I have this cute little mini-tower unit set up and running perfectly with Windows ME and Internet Explorer etc., but it’s kind of underpowered for XP so there’s really not much I can really do with this little incipient doorstop at present, other than give it away to someone who will call me at all hours with support questions, or leave it on someone’s doorstep in the dark of night with a care and feeding note taped to the chassis.
I’ve been messing around with DOS and Windows since 1986. My mission is to screw around with Linux now. If Linux is all about command line interfaces I had enough of that in the bad ol’ DOS days to last me for a lifetime. I want to be entertained and amused by it’s non-Windows impudence, but I also want a slick, good looking desktop and reasonably easy install. Is Linux ready for prime time in these areas or not? If it is, where best to start and DL a free version? I have a version of Red-Hat (manual and CD +license) that’s a year or two old, but I imagine that’s old school by now.
A year old version of Red Hat isn’t that much out of date, and is probably one of the easier distributions to install. http://www.linux.org has info on all of the distributions. You can poke around there for a bit if you want to see what else is available.
You have a couple of choices for your desktop. I’d recommend KDE or Gnome. Both are easy to configure and customize, so you can put whatever slick background you want on the screen.
I have Fedora on an older computer, it works well enough but I admit I don’t often really use it. If you cannot easily find Linux drivers for your modem/soundcard, then do the intelligent thing, spend $20 and get a new “old” soundcard and -slow- hardware modem (ISA modem maybe? → really cheap!). Don’t pull your hair out trying to make “kinda-maybe-sorta” hacked drivers work, just buy hardware that is supported. For an old computer, doing this really doesn’t cost much and is way less of a headache.
One headache: ATI videocards do not have any Linux drivers available. If your PC has an ATI videocard (like mine do) it will still start up and run normally, but 3-D Linux games may not run properly on it. If you want hardware accelleration video, then you need to buy an older Nvidia video card for $25-$30 or so.
Fedora is the current/free version of Red Hat, “Red Hat” itself went pay. Install is easy to understand, it includes a whole GUI/desktop, and also has Up2Date which is about as easy to use as Windows Update is. Thing is, a phone line is a stretch–you might end up with a couple dozen megs of updates right off the bat… but it’s easy to do anyway–you don’t really have to “know” anything about Linux to use it. And you can of course open up a console window and use CLI too, or boot without starting a GUI at all if you feel lucky.
There’s lots of interesting GUI options available to play with that Windows doesn’t let you alter. My current “idiot story” is that I was messing around and ?somehow? turned off the feature that allows a minimized window to show up as a button in the taskbar… so I would minimize a window… and it would disappear to… the mysterious seventh dimension in RAM. Occasionally upon reboot, a couple of these windows would re-appear, out of nowhere. And nobody could explain easily how to clear out all the minimized windows, or even see how many were there–but there must have been 30-50 GUI help screens as well as a few dozen minimized instances of Mozilla in there, and a bunch of other stuff besides. I never did find out how to go in and close them; they just all came back a few at a time upon reboots, and I closed them all that way.
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That computer is just slightly worse off than mine is. Mine’s a 400MHz Celeron with 192MB RAM and an 8 gig hard drive. I use it every day, as it’s the only one I have. I run Win98 on one partition (though I never use it) and Debain Linux on the other - that’s where I am right now! I am running KDE, and the only problems I tend to have are if I try to run too much at once - I run out of RAM and Swap, and everything grinds to a halt. Stupid old box!
I like Debain, but I didn’t actually install it myself. My SO did (and does!) all the grunt work, though if I get a new computer this summer, I plan on doing the work myself. Debian isn’t really the best distro to start from, since it’s installation isn’t as easy as Mandrake or RedHat, but my SO started off with Debain without ever using anything else, and he’s managed to figure it all out! Besides, Debain has the apt-get system, which is the best for upgrades, AFAIC!!
