Maximum PC

This thread will be the place for people to post their FAQ responses to "which distribution" and why. If you have advice on selecting a distribution, a favorite, a different distribution for different types of use, go ahead and post your thoughts. Feel free to post more than once on different distibutions, include mini-reviews of distributions, that kind of thing.

NO FLAMES and NO TROLLS: this stuff will be promptly DELETED. This is not a discussion thread. You might prefer one thing absolutely, but saying "I like X because Y is the most retarded thing I've ever used" is not what this thread is for. This thread is for helping people who are interested in trying Linux -- it could be their first time, or they could be interested in something different.

If you have a specific question on a distribution or a specific need that isn't addressed in this thread, go ahead and post it in the forum, but make sure you read this thread first

Any discussion in this thread will be split off into the main forum, so we can keep this lean and mean!

Gaming: I recommend Gentoo ... it will help you eke out every possible frame.

Peripheral support is standard across the board ... any distro that supports net installs will have the latest and greatest drivers / kernel modules / patches available.

Gentoo is updated more frequently than Debian; Debian does more testing.

I suggest Gentoo in general for anyone wanting to learn liux ... simply because their forums are an incredible place to get advice on just about any topic ... do a search there on any subject you are interesed in *before* you start installing a distro. That should give you an idea of whether something is possible and how difficult it would be.

So Gentoo would be the best for emulating CS source? my CS clan is moving to source, and i want to try out Linux, and use the system for more than just surfing. I may want to try some Linux games (not that there are very many) as well. Thing is, I don't want to pay for that one emulator... I don't remeber, I know you can run windows apps in Wine, but not all games work, I would have to modify it. oh well, I'll do my research then...

Yes, Gentoo is good for what you want to do. Just make sure you set your GCC flags so that it compiles to your processor type. Other than that, you're gold.

Try glxinfo in a terminal for loads of information on the OpenGL render.

Not sure if that is an Nvidia thing...I think it's part of the Xserver (someone can check that).

I will keep this simple for the simple minded people out there

If you want to learn RedHat, then use Redhat; If you want to learn Linux, then use Slackware.


Enough Said.

Though if you have some absolute objection to slackware, then try Debian and when I say Debian I mean Debian not one of these little knock of Debians like Mepis or Linspire, or Knoppix or Ubuntu or Kubuntu etc.

I've been a Mandrake user so long now, that I feel like I've become jaded. Mandrake's "user friendliness" has become cumbersome, and I realized that I was no longer interested in working around the RPM system when I found myself almost exclusively using source and compiling things myself. I found myself less and less often booting into Mandrake, and my writing of howto's came to a complete halt.

I've been a linux user/abuser since '99 and in that time, I've used; Caldera, SuSe, Mandrake (6.x - 10.1), Debian, Slackware, RH, Fedora (2&3), Peanut, Knoppix, and Turbo. With the exception of Debian, I really didn't have my interest piqued enough to switch to anything else for any amount of time > 3 months.

So, cut to the present day....

I got myself a new HD (SATA/150, 200GB), some more memory (2x 512MB for my dual-channel setup), and a new PSU.

I sitting there staring at the new drive and I start thinking about ghosting over my Mandrake 10.1 partition to the new drive, but when I do, all of the possible limitations just pop into my head (SATA drivers, re-installing WinXP, MBR, partitioning, nForce2 chipset, sound, NIC, accelerated nvidia drivers, blah blah blah blah) and all the troubles I had with 2.6 and Mandrake 10.x begin bothering me. Thinking that the SATA "hurdle" is the biggest one to overcome, I start looking around at the capabilities of the different distros. At first, I land at Slackware's door because of the ability to load up the sata.i boot disk right from the get-go. But then, while looking over Linuxiso.org, I find myself going to Gentoo's website.....

I take a gander at their documentation about installing Gentoo, and I find that it is the most complete and well written guide that I think I've ever read concerning Linux. As soon as I get home (ssshhh, I'm at work), I'm downloading the minimum install CD and daydreaming about when the wife and kids go to sleep how I'm going to be in Linux "heaven".....

OK, so I need some advice here;

Is Gentoo really all its cracked up to be? I mean, I don't have too much trouble doing config files, but dependencies have always been a PitA for me. And, if Gentoo is not a mature distro, I don't want to be sitting at my desktop combing through website after website searching for solutions to my problems......

Will I notice a difference? Like I said, I'm jaded.

Is it fun? I think I like tooling around with an OS as much as I like doing actual work/play on a system.

