OESF Portables Forum
General Forums => Off Topic forum => Topic started by: dougeeebear on November 15, 2004, 01:24:01 pm
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Since I purchased my SL-5500 a few months ago, I have become more and more interested in Linux.
I have a Gateway laptop computer 2.2ghz intel celeron processor with Windows XP Home Edition installed on one partition, and MS-DOS installed on another partition.
I have a boot manager that allows me to have multiple operating systems on my laptop, and switch between them.
I would like to install Linux in another partition, but I don't have a clue of what I should get, or where is the best place to look for it.
I will need the complete operating system, and some programs that will get me started.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks, Doug
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I'll add what others will probably second--if you want to just check it out first, a great try-before-you-buy option is Knoppix (www.knoppix.net is one good place, or head direct to the source at knopper.net (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html).
You'll get a bootable Linux CD image which will go all the way to a graphical desktop. It'll run slowly because everything has to be streamed from a compressed CD image, but it'll at least get you an idea of what you're jumping into.
You CAN install knoppix direct from the CD, but you may want to go for a prepackaged distribution that's designed a bit more for that sort of thing. And there are far too many to choose from. Higher learning curve but more educational and really good: Debian; more corporate: Redhat; a bit more hobbyist but from what I've heard a very good distribution: Gentoo; new on the block but garnering a lot of interest: Ubuntu. I could go on for a while.
I'd say, start by booting Knoppix from CD. If you're still interested, be prepared to do a lot of research... but it's great; I only boot Windows for games, and even some of those I can run under Linux.
-->VPutz
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Just let me add: I've read that aurox linux is well-suited for laptops. Can't comment on that, but thought I'd share... (My personal preference for the desktop is Gentoo, if you need more choices; it's still more hassle then Debian, but the software is much more up-do-date).
Cheers
Philipp
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Both Fedora and Suse offer good releases for laptops; I use both. Fedora can be a bit too cutting edge for server use, in my opinion, but should be fine for your laptop. The advantage of Fedora is the very pervasive apt support from FreshRPMS, DAG, Newrpms, Dries and ATrpms, which makes updating and installing new packages as easy as ipkg and a good feed. Suse, which can be a bit more stable, also has a half decent apt support in http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/ (http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/), but I find their abiltity to produce working, up to date rpms spotty at best.
There are tons of Linux distros out there. Experiment. And then there is BSD....
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I'll add a vote for Suse, I have 8.2 on one laptop, and 9.1 on another. Both installations went absolutely smoothly, with all my hardware identified and the networking setup automatically. Perhaps the biggest installation hassle was trying to decide what to install. Suse like most distributions comes with thousands of packages. I particularly like the automatic package upgrade, whereby Suse calls home when you tell it, grabs a list of updated packages, and offers to install them for you.
You can download a Live CD version of Suse 9.2 at http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/ (http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/) this will allow you try it out, and see if your hardware is compatible. Unfortunately if you like it you will have to purchase Suse. This is not as bad as it sounds, as the manuals that come with it are more than worth the price.
You mention that you have a partition manager, you may want to resize the Windows and DOS partitions before installing whatever Linux distribution that you choose.
Regards,
Clive
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Linux From Scratch (http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lfs/html/)
Gentoo Linux (http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/philosophy.xml)
DistroWatch.org (http://distrowatch.com/)
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Hey doug...
I agree with vputz and others about trying a CD based or lived CD version first.
I have looked at Knoppix, Kanotix (get these at knoppix.com and kanotix.com) and Yoper (Yoper is NOT live CD however.)
all are pleasing distros in many ways. They all recognize my hardware and have all the software that I would need. However, my trouble is with my Canon printer. I have not been able to find a suitalbe driver for it (an i850.) So while my 333 mHz celeron ran very happily with all these distros, my home setup is not ready for it yet!
God Bless
Doug
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Slackware of course! I got it to run on a cyrix 166 Itronix. Just look up Itronix on ebay and you'll see one.
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Another vote for gentoo. I use it on a 700mhz ibm a20 as well as my main desktop. gentoo is a little more work to get it going (no gui installer), but portage I find is a great way to add, remove and maintain software versions. I like slackware and freebsd on desktop, but I have not tried them on a laptop.
Linux WMs have come a long way since when I first started. I love FVWM's thumbnails and enlightenment's pager, but I mainly love fluxbox.
