i am now humble (not a question)

[joesbox]

i don't know if this is the right place for this post or not but i had a humbling experience the other day. i have been working with linux for about 5-6 months now and thught that i had learned a lot. (i did but not enough) So i downloaded Debian hearing that it was the best distro and thought that i could work it. i mean.. "hell i was able to install RH 7.3, RH 8, and Mandrake 9 with little or no problems." holy crap was i in for a trip. i didn't understand half of the stuff that Debian was asking me to answer and didn't even get X to work. i tried for about 3 days to get it to work (off and on) and got frustrated and went back to Mandrake. so now i am thinking of taking baby steps and going to SuSe and learning that. but the problem is that i can only find a cd eval version of suse. anyone got a suggestion of a route for me to take as far as learning the sys and not just how to use the sys. so far i have been able to utilize blackbox (and like it better than kde or gnome) and customize it for autolaunching programs and the styles that i like and use it for everyday shtuff but the big thing that i want to do is be able to get down and dirty with the system and be able to help people that are at the point that i am now.
what do you all say?

[The Ennead IX]

My advice would be to forget downloading distros and go out and buy one. It worked for me in so far as i've stuck with it. Once i've laid out my hard-earned then there ain't no way i'm giving in without a fight!! :D

After saying that i'm now running mainly Gentoo ...... which I downloaded :rolleyes: but you get the idea.

The other way is to partition and put two distros on. You need a working and stable computer to do every day stuff but with another distro on, you can use that to experiment and it doesn't matter if you hose it, you just reinstall and try again. Then just use that distro to start learning whatever area it is that interests you, networking, programming, graphics, whatever.

[sharth]

Heh. I started with debian. It took me a month to get X :) That was before I found howtos or anything. I was basically searching at the library for info on how the X setup works. Debian is fun though, atleast to me. Try libranet, you can basically change it into debian after the install (or so I hear), and there is a porgeny isntaller for debian, which give you a grpahical install. AND you can do a hard drive install of knoppix.

[yinrunning]

Yeah, I'm probably in the same place. I'm having enough trouble trying to eek out time in my schedule to learn things in RedHat, let alone switch to something I probably won't be able to install the first few tries. I'm learning in leaps and bounds, just like you... there's just so much!! It's all really cool, it's just alot! :)

So, I'm holding off on things like Gentoo/Debian, etc. Till I can get my one Linux-only box running the way I want it to and feel like I have a broad enough grasp of the OS to play with some of the more hardcore distros. This is the first day in a while that I've had time to boot to Linux on the box I'm on, in fact, cuz I keep having to do things with apps in XP that I haven't gotten to run in Linux yet. :( The battle continues. :)

[Timothy L. Miller]

First step to getting everything working great is to make sure you know everything possible about your hardware. Make sure you know what video card/mouse/keyboard/monitor you have, and what their respective info is (refresh rates/supported resolutions on monitor is the biggest here). Then do a Google (http://google.com/linux) search to find out what module your video card uses. Once you have this information, it becomes much easier to set up X successfully.

[BigFatJoe]

Originally posted by sharth
Heh. I started with debian. It took me a month to get X :) That was before I found howtos or anything. I was basically searching at the library for info on how the X setup works. Debian is fun though, atleast to me. Try libranet, you can basically change it into debian after the install (or so I hear), and there is a porgeny isntaller for debian, which give you a grpahical install. AND you can do a hard drive install of knoppix.

same here. First, I installed Mandrake, but the install seemed so bloated that the resemblance to windows gave me the creeps. I kept it for 3 days. Than I went to 98 SE (can't remember why i had to migrate back) and ran it with Litestep. It wasn't that bad, but the amount of stuff I do with my comp - it could not keep up. I actually set up a routine to save my unbloated/custom registry and other sys files and reinstalled my c:\windows every 2 weeks. The litestep helped a lot, but it wasn't enough. Then I came across Blackbox for Win, and liked the idea - the blackbox for win itself was very unstable at the time. After that I gave up, backed up my data, formatted my HD (didnt think of even dual booting - I'm not a gamer and everything else I can do in *nix), installed Debian, Blackbox, and never looked back. Yeah, ok...it took me 4 tries to get it working, but once I did...life is good.

; )