Due to my utter disgust with ME, I’m contemplating diving headfirst into unixdom. After a bit of research, I think I like WinLinux… for thirty bucks, the amount of stuff that comes pre-installed is making my mouth water.
I’d like your opinions on the best version of Linux for home use.
Oh yeah:
PIII 850mhz KDS notebook, 128 MB
USB peripherals: HP CD-writer, Logitech optical mouse, and a cheapo UMAX scanner.
For home use, Linux Mandrake is probably the easiest to work with and set up. I’d try that, or RedHat. I haven’t even heard of the WinLinux distribution. Mandrake has the Linux4Win option, which will install Linux into a hardfile rather than a separate partition, but I never got that to work. Right now, I’m running WinXP RC2, and I find that it’s one hell of an OS…I drive my computer hard, and I can run it for weeks without a crash. So…maybe wait a bit for the official XP release, or head right into Linux…cheap, fast, and stable. Guess you can’t beat that.
You might want to do some research on the components in your notebook, and whether there are drivers for Linux available for them. Notebooks can be tricky in this respect even with Windows NT… I used SuSe on a desktop and was happy with it.
Well, black455, no one can really make any recommendations without knowing what your intended uses are for this machine. If you plan to just do websurfing and email, well that’s fine. Any decent linux distro will do. I prefer OpenBSD for security but Debian has a nice package manager that make sofware updates much easier and simpler than Redhat’s and you will appreciate that when it’s time to upgrade your kernel or compiler. Keep in mind you won’t be able to run windows games and apps from within WinLinux or any other linux without setting up WINE or some similar emulator. StarOffice is not a complete replacement for MS Office also though it functions well enough for me.
I haven’t used Mandrake or Suse but I was thoroughly unimpressed with redhat < 7. I haven’t tried Redhat 7 though but I don’t see a need for it since I use my computers for work things and security is more important to me, hence OpenBSD. Redhat is easy to setup though so if you are new to unix-like OSes, go with something like that or Mandrake or Suse. I’ve heard they are all easy to setup. You will likely want to play with it a while anyway before finding a version that you really like.
Thanks everybody… I’m planning on doing basic stuff… word processing, web surfing, web design, graphics, a bit of perl hacking.
I discovered last night that my winmodem (PCTel HSP56 Micromodem) most likely won’t work. I’m currently looking for the right drivers to turn it into a linmodem, but I’ve had no luck so far.