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Best solution = Gentoo of course
Easy way = MDK 10.1
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Hi !
It all depends... The easy way to use Linux is MEPIS . Look at :
http://www.mepis.org/ (http://www.mepis.org/)
Live CD (boot from CD) or install to the harddisk. Finds almost all HW . Java, Flash, realplayer, mplayer .... (you name it!) all configured to work right away. And apt-get works right out of the box if you still miss anything.
Simply the best !!
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Thank you for all your input.
You have given me a lot to check out.
Looks like I'm going to be busy.
I'm gonna try to see what's *free* first (if any are).
Thanks again,
Doug
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> I'm gonna try to see what's *free* first (if any are).
Heh... if you thought that was going to reduce your options, you were way wrong. I'm pretty sure all the options mentioned are free. Welcome to the world of high-quality low-cost open-source software!
-->VPutz
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If you have any problem downloading the images or can't burn your own CDs BudgetLinuxCDs (http://www.blcds.com/index.php) are worth a look.
I'd recommend Mandrake, myself, but don't get 10.0 which has a bug in the partitioning code in at least some of the publicly available versions. Get 9.2 (if its still available) or 10.1. If you do get it from BudgetLinux (or even if you don't 8^) ), you can also get all the contributed packages and updates on CD from them, too.
Most of the other mentioned distributions can be got from them ahnd probably most of them have an equivalent of the contributions disks - I just know Mandrake a little better.
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You should look at:
http://www.linux-laptop.net/ (http://www.linux-laptop.net/)
Look for examples by folks that have written how-tos for your specific hardware. There might be some points there to direct you which distro would be a good match. I use Fedora Core (http://fedora.redhat.com/) on all my equipment and have had absolutely no hardware issues since Core 2. Just downloaded Core 3 DVD via the bittorrent and will be trying that soon.
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My Vote goes to Debian Sarge. I use that and it is so stable that I think it is a mechanicaly working Operating system with steel gears etc. The packages are new enough for me.
Cheers
Sam
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If you are interested in Computer Security, then I would highly recommend Knoppix STD (http://www.knoppix-std.org/) or P.H.L.A.K. (http://www.phlak.org/) It also depends on what kind of Linux you want. Personally, I dislike Fedora Core (http://fedora.redhat.com/) and Suse (http://www.suse.com/us/), because I don't see the point in using Linux if it reminds me of a Windows clone. If I wanted user-friendly, I'd stick with either Windows or Macintosh. If you wish a very user-friendly Linux, choose one of those two, or Mandrake (http://www.linux-mandrake.com/). If you desire a more Unix-ish OS, then I would recommend Slackware (http://www.slackware.com/). Just my opinion.
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Hey guys. I've been using Slackware for I don't know how many years. Probably a good 7 or 8 now? I've had it running on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 5150, 3.2ghz) for a while now and while it does run decent, updating isn't fun. I'm thinking of switching over to Gentoo or Debian mostly because of their package management.
I've tried Swaret before and really I wasn't too impressed.
Now don't get me wrong, my servers shall always run Slackware. My personal server that sits right beside me here has ran Slackware since day 1 and forever will. I think for my laptop though I need something a little different.
Anyways, my questions.. any of you guys had experience with Gentoo at all, or Debian? Or maybe both, and could give some insight? I've had many longtime linux friends recommend Gentoo, so I'm kinda aiming towards that.
By the way, the setup is a 3.2 ghz P4 with 256 megs ram and a 40 gig hd. The current Slackware runs great, but not up to par with a 3.2 ghz processor.
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Yep, I have quite some experience with both. They're both great Here's a list of the differences that are really relevant for me:
*Compiling stuff on gentoo. You don't have to do it, especially not for the really big packages, but I don't know if everything works fine if you go binary only. With somewhat recent hardware (I have an Athlon 1800 with 512 RAM) it's not that much of a deal, so I guess you could be ok with that as well. One can also let the computer run over night when there's a bit more to compile
*Configuring things. Gentoo usually doesn't help much, you have to do it yourself. That's the idea, and I like that. Debian helps you more through configuring things (and does pretty well with that). The solutions in detail are very nice and slick in both.