I also have an ATI Rage 16MB video card, and I have no problems with it. 3D games CAN work, as long as your processor can manage it! A lot of ATI cards are supported nowadays, and many can take drivers for other cards under linux. My SO has an ATI Radeon 7500 and it works fine, too. ATI itself releases drivers for their ATI Radeon 8500 and up. Cards under that are supported by XFree86 4.2-4.3.
You might want to look at the Knoppix distribution. It’s a bootable CD image containing Linux, OpenOffice, a browser and so forth. The nice thing is that it doesn’t install anything on the hard drive, so you can try out Linux without affecting your current system.
Not true. You have an array of options for using ATI cards in Linux. You can either use the official ATI Linux drivers, or download drivers developed by the community. You can find more information on using ATI cards in Linux, as well as help getting the best drivers, on the Rage3D Linux Forum.
ibiblio.org hosts dozens of distributions. Mandrake, Fedora and SuSE are great for beginners and those with computer experience outside of Linux.
Debian and the debian variants (Knoppix is one) is also very good and, in my opinion, has a better system for updating packages (this coming from a Mandrake fan). The installer for Debian is old style. Effective, but not pretty.
All the distributions I’ve tried have been good. Each has its own character.
The big diffrentiator for me, though, is an installers ability to correctly configure XFree86 (the windowing system). People new to Linux can be easily frightened away if they have to configure this manually.
Mandrake is the best I’ve seen for getting XFree86 right. Fedora, SuSE and Debian are nearly as good.
Try one of those four to start, and I believe you will be happy. Linux isn’t all command line. It’s a wonderful graphical experience with the added benefit of a robust command line when you just want to cut to the chase.
I DL’d and itsalled the Mandrake Linux 10 CD’s. Well it’s interesting. Have a keyboard key repeat problem on several keyboards I’m trying to solve, but otherwise it seems to be operating as advertised. I have it running the KDE desktop. One thing I will tell you is that Mandrake Linux 10 + KDE desktop is almost as demanding of resources as Win XP. It’s quite pokey on this 350 Mhz system with 160 megs of RAM .
Well, the card that I have (Mach64 I thinks) doesn’t have full hardware accelleration (3-D) support in Linux. It will work for normal use but not with some games. NVidia cards all seem to have full hardware support but ATI’s don’t.
I have the drivers mentioned here: http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Hardware-HOWTO/video.html
And those are the ones that don’t have hardware support. Mine is a desktop PC, but apparently a variant of this card was used in laptops for a while, as many people you run across mention that too. I eventually arrived at a page for a driver delevlopent community that gave the details of what parts of other drivers worked for the Mach64 (a few) and what was known that didn’t (most of it).
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Yea, as far as I’ve seen (several different distros on different computers) Linux doesn’t really run “faster” until you turn off the GUI–but then it takes a lot longer to input commands. So the question is rather like: do you wanna work (by typing CLI) or let the computer juggle a GUI? … And actually, some of the mnimal GUI’s like TWM do run visibly faster–but so far I haven’t found any “minimalist” one that supports clickable icons. So TWM (Tiny Windows Manager) has “windows”, but only for running applications in. For everything else you are basically reduced to CLI input typing. Not good.
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Probably true. GNOME might be a little, but not much, peppier.
Mandrake comes with other window managers. I love Blackbox, a minimalistic window manager. No bells and whistles. Right click to get the menu of applications and away you go. Blackbox is fun.
Fluxbox is Blackbox with some options.
Windowmaker is good, too, but I’m not a fan of the borders. Too square.
IceWM is a lightweight desktop that is more familiar to Windows, KDE and GNOME users.
Any of these four window managers will be fairly peppy on your machine. I run Mandrake 9.1 on a laptop with ~333MHz processor and it doesn’t feel poky at all until I have to compile something.
If you are serious about playing with Linux and want the old machine to feel peppy, find a lightweight window manager you like.
WindowMaker has clickable icons. But ask yourself: do you really need the icons? It seems strange at first, but a menu of applications that appears when you click the right mouse button is, for some people, more convenient. It’s personal preference, true, but I get frustrated when the right mouse button doesn’t give me access to everything I want to do.
