Hi Ken,
I've recently jumped over to Linux, from NT4, on my desktop machine. I had
a few gig spare on one drive, so I decided to install Red Hat 7.1 onto that
machine and dual boot it. I had some problems with Red Hat, ie not
recognising my existing partitions etc, and so I tried a second distro that
came on a cover disk... Mandrake 7.2.
Personally, I found Mandrake to be far better than Red Hat for an almost
complete newbie. Installation was a breeze, even setting up the dual
booting of the system was very simple. Be warned: Red Hat nuked my windows
booting!!!
I have found Mandrake to be stable... I have had to reinstall a few times,
but that was my own doing. I had a problem with my machine when NT was
running, where by the whole thing would freeze, except for the mouse, then
beep and totally lock. This has not happened in Linux. I needed to boot
into NT a few days ago, five minutes into the session, the thing locked
up... So I booted back into Linux, and seriously considered removing NT from
my machine!!
An alternative option to looking at vmware is the Linux Peanut distro. This
actually lets you run as a windows program until you get to grips with it.
It's only an 85mg download (or check the latest coverdisks on the Linux
magazines!). I haven't tried it, but some reviews in recent PC mags have
been fairly good.
Performance for me has been good, no different to Win NT. But far more
stable. I also have an NT4 server, a PowerMac and a Powerbook... The Linux
box runs Samba for connecting to Windows boxes (and vice-versa), and I have
installed netatalk which lets the Mac machines access my drives and
printers... Networking is great!!
One tip.... Get WEBMIN!!!! I think this should be the first thing that you
are told when you install the linux distro. It is a great way of
configuring most things on the machine, and what runs and when!!
Fantastic!!!
So to answer 2). Mandrake would be my recommendation. I prefered it to Red
Hat. I also read (I believe it was in PC Week, Aus) a recent comparison of
about 12 distro's, and Mandrake came out on top of that too. I got the
distro on the coverdisk.
I use my machine for mainly CF development. I have found that jEdit is a
great editor, it's Java too and will therefore run in windows as well. And
of course don't forget StarOffice/OpenOffice to open all your MS Office
documents!! :^)
Personally, Linux seems to do everything I need of the machine. And it
stops me having to worry about the continually increasing costs of software
from the likes of MS! The latest Office XP being a perfect example!!!
I'm not a big anti-MS person, I just can't afford to buy their software at
the rate it's being released!!! So Linux is perfect.
Hope this helps a little, feel free to email me personally if you have any
more questions!
All the best
Nick
on 31/7/01 3:57 AM, Ken Wilson at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Can I get some advice from those more experienced?
>
> I need to dive into Linux. Currently running Win2K server on my development
> machine and, thanks to recent downsizing at my old job, can't afford a
> second box for running Linux right now. So, my initial questions are:
>
> 1) Is running Linux via VMware a reasonable option? Performance ok for my
> purpuses? Or am I likely to run into problems that have little to do with
> Linux.
>
> 2) Any advice regarding what flavor of Linux would be best for a complete
> newbie to start with? Between all the variations of Red Hat, SuSE, Madrake,
> etc. I'm a bit clueless as to which would be best and don't have anybody
> knowledgeable to ask. Likewise, will the cheaper "Personal" versions get me
> what I need to start versus the "Pro" versions? I assume that's mostly a
> matter of what's packaged with it.
>
> Any advice is much appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ken
>
>
>
>
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