Did I pick the wrong distro?

[Raven_11_11]

I have several older machines that I have put together just for fun and I would love to install linux on one of them. I can't find a "boxed" copy anywhere around here so I bought a magazine that included a copy of Slackware 10.0. Even with the included documentation, it was a disaster. Before it was over the hard drive bit the dust,my wife threatened to leave me and my two year old was calling me the "mean Daddy".
I have bought two other distros,Gentoo 2004.2(also in a magazine) and Red Hat 9 Fedora Core 2(with a how to book from the bookstore). The Red Hat distro lists system requirements as,400MHz proc. and 192MB RAM for graphics the other does not say.
The target machine is an AMD K6 2/360 with 152MB RAM and a 4 gig HD.
My question is this, which of these(if any)would be my best bet? Or is there another distro that is better for noobs(and sometimes "mean daddys)?
I have a broadband connection to the internet so I could download a distro fairly quickly if I can just plug the cable into the other machine and have at it(it has an ethernet NIC) Can I even do this?
Thanks in advance for your help.


Oh yeah,do I have to have linux actualy installed and running before I get one of those cool linux bumper stickers?

[gehidore]

i dont see how slack 10 killed your hard drive.

but you might want to try this (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org)

see if these boxen can even run a light gui very well.

[quip]

It's hard to say why your installation failed, but I have Slack on much worse boxes (Pentium 133, 64 megs RAM, 1.5 gig hd) and better (my desktop and laptop machines) As long as you don't have real exotic hardware, any of the distros you mentioned should work. Your limiting factor will be your choice of gui, as mentioned. However, you should be able to run any of them on the hardware you mentioned, possibly slowly ;)

[knute]

Once installed slackware on a 286, with 256MB HDD, and 4Mb of ram. :D

It worked to!

I could browse the net, email, and play games! :D

But then again, I've used linux for 6 years pretty much exclusively! :D

If you know about compiling programs, either gentoo or slack would be useable to you, because that's how their packages are built. If not, then the learning curve will be that much greater to start with, because you don't have setup.exe or install.exe as a general rule. ;)

Fedora uses rpm's (premade binaries -- kinda like the exe's that you get with windows). So that may work the best for you, though, with all that fedora installs, it's kinda hard to make it lite on low-end hardware.
Also, with rpm's there's what's called rpm-hell. It's when you get packages that depend upon other packages, which depend upon other packages, which depend....

The tools apt-get and/or urpmi are good for taking care of that. (Based off the debian tool with great success, btw.)

Don't get me wrong here, you can still set it up so that it will run on systems that don't meet the minimum system requirements.

KDE (it's a desktop environment) is kind of resource hungry, and get's installed by default, unless you go expert and tell it not to. Also openoffice can be resource intensive, as well as a few other things.

If you are running it at home, you most likely don't need a web server, ftp server, ssh server, and such running so you can turn those types of things off. I'm not sure if Fedora has them set to run by default or not, so it's something that can reduce the resource requirements.

I know that this is long, and I hope that I haven't scared you off.

Another option is a live cd. That way you can see what you like and then install it later. It is a distro that runs completely from the CD.

In fact, if the gentoo cd that you bought is a universal cd, that would make it a live cd. All you need to do to try it out is to put in the cd and turn on the computer (provided the computer is set up to boot from cd, that is), and it will boot up.

Gentoo's comes up to the command line.

If you go to http://google.com/linux and use the search term "live cd" you will get about 832,000 hits that you can browse and see what all is out there.

One place to start, (and second in the search btw), is http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

It'll give you a list of the different live cd's out there, then if you find one that you like, simply download the iso and burn it to disk. :D

HTH

[JohnT]

I would advise against any distro out of the back of a magazine or book.....IMHO

[ehawk]

If this is your first foray into linux, and you're not sure you computer can handle it, try MEPIS. It (like knoppix and others) allows you to simply run it from your CD at bootup. I was able to simply plug in a cable modem, boot it up, and have everything autodetected, was surfing the internet in about 3 minutes after booting. Check it out and see if it meets with your approval. There is an icon on the desktop that installs it to your hard drive with everything configured as it is during live-evaluation. The whole process is about 4 clicks if that's all that you will install on the machine. It's the easiest installation I've yet seen....that's why I would recommend it over knoppix for a first-time user. It uses the awsome package managment system developed for debian, apt-get, and has a nice GUI front end for it called kpackage.

