Started my computer life on a BSD mainframe. clunking around at the command line level way before I even knew MS windows existed. Ive since spent the past 10 years being frustrated with windows and I think Ive finally had it. So here I am looking for advice on how to get started in the Linux world. Ive read a bit about the distros and some “getting started” guides on the net. For the most part what I read was about 486 and 386 CPUs and as such seemed a little dated. I consider myself an able Windows PC guy. I just need simple direction for a reformed user on how to get started.
My current idea on what I should do is as follows:
Buy (for manuals, boot discs etc) a copy of Red Hat Linux 9.0 , 30 bucks retail
RTFM and follow the instuctions: This is obviously where I need help. Iam guessing the install works similiarly to a windows install just need to be sure: format, partition, install / configure.
Questions:
Would everything I need to get up and running be included in the retail package? i.e. format and partition utilities with a bootable CD?
Any other distros I should consider?
Is hardware compatibility going to be an issue for me? I have an AMD 1.3 Ghz processor, ECS K7S5A motherboard (onboard Audio and LAN), 512 Mb DDR Ram, 40 Gb IBM Deskstar hard drive, and an AGP Geforce 2 GTS (Hercules Prophet) video card for one machine and a Geforce 4 TI 4200 for the other.
I also have a 120 Gb IBM deskstar with mp3s formated fat32 in my second machine. Is there a way to mount this drive after Ive installed Linux? After I have backed up the Mp3s I intend to format this drive for pure Linux use. (terminology? What is the fat32 equivalent for a Linux partition or is it the same?)
My primary concern is game playing. Is there a reliable windows emulator so I can play all my old winbloze games or will I suffer a fate similiar to Mac gamers?
Mandrake and Red Hat are excellent introductory distributions. They are full-featured and installation is darn near automatic. I prefer Mandrake, but favorite distribution is an individual thing.
Your hardware shouldn’t be a problem. On board audio is, sometimes, tricky, but the answer is usually available after a short google search. Sometimes, the on-board audio works when I install to a new computer, sometimes it doesn’t. Motherboards with cheap components to save cost are the usual culprits.
A decent PCI audio card is not that expensive, and sometimes much easier than trying to find the right drivers.
Your onboard LAN card will work fine.
As for the 120GB mp3 disk with the fat32 partition, these can be mounted under Linux. This shouldn’t be a problem at all.
As for games: www.winehq.com offers good software for running windows applications on Linux, but www.transgaming.com is the place you need to be if you want to play. You don’t even have to have Windows installed on another partition, although you may need some dll files. Check it out.
Do it. Get Red Hat or Mandrake, fire up winex and enjoy. If you like the games, you might start by dual-booting (it will make life easier as you find your way around). You’ve got plenty of disk space.
As far as filesystems go, the default for Linux is ext2/ext3 (ext3 has journalling, otherwise, they’re the same thing). However, you can certainly mount FAT partitions with Linux - if you don’t want the bother of converting things over, you don’t need to. Of course, FAT doesn’t natively support per-file permissions, but if you’re the only person using the computer, you can get away with giving sensible permissions to the whole FAT filesystem.
What distribution you use depends very much on your preferences. If you’re looking for a “Windows-like” feel that doesn’t presume you know anything about computers, Mandrake or Xandros are both good. If you want a more powerful, but still commercial-feeling OS, Red Hat or SuSE are both good. OTOH, I use Slackware, which is very BSDish, but is not generally the best sort of introduction if you don’t remember much BSD stuff.
All of your hardware looks to me like it should be supported.
Concider getting a Live CD to start , either Knoppix or slacklive. These will be a complete o/s on a cd , my slacklive is only 184 megs ,and gets you into linux without having to do the full install, plus configs.
Which is important because of the amount of people that switch over,and then find its a hassle to learn linux ,after coming from windows. That said , if you do want to go the full route ,then by all means , Mandrake 9.1 is probably one of the best drakes to come out. If all you want to do is to surf the net , do home office and play the various arcade games, then mandrake will pretty much config everything for you.
I’ll second pretty much everything ** leenmi ** has said but want to add this caveat: It won’t be easy. In fact it will be difficult and frustrating and you’ll get pissed off with the OS and with yourself frequently at first.
