Shiato Han wrote: > im a linux newbie, may i ask if what linux desktop > distro that i could install on my laptop with the > following specs, P3, 128mb 10gb. That has a minimal > hard drive consumption.
I could run Slackware 8/9 on a 64MB P233 MMX machine nicely, so I'm sure your laptop will be able to run Slackware 10.x quite comfortably. I do run Linux almost completely from the command line so X-Window might still be an iffy affair, but there is really nothing you can do about it since Slackware's X-Window distribution is just about the smallest around, adding ZERO to the base distribution. You should use a more minimalistic window manager instead of KDE or Gnome. Try Windowmaker (nice)... or twm, if you can live with the primitivity of the latter. Slackware does not add any of its own homegrown utilities so it's effectively the slimmest distro you can really ask for. This also entails a steeper learning curve but to me, it's well worth it. For example, in Suse, you can use Yast to configure your machine to act as a router. It only takes a few clicks. In Slackware, you have to know the correct iptables command to enable routing (found through a HOW-TO). It's only a few more keystrokes, but it's a bit more complicated and takes a bit more time to understand. [ In the case of my trying to share my 56K dialup wirelessly - yes, Linux or BSD is a great OS to let you do this sort of shit - I felt Slackware made it very clear what was going on underneath. Admittedly, dealing with pppd is and has always been a PITA... but I eventually got it working and... MOST IMPORTANTLY, the solution was well-understood and did not involve 'mysterious' hacks unlike what is often the case with Windoze and Linux distros with a 'friendly' insulating layer... ] Suse (and Redhat, Mandrake, etc...) insulates you from the need to know what's really going on underneath while the Slackware method forces you to learn the TRUE way to do it. The great side benefit is that such knowledge will apply to *ANY* distribution. The position may sound extreme, but frankly, the sort of hand-holding commercial distros give you is not really in the spirit of Linux. People who need such 'friendliness' (in quotes, because it actually starts to go against your interests when you start to need to do more complicated things - which is often the case in system administration) should just stick to Windoze (which is actually a great OS - it just has a different philosophy of doing things... superior for the end-user, but inferior for the system administrator). The two great disadvantages of such hand-holding are that you do not learn knowledge that is applicable across different distros and a lot of the flexibility and power is hidden from you Granted, all that 'flexibility and power' is annoying to have to face when you're just trying to do something simple, but once your needs become more sophisticated, you will appreciate the knowledge of what features are actually available (hidden away in most other distros). -- reply-to: a n d y @ n e o t i t a n s . c o m http://neotitans.com - Web and Software Development It's called DOM+XHR and it's *NOT* a detergent! _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
