Linux - Taking The Plunge

[Crowds]

I have a spare old 40 gig drive and I would like to use it as a testing area for me to try out linux. My trouble is I don't know what Linux route to take. There are so many versions out there I am not sure what would be the best route to take.

What would you suggest ?

Crowds

[Spookster]

Redhat Fedora is good place to start. Redhat is one of the oldest linux distros around. You can download it here http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Download and follow these installation instructions here http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installation_notes.html and there is a great forum for it here http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/index.php?

[Crowds]

Thanks Spookster
Fedora is one I have been looking at but I have held back from the download so I could ask a few more questions. Would I be Able to install php and mySQL on this.

Crowds

[Spookster]

Thanks Spookster
Fedora is one I have been looking at but I have held back from the download so I could ask a few more questions. Would I be Able to install php and mySQL on this.

Crowds

Yes those are both available packages during the install as well as Apache (httpd).

[intiendes]

i think fedora has the whole built in package ... its great and free

[Crowds]

Thanks for the replies... plunge taken. Now I just have to wait seven hours for the ISO to download :rolleyes: Time to upgrade my connection I think :)


Crowds

[Beagle]

Crowds:

If you're not on broadband, yeah, I'd recommend getting it.

If you are though, most distros offer a torrent of their installation ISO. Also, realize that most distros provide a "net install" cd which is much smaller because it downloads the necessary packages over the net during installation (hence why you should have broadband).

Further, instead of just jumping head first and going through the installation process, you should try out a live CD. Many distros provide a CD that you can simply run their OS from, like Ubuntu/XUbuntu/KUbuntu, Knoppix, Mepis, Freespire, and many others. This will allow you check out the default configuration and see if you like it, as well as see if the distro comes with the necessary drivers to use your hardware. Sometimes, weird or old hardware will only be supported "out of the box" by a few distros, and it's good to have live CDs to switch between distros before committing to one through the installation process.

Also, once you DO commit, you can still try out live CDs, so if you install Fedora Core, and you start to get frustrated with it, you can drop a Knoppix CD into the drive and reboot and see you might like to try Knoppix instead. You can do this to any computer you can reboot, by the way, so you can bring a CD with you to your school lab and while you're using it, it's linux, take the CD out and reboot, it's back to windows.

Good luck, and make sure you get a IRC chat client for your other computer (if this is your only computer, get *****x so you can use it from the command line) and connect to irc.freenode.net and join #linuxhelp and the channel for your distro ##redhat, ##debian, etc. Your support group is the community, so make sure you treat them with respect. You will learn A LOT by simply sitting in a chat room and reading other's problems.

[Crowds]

Thanks Beagle,

I am on broadband and the download (2:24 to go :-) ) is via a torrent. But its only a 1 meg connection.

Hmmm the bootable from CD versions. I have tried one very breifly a few years ago. But will definatly look out for more of the other distro's via this method to give them a go.

Cheers

Crowds

[oracleguy]

Yeah Ubuntu or KUbuntu are popular distros these days that you might also want to try out.

If you run into any problems try searching google and google groups (you can get to groups by hitting the 'more' button on google. There are tons and tons of forum/blog posts and howtos on the internet especially concerning linux.

[Spookster]

Mandriva formerly known as Mandrake is also a pretty decent distro.

[Beagle]

rofl, apparently, the name of my my chat client is a profanity. It's the "unacceptable" term for a female dog with an "x" at the end. so, where I say to use *****x it's really "the b-word"x

[Crowds]

rofl, apparently, the name of my my chat client is a profanity. It's the "unacceptable" term for a female dog with an "x" at the end. so, where I say to use *****x it's really "the b-word"x

Lol, yes for a while I thought you were telling me to get f####d :D

[Crowds]

Well this post has been made from Fedora Core 5 :D
Installation was relativley painless. Setting up my modem was in fact far easier than the protracted window event... I did not have to go anywhere near an installation cd. Just a matter of setting up a few config files and then using the terminal panel to copy them to the system.
Well easy yes but I didnt understand what it was doing. Just glad it did it :thumbsup:
I guess I have a learning curve to climb and I will still be using windows a lot unfortunatly as some applications I use are windows only. The whole Cubase and VST side of things I cannot replace as easily as there are years of work stored and I am so familiar with the program that I could not afford to spend time (yet) learning anything else. I will however be looking into some of the linux based DAW apps.
Now I need to look at a replacement for Dreamweaver as while I can code html and (some) php I still need the wysiwyg enviroment. One of my main reasons for trying out a linux OS has been my desire to get a stable local php and mysql server set up for testing. So I guess setting that up is quite high on my list.