This isn’t because Linux is so much harder to use than Windows but simply becuase you know how to do everything you need to do using Windows, but not with Linux. You’re going to get frustrated at having to learn how to do a lot of basic tasks all over again, just be patient though and you’ll get there. I would suggest keeping a windows box around for a while so when you get frustrated you can just switch over to something familar for a while. I would also suggest trying to do as much as possible the *nix way from the start, instead of relying on the graphical config tools most distros ship with, they’re nice, and easy to use for a new windows convert but ultimatly they will prevent you from truely learning Linux/Unix.
That about says it all. Personally, I found having O’Reilly’s “Unix in a Nutshell” invaluable when making the transition, although you’ll probably want to pick up “Linux in a Nutshell” instead. (I had to work on Solaris first, which is why I got the “Unix” and not the “Linux”.) Just having a list of common commands and how to use them (many manpages are impenetrable for a beginner) lessened the feeling of helplessness considerably. And I still pick it up all the time to look things up.
If you already know about partitioning a hard disk, you’re way ahead of many people I know who made the switch.
Mandrake has a reputation for installing very easily, but when I tried Mandrake, most of all of the Linux books I saw were for Red Hat.
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But I don’t know that any of those books would have been useful anyway: what I would have liked to know was things like “how to install a new program”, and “how to get a GUI to load on startup” (assuming one wasn’t set to by default). Most of the books I saw went into arcane details about the inner workings of the kernel, and simply weren’t useful to a total Linux beginner/general PC user trying to replace MS Windows at all. The “help” files in Linux were fragmented–and still are, very badly. In Windows, you hit “help” on any OS window and you can look up how to do anything concerning the OS; Linux is not like that at all. Each separate OS module os a separate program, each with its own separate help file. So to find out how to do something, you first have to know what it is you’re looking for, and where it is supposed to be, because there’s no “general help” function to tell you that. The “help” function of the GUI will only tell you how to use features of the GUI–it won’t say anything about how to install new programs or set up a modem, or anythiung about any other OS feature. Trying to use Linux eats up lots of your time, and this here is the exact reason why.
~
What kind of modem do you have? If you’re using a winmodem, you’ll have trouble getting it to work with Linux. (Which is one of the reasons why I haven’t switched to Linux yet.)
No modem, no internet right now. (Was DSL a while back)
… Ill have to remember about that issue tho, if I end up using a modem again. I remember a while back the systems Wal Mart were selling that were touted as Linux capable but came with a winmodem… hehehe
If it was Wal-Mart selling them, then they probably had Lindows installed which is basically Linux, with Windows emulator software, so it most likely could use a winmodem. You can check here for info on modem which will work with Linux.
I’ve been using BSD and Linux for around 7 years now. As far as distros go, I prefer Debian. It has an excellent packaging system, so that you won’t have to bother with compiling programs. You can keep your system up to date with all the various necessary utilities and libraries. Obviously, RTFM… but like you said, that’s the hard part. Linux has massive community based technical support, and a huge amount of documents you can refer to. Specifically, I am absolutely certain people have written in-depth walkthroughs detailing how to install the various distros.
It’s a good idea to keep a machine connected to the internet, so you can access that information. You can find real-time help from the linux community on IRC. Try EFNet, channel #linux or #linuxhelp . Or, as an alternative, there are plenty of message boards and newsgroups that you can ask questions on. FAQs and tutorials can be found at The Linux Documentation Project …
Drivers for winmodems have been written for linux. Not that you should ever buy a winmodem. The only significant problem with Linux and hard-ware compatability is lack of support for many video cards. If you’re a gamer, expect to be frustrated by poorly written drivers or no drivers at all. The developer community is making progress, but it’s pretty bad right now. Linux ain’t for playing games, at least not yet.
At this point, I think there are distros that will essentially install like Windows. That is, graphical, click-to-install type things. No doubt you can do everyday things with the default installation; browse the web, e-mail, etc… but the real advantage of linux is that it offers you complete control over your system. If you want to be the God of your machines you’ll have to invest a lot of time in reading manuals and understanding the intricacies of the underlying software.
Someone already mentioned Wine and WineX… all I’ve got to say is, don’t expect too much from them. If games are your thing, keep a windows machine handy…
Thats a good point ,and it requires you as the individual using the computer , to determine whats important to you.
For general inquires about computing problems ,http://google.com/linux and http://groups.google.com , plus the various linux boards will give you information overload , as to possible reasons and fixes.
But the main thing to bear in mind , is your computer uptime. Windows is by no means a shoddy product anymore, it has issues ,but I am hearing too many linux folks giving kudos to XP.
If you want a turn key system, then by all means , keep windows and dual boot mandrake or RH for playing with.