Switching to Linux

[NuclearFusi0n]

Originally posted by: Flatline
I've always wondered how much of Debian's speed advantage comes from running it on ext2 (which was still the default for woody the last time I installed it) instead of a journaling FS; of course, there are many other reasons to run Debian than speed...

IIRC ReiserFS is slightly faster than ext2 (with notail)

Reiser4 will spank 'em all anyways.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: mtnbikerjeremiah
What is with you all?

Mandrake 9.1 is the easiest to set up and has a ton of included applications... and Wine is easy to install on it allowing for microsoft applications to be ran on it, if you decide to do so. Mandrake has a ton of support for newer devices...

MANDRAKE 9.1 is the easiest for noobs. Period.

Just to repeat Spyro - that depends. If Mandrake is cooperative with your hardware, it's smooth sailing. And in most cases, it is. But when it's not, you might as well give up unless you understand the system very well already (in which case you likely wouldn't be using Mandrake anyway). The more a distro tries to do for you, the harder it is to fix when things don't work right. That's why Slackware is the absolute easiest distro to adapt to strange hardware and other situations - it does nothing for you, so you don't have to fight the infrastructure to make things work the way you like. In most cases, I think you want a distro somewhere in the middle. Both Red Hat and Debian are excellent middle ground, IMO, though quite different in style.

 

[Panther505]

I think that the last sentence in Cleverhandle's reply is the key... Style is what is comes down to. Some people believ in JFM (Just F**king Magic) and that is how they want their system to run. Others are tweakers or have Power User needs and other distros will suit them. I spent 3 weeks trying to get Debian to install on a rather unique setup that I knew was gonna be difficult. Why? Because that is the system that I wanted to first install Debian on, the hardest so that the next 3 or 4 that I installed would be cake. I don't completely understand why debian puts some things in certain places but for the most part I can make the system do as I want it to. I don't want/need the gui tools so I use the CLI. Others want the convience or comfort of the GUI tools and Mandrake, Redhat, and SuSe will suit them.

Panther

 

[drag]

Heh! I did that too. I had a old 486 compaq server.. a old job with a SCSI hot swappable drive array.. and a EISA bus. Ancient, obscure, I had to wait 2 months for somebody to make a custom driver for it and it took me another month or so to figure out how to use it, but I got it installed! You see the EISA bus was a weird one, not to mention all the hardware was compaq propriatory.

however I am lying a bit did have redhat installed on a previous computer.. I used it for a NAT firewall/router for a DIAL-UP connection. I had it set up so that my roomates upstairs could activate the dial up proccess from their windoze 98 machine. It would also disconnect (sometimes) from a incomming phone call, and it had little idicator lights on the taskbar so my roomates could see if it was connected and they could disconnect it it they wanted to make a phone call. I did that all with a generic version of a lucent winmodem. (PITA) And the crappiest RD distro of all time: 7.0

I did that to end the 1 phone line, one female upstairs, one quake player downstairs wars that were building up.

 

[Flatline]

Just to be thorough (and bear in mind that I am not "pushing" any distro, nor am I advocating any one approach) that no matter how many GUI tools a distribution has, you can still go to the CLI and modify config files. I like both approaches and I use a hodge-podge mixture of GUI and CLI (partially depending on which machine I'm using...I have a Mandrake workstation, RedHat servers at work which are headless, Debian workstation, and a Slackware workstation at the moment).
Part of the reason that I usually recommend Mandrake to noobs is that they can almost always get it set up and running extremely easily (sometimes there is weird hardware involved, but other than that it is about the most painless install I have ever seen); after they have worked with it and they start getting curious they can still use the CLI and poke around to see what makes their system tick.

IIRC ReiserFS is slightly faster than ext2 (with notail)

That may be so, but when I use journaling file systems I like to leave journaling on

 

[NuclearFusi0n]

Originally posted by: Flatline

That may be so, but when I use journaling file systems I like to leave journaling on

All notail does is sacrifice a little space in exchange for speed - it has nothing to do with the journal.



notail
By default, reiserfs stores small files and `file tails' directly
into the tree. This confuses some utilities like
LILO. This option is used to disable
packing of files into the tree.

 

[Tbirdkid]

im an extreme nub to linux and just installed a full bore redhat 9 without a dual boot. i jumped in head first. it is a bit hard to learn until you find a good site where people can help you alot. I did... if you want to know where to get ALOT of questions answered pm me and I can help.