Here are the system specs:
===========================
Abit NF7-S v.2 (dual-channel, 400MHz, 10x200 clocking)
AMD Athlon 2500+ XP (Barton core) @ 2000MHz
2x 512MB Crucial PC-3200 DDR
XfX GeForce FX 5700 256MB
Maxtor 10, SATA/150 200GB HD
Maxtor 9, U-ATA/133 120GB HD
Plextor PX-712A DVD-/+RW
AOpen 16x DVD-ROM
On-board sound (Realtek ALC65)
On-board NIC (Realtek 8201BL <-- I think)
MS USB Optical mouse
Logitech USB Headphones w/mic (Although, I also have some Zalman 5.1 surround headphones w/mic)
USB keys (a couple, 128MB each)


-- I'm going to use the SATA drive as the boot drive and put the WinXP and Linux install on that. I plan on using the 120GB drive as the Secondary Master and using it strictly for storage (all installed programs go on the 200GB drive). The DVD-/+RW will sit alone as Primary Master, and the DVD-ROM will be the Secondary Slave.


Uses of Linux:
=============
Games - using ports or WineX/Cedega (need 3D acceleration)
Networking - Web browsing, IRC, IM, e-mail, snooping around, setting up servers, etc.
Multimedia - Watching DVDs, listening to MP3/Ogg/CDs, etc.
Creation - Transferring/editing photos from digital camera, HTML creation, C++ coding, etc.
Archiving - DVD-/+RW burning, CD-RW burning
Office - document creation, printing
Toys - Celestia, K-stars, whatever.

I also am thinking of moving my server over to Gentoo. Its duties include, but are not limited to; NAT, DHCP, DNS, Apache, IP Tables firewall, postfix/mail, sniffing, logging, occasional gameserver, routing, and a few other daemons.

If anyone can give me some advice, I'd appreciate it.

Yes and no. Gentoo is truly an optimized distro, you compile the system from source with GCC settings optimized to how you want to compile the system. It also gives you the choice of how much of your system you want to build:

Stage 1: Bootstrap the system, compile GCC from scratch.
Stage 2: System is bootstrapped, but you have to compile the system binaries from scratch.

Stage 3: Combination of stage 1 and 2, everything is compiled save for the packages.

The reason I love Gentoo is Portage - it functions like FreeBSD's ports in that to install apps you simply type in emerge apache. It's easy to remember, not only that but Gentoo has their entire package list available online at http://packages.gentoo.org

Another reason I love Gentoo is rc-update. Gentoo has its own initscript facilities, you no longer have to edit inittab or write your own initscripts for daemons, rc-updates does it for you. So let's say you want SAMBA to boot in the default run-level, you do: rc-update add samba default. The name of the daemon is always found in your /etc/init.d/ directory. To remove, say, Tomcat 5 from the run-levels, you type in: rc-update del tomcat5 default.

Gentoo's biggest problem is it has a tendency to deviate from standards. For example, Apache 2 and PHP. They renamed httpd.conf to apache2.conf, they did a quick workaround editing a few things. For example, you no longer have to write LoadModule or AddType into the conf files, you simply add APACHE2_OPTS="-D SSL PHP4" in /etc/conf.d/apache2. While this is nice, if you're looking at the Apache docs, you're bound to be lost.

Anyhow, I'd give it a shot. Gentoo's a nice distro overall but you need some experience to a degree. I did find this interesting site:

http://gentoo-wiki.com

Well, I like to jump in feet first and blazing hot. So, I plan on doing a Stage 1 install.

Learning new stuff is good.

I'm going to have to read up on USE, emerge, rc-update, gcc optimizations, etc.

I really like the idea of installing everything myself, since I constantly find myself moaning about **** linux distro installing redundant software, installing mandatory software, or installing things I use other apps for and if I uninstall it/deselect it, it breaks something I *do* like.

Anyway, this is my project for the weekend. I may have to start a little blog on how I do.

Any other recommendations? I have the website you furnished bookmarked, and I'm already reading there...

You're on a good track, just stick with it. Gentoo's an amazingly large distro to learn, it's great if you really want optimization.

OTOH, I've stopped using Gentoo on my server(s) and have now moved to Arch Linux. I like the idea of merely downloading pre-compiled binaries (albeit 686 bins) instead of having to compile everything from scratch.

First of all, my favorite "demo" of linux is Knoppix (click the British/American flag for English). It is a great way to learn linux without messing stuff on your PC. There are others, but knoppix is my favorite for new linux users. Also, try debian or fedora core 3 (fc3 is kinda advanced during its setup).

Now, for what u want to do... I cant help you with that. Mainly because u already have XP on ur hd, and you would have to partition it so u dont lose any information. I can not and will not help with that because i know i will f it up. Ask someone smarter than me and they will be glad to help

PERSONALLY, i would buy a cheapie 40-80 gb hard drive, or just strip one off an old computer and install it onto your PC and just use diff distros on the second hard drive so u dont delete your XP. Its also tuff to install windows after u install linux, cuz Microsoft has a habit of formatting your entire drive, unless u know how to tell it not to (which i dont, again).

What i did, because my windows installation was ever so slow..... (Went for almost 10 months without any virus check, spyware check, or defrag) is i bought a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 200gb hard drive, and used my 160gb hard drive for all matters with Linux, and the Diamondmax was a fresh XP install.

