most likely be terrible. That is assuming you are using a linux distro with a GUI.
 
/dev/null said:
I think running vms to get a feel for linux distros is fine, as long as you realize graphical performance is going to most likely be terrible. That is assuming you are using a linux distro with a GUI.
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Actually, graphical performance is actually quite good in a VM, as long as you are just doing general stuff. :)
 
ManofGod said:
Actually, graphical performance is actually quite good in a VM, as long as you are just doing general stuff. :)
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I think that highly depends on your VM Host software (vmare, kvm, xen, virtualbox, etc...), resolutions, if the desktop is 3d accelerated (and your vm support host supports that or falls back to software rendering....) etc.
 
/dev/null said:
I think that highly depends on your VM Host software (vmare, kvm, xen, virtualbox, etc...), resolutions, if the desktop is 3d accelerated (and your vm support host supports that or falls back to software rendering....) etc.
Click to expand...

For general desktop use VMs work great. Games are tougher.
 
The reason I suggested a VM:

You can download them pre-configured and installed, you just hit Play.
You can go back and forth between Linux and Windows without a reboot.
It has no chance of accidentally messing with your boot record, your Windows install, with your current hard drive partition or files, or anything else.

I agree, if you are comfortable with Linux, that running a Linux VM on Windows is "backwards", it's not on "bare metal", and all of those other comments - they are all valid, for sure. But this is just dipping your toes in the water, it's a convenient option with some benefits.

I do like LiveCDs as well, they are another good option. They have a slightly different pro/con list to a VM - you get bare metal performance, and it's as easy as hitting play, but you have to reboot to get back to Windows, and there's a (albeit pretty small) chance of accidentally doing something to your current machine's OS install, partitions, or files.

These are just options; it really doesn't matter which you choose - if you get the bug and go down that rabbit hole, your going to go out and either dedicate your machine to it eventually, or partition/get a second drive to permanently install a distro. These are just introductions or trials, not long term solutions.
 
Something you won't hear often - all distros are basically the same. By that I mean the differences are in areas which don't matter to most normal users and definitely not to a newbie - package managers, the base, frequency to updates, upstream servers, default DE etc.

So base your choice on what is the most popular distro with the most active support community for casuals and beginners, and rule out expert/exotic distros. There's a new one on distrowatch every 4.87 seconds, I'd never recommend that site to a new user.

I'd say make a few bootable iso's of Linux Mint, Ubuntu and boot from them, then spend a few hours doing what you do most - browse web, edit documents, check mail, and OS specific tasks such as checking settings, connect to wifi, update software. There are a ton of guides on the web and youtube videos to guide people. At the end you'll have a much better idea what you like or don't, and can even try some of the more advanced distros.
 
VM people need to remember that they need the kernel guest drivers to properly manage the host virtual hardware. Just FYI.
 
MrCrispy said:
So base your choice on what is the most popular distro with the most active support community for casuals and beginners, and rule out expert/exotic distros. There's a new one on distrowatch every 4.87 seconds, I'd never recommend that site to a new user.
Click to expand...

Totally this! Good advice. (y)
 
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