*Package management. Since you mentioned it, Debian's apt still is king of the hill. Portage from gentoo is pretty nice, but it still lacks some desirable capabilities. But that doesn't hurt too much. Automatic updating is a one-liner for both and works just fine (of course, takes longer in gentoo, see above)
*Forums. I can't really tell you about Debian here, but it's very popular and you should find enough help on the web. Anyway, just wanted to mention that the gentoo forums are crowded with skilled people who'll help you out.
*Up-to-dateness. This is where gentoo shines, you can really have the most up to date software, because the package management is somewhat ports like. You can even mix some unstable software with a stable system very easily, which occasionally saved my ass. You can do that with Debian as well, but still software will eventually be a bit outdated (or more), and in my experience, mixing stable and unstable parts often results in broken things.
So, for me it's gentoo on my desktop, having the most recent software is just too cool I'd have Debian on my servers, occasionally something breaks in gentoo, but never in Debian stable.
One thing I can't tell you is about laptops, dunno if you'd be better of with another distro or so...
Hope that helps, cheers
Philipp
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Open your mind. Try the top 5 Linux distributions at least.
http://www.distrowatch.com/ (http://www.distrowatch.com/)
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I used to use slackware (aftre trying RedHat, Suse, Mandrake, and Vine). Slackware gave me a lot more control over what went onto my system than the others (Rpm hell is almost as bad as dll hell) but as you mentioned upgrading was always a pain.
Found Gentoo while browsing through a Japanese linux magazine (back at version 1.0 - when the had simple version numbers). Installed it on my machine and have never looked back.
Took me about 3 weeks to get the machine how I liked it, and then broke it in the great gcc/glib mess up and ended recompiling everything. Since then Gentoo has matured quite a lot, but it's a hands on distro. Almost too easy to stay on the bleeding edge, but has a more stable version if you prefer not to tinker too much.
I've probably learnt more about linux in the first 6 months of using Gentoo than I did in the 4 years or so before that.
Never tried debian - not sure why, but it was never a distro thay jumped out at me and said "try me" although some linux gurus I have great respect for use nothing else.
Give them both a try, hell why not try 4 or 5. It's so much easier to set linux up to multiboot than any version of windows.
Stu
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I've been using Debian since about '98 on most of my Linux boxes. The old Debian installer used to leave a lot to be desired (for a while I resorted to Knoppix to do Debian installs), but the new installer (for the "testing" distro) works quite well.
The secret to being happy with Debian is understanding the relationship between the three distros (stable, testing, unstable) and knowing which one to use. For servers I recommend "stable" with a few select backports of newer apps. Backports are new apps built against the relatively old libraries in "stable". Mixing "stable" with the other distros is generally not a good idea. It's not a big deal right after a new "stable" is released, but as "testing" marches forward, the differences can get pretty significant. The packages in "stable" are often a long way from being current, but they're usually rock solid reliable.
For desktops I recommend "testing" or "unstable". I actually run a mix of the two (mixing "testing" and "unstable" is generally pretty safe) though I've been contemplating just switching completely to "unstable". My experience has been that Debian "unstable" is more stable than the stable versions of some other distros. If you are going to mix "testing" and "unstable" make sure you understand the concept of "apt pinning" before you start adding packages from "unstable".
I've tried Gentoo and though it's quite good, it can be mighty painful (i.e. slow) to install on anything other than high end hardware since it has to build everything from source. Sure, you can get binaries of Gentoo packages, but that kind of defeates the purpose of Gentoo (having everything built optimally for your exact hardware). If you're going to install pre-built binaries, you might as well just stick with Debain.
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Well, I'm using Mandrakelinux since 2000. Between 1997 and 2000 I was using Redhat AND Debian but not as my main desktop. I was still using Windows in the first partition for many reasons.
There is no hell in rpm based distro. This is the beautiful propaganda I can see all over the Internet. If you don't want something easy to use and easy to manage then try something else. There is nothing to say. The users are the judges:
http://www.distrowatch.com/ (http://www.distrowatch.com/)
And the distrowatch.com main page classifying looks like this for years!
Saying something like "this distro is bad because it is too easy to use" is the excuse of people who just want to be the only ones to use GNU/Linux. My girlfriend runs Linux. My mother runs Linux. My friends run Linux. None use Slackware. None use Debian. And as you, they have been free to choose what they prefer.