Cheers
Crowds

[Spookster]

Well this post has been made from Fedora Core 5 :D
Installation was relativley painless. Setting up my modem was in fact far easier than the protracted window event... I did not have to go anywhere near an installation cd. Just a matter of setting up a few config files and then using the terminal panel to copy them to the system.
Well easy yes but I didnt understand what it was doing. Just glad it did it :thumbsup:
I guess I have a learning curve to climb and I will still be using windows a lot unfortunatly as some applications I use are windows only. The whole Cubase and VST side of things I cannot replace as easily as there are years of work stored and I am so familiar with the program that I could not afford to spend time (yet) learning anything else. I will however be looking into some of the linux based DAW apps.
Now I need to look at a replacement for Dreamweaver as while I can code html and (some) php I still need the wysiwyg enviroment. One of my main reasons for trying out a linux OS has been my desire to get a stable local php and mysql server set up for testing. So I guess setting that up is quite high on my list.

Cheers
Crowds


Congratulations!!! Welcome to the world of Linux.

As for those windows apps you can look into WINE to see if you can install and run them under WINE. If not you can always dual boot. But if you are feeling adventurous you can install VMWare server free edition and install Windows that way. Then you can start up windows within Linux in it's own window and run your apps that way. Be warned though that the stupid WindowsXP activation crap doesn't like that because it sees it as a different computer and will not accept your product key unless of course you are using a version of windows that doesn't require activation then there are no worries.

[Crowds]

Hmmm WINE sounds interesting. A quick google seems promising for the most recent versions of Dreamweaver and Flash but couldnt find much for cubase. I suspect Cubase will not run due to its dependance on asio protocols and correct drivers for my sound card (which is an ark 24 and as such no longer has updated drivers for even windows :( ... the company closed down and I dont think there was ever linux compatible drivers. To make maters worse they refuse to release the source code for people to develop their own drivers to provide longevity to what is otherwise an excellent sound card... I digress/rant)

As to the other option for launching windows within linux... well thats one of the reasons I wanted a linux OS so I could get away from having to run apache under windows using things like phpdev. And my Windows OS is XP :( so the activation issue is likely to be an issue.

Thanks Spookster will have a look at WINE in the morrow, beer and movies are calling me right now. A welcome break for my brain and eyes ;)

[Spookster]

Sounds like a new sound card is in your future. Sound cards these days are pretty cheap though. Unfortunately I have one app MusicMatch that I cannot go without which doesn't have a linux version and won't run under WINE so that is why I had to go with VMWare. VMWare though is a pretty cool app anyways. I also use it to install other distros of linux to try them out. It's quick and easy to set up a virtual machine and install the other distros so I can play with them and see if I like them or not. Getting rid of them is as easy as deleting the virtual machine.

[marek_mar]

WINE: The Wine Is Not an Emulator WINdows Emulator... :p

[ghell]

I have Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06) on this box and its slightly annoying, all over their community forums you see people with the same problem as me - booting with usb devices plugged in (eg my card reader uses internal usb, so it usually tries to boot from an empty card slot etc which means I have to unplug it from my motherboard to boot linux up, its incredibly hard to put back in and you can't just manually change wthe root drive because it keeps switching which drive is which device)

There are also problems if you use modern raid (I have 2*250GB SataII on nForce RAID 0) ie software raid thats controlled from bios, so it looks like hardware raid but is infact software. To get past that you just need to apt-get dmraid while youre still on the live CD before you click the shiney install button, but its slightly annoying when you have to spend a while looking for that solution. I don't know if this is also the case on other distros, I have only used a couple.

Appart from that ubuntu seems great.

I'm waiting a couple of weeks for Fedora Core 6 (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Core/Schedule) though because of the USB problems I have with dapper and I've used FC4 before :) Having a 10mbps line and old 200gig IDE drive helps though, its a pretty big distro.

[krucial]

I'd say with no prior Linux experience try Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com) great and easy to navigate I-face, but is also like a linux core once you get into it. If you want it just for programs and to say you're using linux, Ubuntu is great, if you want to learn commands and the lot, Ubuntu is great. :).