[enshum]

I have a copy of Suse 9.1 personal, and fedora core 1. I will send you one or both just tell me where to send them. Suse would be the best choice its very stable.:)

[blackbelt_jones]

I would NOT reccomend SuSE for that sort of box. I had a box with similar stats, and SuSE was ridiculously slow. On the other hand, a really easy install. I liked Red Hat 9 with 150 MB RAM, though your hard drive is just a little small for that. RH9 is no longer maintained, but can still be downloaded for free at linuxiso.org

Really, the best advice I can give you isn't about the distro, it's about your approach. There are probably people who sat down and installed Linux out of the box on the first try-- but I'm not one of them, and if you're not one of them, either, that's pretty normal. If you can get yourself to the point where you can accept starting all over again , maybe even more than once, or more than that, as a part of the process, you can go on to learn quite a bit about this-- and for me at least, it was worth it.

[janet loves bill]

Originally posted by JohnT
I would advise against any distro out of the back of a magazine or book.....IMHO

I concur.......support your distro by "buying" from their website...............

and Don't ever buy linux off Ebay..........those morons only download the ISO and burn it themselves...........the Developer get no $$ for his/her efforts at all.............

[gtalum]

I run Gentoo on my old AMD K-6 II 450 machine with a 2 GB hard drive. If you can stand to deal with an install process that takes a few days, it's worth it. The system will be compiled specifically for your machine and the speed difference is definitely noticeable on such a slow box. But, as I said, the install of a stage I Gentoo system will take you 2-3 days.

It's also not as difficult for a newbie to install as some here woul dhave you believe. if you can read and follow detailed instructions, you can find a great installation guide over at www.gentoo.org . There you can also find excellent Gentoo-specific forums that will cover any problem you might have using your new Gentoo system after the installation is complete. It is a bit more complictaed than running one of the big distros, but it's an excellent learning process,the support is there, and the benefits will be immediately noticeable.

[hard candy]

"Slackware Linux can run on 486 systems all the way up to the latest x86 machines (but uses -mcpu=i686 optimization for best performance on i686-class machines like the P3, P4, and Duron/Athlon). "

I'm thinking you may have a partitioning problem. Where exactly did your error start and what was the error message if any. Another question, did you elect to install everything/all the packages? You may want to go through and cut out some of the Window managers (like KDE and Gnome, maybe use a simpler manager), graphics programs, development stuff when you install. You can add back later what you want to use.

http://www.bitbenderforums.com/vb22/showthread.php?postid=311808 is a nice step by step graphical howto for installing Slackware.
http://shilo.is-a-geek.com/slack/instalslack2.html is another good simple installation instruction.

[desmatic]

I wouldn't recommend any of the distro's you are using as a linux starting point. While yes they're cool, they're also quite hackorish. More for Linux users looking for something that better suits their personality. Besides, they aren't LSB/FHS compliant so not that many books will be of use to you. I personally dislike Red Hat stuff (too bloody expensive for what it is) or fedora (unstable) and would never recommend it to someone new to linux. It's not a distro thats very compile from source friendly and the gui's very molested. Mandrake and SUSE are much better alternatives. Mandrake is very hackable and a good one to use if you want to compile from source or use RMPs. SUSE is very stable. As far as performance goes, it doesn't matter which OS you use, its what you install.

Don't get me wrong about gentoo or slack. I used them for a while, but gave up on them for something even more interesting (LFS). But they're not such great starting places. There's also debian, which only suffers from being behind a bit, otherwise its really very slick. It's a lot like slack in the fact that you're not inundated with stupid scripts that configure everything for you automatically like you're a moron. And if you install the developer stuff, it's really easy to add on packages compiled from source.

[enshum]

"You may want to go through and cut out some of the Window managers (like KDE and Gnome, maybe use a simpler manager), graphics programs, development stuff when you install. You can add back later what you want to use." Very good advice. And Suse 9.1 can run 386 however I believe it would be c/l. And I wouldn't use kde-gnome with k6-360, k6-2-450 should be considered minimum w/kde.:)