If you want to be a poweruser, test the top five GNU/Linux distribution. And I'm not saying to install the CDs than to remove it but to install and try to read the great free electronic documentations included and ask questions on newsgroups. All your Slackware tools have a corresponding tools in other distro. For your "rpm hell", try "man urpmi" "man urpmq" "man urpmf".
Something like this could help if you don't like to read the default doc in KDE/Gnome/IceWM:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)
If that doesn't change your mind then... well... here is the power of freedom. And if you still use Slackware or anything else with GNU toolset, Linux kernel and Open Source / Free software then I'm happy.
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This is one of those topics that never really gets resolved. Like a lot of things, it all comes to personal preference.
I started out with Mandrake and I am currently running Gentoo on all of my home linux pc's / servers (4 total). I like Gentoo for the fact that it doen't try to hide anything from the users unless you tell it to. I moved away from the "user" linux flavors (Mandrake, SuSE, and RedHat/ Fedora) because as I was using it, I found that "Web Browser" wasn't necessarly the web browser I wanted (one of several things that I found irritating).
Besides, I like being a little compulsive about my setups (professional hazard). I think that is one of the strengths of the different distributions; everyone can find at least one that suits them. The only way to find out whether you like it or not is to try it. If your timetable doesn't allow for playing around, then sticking with what you know is probably the best bet (although that might apply to more than just linux).
Now on to answering the question at hand. Gentoo's portage is great. I think I read that Open Embedded was inspired by Portage. Very rarley do I want to install something that isn't in portage and even then it isn't a big deal. It may be a good idea to look at Gentoo's support forums (http://forums.gentoo.org/) to get a feel for it.
Just my $.02
--webslngr
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Hey
Thanks for all the responses; this thread is a very interesting read.
I've actually decided to try out Gentoo. I decided to do a stage 1 install as well. It seems to do the job pretty well and seems to be pretty up to date, so I'll try that out and if I'm not satisfied I'll try out Debian. If all else fails, there's always Slackware.
By the way, I didn't mean to come off as shunning all other distros. It's just I've used the others like Redhat (or Fedora or whatever they call it now), Mandrake and such and I was not liking them at all. That's why I've stuck with Slackware all these years; it's always been strong and stable and didn't include all the fluff. It has done more than I have asked for in the many years I've used it and so I stick with what works, and Slackware works very good.
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If you have any problem downloading the images or can't burn your own CDs BudgetLinuxCDs (http://www.blcds.com/index.php) are worth a look.
I just ordered Slackware from them. It is a lot cheaper than 39.99 on the Slackware website.
The comments by dz, in another thread regarding Slackware, sort of helped me decide what to try.
Thanks for the info.
Doug
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dz,
Good choice. The ease of portage to install software is only limited by the CPUs speed to compile. It can be addicting. The real trick is how to emerge the world and not break things. So far so good. I update my desktop and laptop at least once a week.
I also use slackware on one of my servers. I'm very happy with it.
Enjoy!
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I don't know how I missed the original thread. They're both on the same topic for the most part, so I merged the two.
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It should be noted that my laptop has been compiling for the past 8 hours or so.
KDE is HUGE.
I haven't used KDE or Gnome in a long time. I've been a good fan of Xfce. I figured I'd give the new versions a try. At this rate, Gnome should be finished compiling before the end of this year.
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gnome is big, but kde and openoffice are the killers
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KDE takes 12+ hours on my Athlon XP 1800+ and openoffice at least 24 hours.
If you are playing around with gentoo and have the disk space then you will want to install ccache - this will save you heaps of time if you have to recompile anything big.
Stu
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<little joke>
I'm part of the processor protection agency! I fight against people who make processors suffering for their own pleasure. Trying to compile the same source code that million of people already compiled for the same final binary result is a shame! Those poor processors have so much better thing to do.
Some of them has burnt... bored to death. You are torturers!
</little joke>
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Stubear: KDE took about 8 hours on my machine. I haven't done OpenOffice yet.
I purchased Crossover Office a while ago and so I get free upgrades. Microsoft Office XP works out of the box with that so I'll use that. I highly recommend Crossover Office for those that miss Photoshop and are in linux. I do understand that GIMP is around, but Adobe Photoshop blows GIMP away and it works flawlessy in Crossover. Same with Microsoft Office XP; both work excellent.
I use it for other things as well, but the sole reason for purchase was Adobe Photoshop.
It was money well spent.