Friendly Linux/Unix flavor

[funow48103]

Hi all

I?m exploring Linux/Unix as an additional operating system with winXP pro.
i just found different flavors of it! I?ve read some are more friendly than others. Suse, red hat. Mandrake, debian............ the list goes on.
i'm not planning to do anything special for now. I?ve talked to a lot of people, who recommended that I keep any flavor I choose for at least a month, and they guaranteed me that I will use Linux/Unix as my primary OS.

Please any body has any suggestion? Any recommendation?

P.S: what do they mean when they say for example i386 and i486 are not supported? Or it is optimize for i586?? What generation of processors are these??


Thank you all in advance

funow48103

 

[CTho9305]

i386 = intel 80386. They were ~16-40mhz processors. The i486s came from ~16-100mhz, and i586 is the original pentium. i686 is the Pentium Pro / Pentium 2 and higher. Unless you are using VERY old hardware, any of the 3 will run fine, but in theory, the i586 versions MIGHT be a little bit faster.

 

[Nothinman]

All unixes are friendly, they're just picky about who their friends are. SuSe, Mandrake, RedHat would all be fine to start out with, they'll ease the transition a bit because they'll probably setup most of your hardware autmagically for you. Once you get comfortable with Linux you may want to run Slackware to get your hands dirty with everything or Debian to get the ease of maintenance it provides. It's all about choice, there's so many different flavors of Linux because there's so many different types of Linux users and you just have to feel around until you find out where you belong.

As long as gaming isn't a major part of your computing day you should be able to do everything you need in Linux, you just need to take the time to get used to the system because things are completely different from Windows.

i386 is the 386, i486 is the 486, i586 is the original Pentium (up to 233Mhz) (get it, pent, 5) , i686 is Pentium II and newer AFAIK, I don't think Intel has an i786 yet. Things compiled with an higher number target normally won't run on lower numbers processors because they use features only in the target processor but they should run fine on newer processors. Basically an i686 compiled binary won't run on a 486 CPU but an i486 compiled binary will run on an i686 CPU.

 

[funow48103]

thank you for the advice.

i have one more question:

is it possible to have winXP pro, Suse and Mandrake as multiple boot on a diffrent partition??

thank you all

 

[asb002]

Yes, if you have partitions for all of them, you can boot between XP, and pretty much any OS you want.

 

[drag]

Sure it's possible, but I would bother with having BOTH Suse and Mandrake. They both are just fine, and can do everything that the other can do.

If you want to triple boot, give something like FreeBSD a try. Many people like *BSD's better because they are more standardised, and not as chaotic as Linux-based OSes can get. They don't have all the bells and whistles that you can get thru Linux, but sometimes simplier is better. The only problem is that it's a little bit more alien from windows then even linux is.

 

[Vadatajs]

For the love of god, don't use debian as your fist *nix. Not until you know how to set up X on your own any way, and even then it's waaay out of date.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Vadatajs
For the love of god, don't use debian as your fist *nix. Not until you know how to set up X on your own any way, and even then it's waaay out of date.

Debconf asks you some simple questions and from there you might need to make a couple edits to XF86Config to get it to work. A few lines at most, and nothing complex. Resolutions, refresh rates, etc etc.

And while debian is known for being a little behind everyone else in "freshness," I'd like to know exactly how you can say it's "waaay" out of date. I'm typing this on debian in firebird 0.7, for example (from an official debian package).

 

[drag]

People get confused from debian stable from default installers.

They don't realise that editing the /etc/apt/source.list and doing the "apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade" is all you need to do modernise it.

Right now I am running unstable and have the newest programs you can pretty much get from any distro. I know redhat 9 can't touch me, and I probably have a few programs newer then you'd even get from Mandrake 9.2.

In a couple months my programs will definately be newer the mandrake's. I usually get a new version of major programs with in a couple weeks of their release date.


But that realy doesn't matter a whole lot. Debian is cool so is Mandrake, so is Fedora/Redhat, and Gentoo. It eventually just comes down to personal preference. I like breaking things then figuring out how to fix them, so I use Debian unstable. For a while I was obsesive about always getting the newest features, so I used Gentoo. When I started I wanted to get a workable desktop going easily so I got Mandrake.


But I wouldn't recommend Debian for a first go, unless you were very computer savy and liked to be challenged and spend time figuring out stuff on a very steep learning curve. Most people don't have the patcience, and I don't blame them. I don't.

 

[GhettoFob]

A little off topic, but is apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade equivalent to gentoo's emerge sync and emerge -u world? I think gentoo's compiling from source is neat and all but it seems like a waste of time, especially for the bigger apps..

 

[drag]

Pretty much:

apt-get update

is to update the package lists for the repositories that you have in your /etc/apt/source.list

apt-get upgrade

is to upgrade the packages.

apt-get dist-upgrade

is a more serious upgrade, and is generally used when you want to change from one Debian distro to another, like to go from stable to testing. Otherwise some packages won't get upgraded thru normal upgrade.

Otherthings are,

dselect is a curses-based package menu, serves as the front end to apt-get which is a front end to dpkg. You can search thru it buy hitting the "/" button and typing out the name you want to look for, and then the "\" will repeat last search for the next name-match.

Also you can do:
apt-cache --search name

to find all name matches.

I like to use dselect lots of times, unless I know exactly what I want installed. It allows better controls on choosing between different dependances and other programs that may add functionality quickly.

Synaptic is a gui front end, but I prefer dselect over it.

Sometimes a bad package or aborted task will leave apt-get in a bad state and a

apt-get -f install

is usually enough to fix it.

(debian.org has very good and detailed docs that have more correct information then what I know, worth checking out if you want to use debian)

 

[RandalLovelace]

I suggest a Konnix download of Debian 9.1 Linux. (has most hardware covered)..

As for those old processors, don't worry, yours is covered by all 6.0 and newer versions.

Good Luck, and enjoy the Penquin.

 

[RandalLovelace]

New Debian is out....

 

[Kappo]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
All unixes are friendly, they're just picky about who their friends are.

LOL no wonder my stuff is constantly in need of repair!


mental note to self: stop yelling obscenities at the machine and start making kissy faces.

 

[silverpig]

Sounds similar to gentoo

emerge sync = update the portage tree (list of packages)
emerge -UD world = update everything, but only to newer versions

There's a ton of other emerge commands too, similar to what apt-get has.

 

[PolskiKrol]

If you want to get a flavor of Linux without doing dual boot I would recommend Knoppix from www.knoppix.net. This is basically a distribution that runs solely from the cdrom drive through automatic decompression. There is about 2GB of software to play around with on the cdrom iso that you would burn to cd.

 

[Nothinman]

Sounds similar to gentoo

Except without the compile times and lack of package QA.

 

[GhettoFob]

are you guys running woody or sarge?

 

[Nothinman]

I usually run sid.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Sounds similar to gentoo

Except without the compile times and lack of package QA.

The small packages take maybe 15 seconds to compile, and the larger ones are usually available in precompiled binaries as well.

 

[Nothinman]

The small packages take maybe 15 seconds to compile, and the larger ones are usually available in precompiled binaries as well.

The QA part is more important to me, I'm at the point where I don't want to have to fix things on my system unless I broke them myself and even running Debian sid breakage is extremely rare.

 

[osage]

I have not installed to a hard drive as yet, but I have been running PCLinuxOS for the last 3 days on a machine of mine, everything works the first time.......this is a boot and run from CD like Knoppix, but based on Mandrake.

site here, and a short review at Mad Penguin