Now, as for games, you might want to stick with Windows, because (excluding Unreal Turneys and [?]Doom3[/?], not many games work with Linux well enough to be performance wise. However, there is a Plethora of dedicated gamers who want to game on Linux, so they would be quite helpful to get you gaming on Linux. WINE (Windows Emulation software) and other Emus are kinda iffy on wether they would be good, but im not sure on their progress with games.

Now, Linux is great for office work, because it is incredibly secure and (flippin) free. I plan to use it in college so i dont totally get distracted with games. If you dont want to spend $Tons of Moolah$ on office stuff (powerpoint, excel, etc) Openoffice.org is standard with almost every single distro. It is almost exactly like Microsoft Office, except it is much better because plugins/updates/utilities and stuffs are available to everyone, and they are free.


Well, there's my two cent post

also,

That's the beauty of open source . The only thing you will pay for is (optional) 24/7/365 support with people who speak english and if u have 56k and u want them to ship you CDs or DVDs

There are two GOOD starter linuxes you can start off with.
Linspire 5.0 is good at holding your hand and installing you packages for you....but you have to PAY for that service.
The other is Xandros. Like Linspire it is also Debian based, and so it is very stable. Its pretty easy to use, very intuitive. If you can race thru Window$, you can pick up on Xandros. Like Linspire it also installs apps for you be they Debian files or RPM packages. The biggest bonus is that it costs you nothing.
I have altered my Xandros. I have updated it with Debian files, so now I have a more 'deb' version of Xandros. You can install Synaptic, and get the LARGEST library of linux apps in the world for free.
I picked up on Will's lead, and I am trying to stay away from Window$ for at least 6 months, and make my puter do everything in linux that it could in Windows.
So far so good.

Knoppix is decent too. Its a livercd so it doesn't install on your hard drive. That way you can decide if you even like it.

LiverCD? Does it install on your Liver?

Knoppix LiveCD or Mandrake Live (9.2) are both good choices for those that don't want to risk their system stability/data with a repartition and installation. Once you are ready to go to a full installation, Mandrake/Mandriva is usually considered a good "new user" distro. A lot of reading is a pre-requisite to doing a full install due to the possible complications that arise from moving data or just partitioning a HD.

I would personally suggest to start with Ubuntu, due to its ease of use to beggin with, try to learn your way around apt and synaptic, and once it starts falling appart, which it most likly will, then get Debian. If you have a small amount of RAM, use XFCE 4.2 for your window manager, because it uses between 55-80 MBs of ram when running on idle, but you need to go to http://www.xfce.org and add thier repositorys (where apt downloads fom) to get 4.2 because 4 has a lot of problems and sucks up more ram. Then for games get Cedega, its $5 a month, but it updates somewhat often so they cant charge per release. I'm not saying its the best way to go and if all else fails, use LFS (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org)!

what is slackware? I tried a live version of it called slax and it was totally uber and now I want to install it onto my hard drive but I can't figure out how to partition my hard drive with windows XP. There were some instructions but they don't work (Damn m$). I am in bliss right now since I can surf the web with ease and it's so fast, even on my old p200 it works fine, but that's probably due to the 96mb ram. also, in slax there was this thing called parted to maek and edit partitions, but it said it was for advanced users and I shouldnt try it i think unless someone shows me how to. Please can someone help me set up a dual boot on this comp? Linux is so nice and uber and the UI is much better than XP and kills os x too. (KDE that is)

Sigh..

I would hate to give instructions to anyone on how to repartition their hard drive and move the data around. The best advice I can give for someone who hasn't done it before (successfully), is to just get another hd, whether its a new or used one....then, install on that.

are there any distros that automatically repartition your hard drive for you? I would like to have linux on my hard drive and I can't get a second hard drive because again im a hi school student so i need to repartition. some other guy said i can just go ahead with qtparted on knoppix to resize my winxp partition, but I'd rather have it done automatically because this pc is the family pc and if i screw it up my dad will kill me.

Also looking to try and run Linux for my first time on an older work laptop did a search on google for "linux live cd" and found this site:

http://www.frozentech.com/

looks like it has several of the more frequently mentioed disto's of linux for cheap that I could buy and test without downloading for hours and hours (have DSL but to download even on DVD worth of data is going to take quite a while)

anyone ever order from this site? Is it legit? Any other better/similar sites where I can order a bunch of distro's live or otherwise for cheap to test out which linux is best for me?

If you want to try out/test/play with linux, bsd or solaris, try out vmware. Not for those looking to game on it, but it's a great tool for letting you try out a new distro, ot using the virtual machine to run your freebsd web server. or trying out network programming on one pc.

what you do with it is create a virtual pc - only effect to your system is 2 vmware network connections. You specify the folder you want the pc and it would create files for the harddrive, swap, etc. copy that if when you screw up, you're saved.