Okay - not trying to activly insult - its my fault for overreacting - good luck with the install :)

rickh,

Thank you.
One thing I do not have net at home. Living on the cheap right now. I have to download here at work or at the net cafe. So the net install won't help at the moment, although I would love to try it, just for the expirience of installing an OS of the net - very cool!

So I am downloading the cd iso's... Do I need all 14?
I only wnat my wireless to work, open office2, a good dvd player, music cd player, and a media player that - if possible - will play all the standard media formats on the net, i.e. .mov. wmv, .mpg, .avi etc...
Now if possible after that I would like to hook up my digital camera and download photos, which I assume would not be diff if it is like windows and sees it like another removable drive... I need to research it.

One other thing, can someone point me to a good site with how to's in english for us non programmer types?

Thanks,:newbie:

http://www.tldp.org

Guides & infos should be the thing you are looking for & also simply search here on Lq - AFAIK :)

EDIT : add : the massive amount at http://www.yolinux.com :)

Vectorlinux ones : ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distribu...als/index.html

& MORE : http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum1/


Now U should have all info needed :)

Yolinux.... Very cool! I like this site so far. Some of the how to's I have looked at are pretty straight forward. let's hope the ones I need are...

look at the 'services' first. That the stuff that is running on your computer most of the time. You can do
and press 'spacebar' to scroll through the list of possible services running on your computer. These 'services' are listening on your ports waiting for a command to activate them. Then you need to look into which of these are actually running on your machine (remember - the list at /etc/services is just a reference )

you can also look a daemons running (try 'top' or 'ps aux' to see what is going on)

try to read up on what you find and see what you don't need. it could well be that you have a full webserver like apache running or a printer daemon without being connected to a printer. There is plenty of stuff like NFS, Appletalk, etc. which migh be running 'just in case' in a distro which wants to do everything for you. I am not saying that this is the case with RH - only that this is something you might want to look into (besides, it is interesting to see what kind of processes are running on a machine and what they do).

As for basic books, I would reccommend 'Running Linux 5th edition' and 'Linux in a Nutshell 5th edition', both published by O'Reilly. They will be useful no matter what distro you use!

Good luck!

VS

Thank You vees!!!!!

This does help. I wwas reaching a point of frustration and about to give up ocmpletely. I wanted a ditro to run as well as windows, right out of the box on this older sys. (Don't get me wrong, I am not insulting linux) but it is frustrating to click the mouse and have to wait ahile each time.

On Another note-

Last night, as suggested to me, I loaded vector linux and it ran better but was not that great. It was ot very user friendly (but it was manageable) and it ran the best up to this point and had some very pleasing eye candy but still bogged. Then I loaded Debian and it ran the best of all but I have to hunt all over creation to configure it. It only gives me 800 resolution when all other distros gave me 1024. The only interface I find will let me change it but only to 800 and below nothing over 800.
The KDE in debian is very nice too, it lets me tell it not to run all the gui affectations so it does not bog the system so much. This helped alot.
I was always afraid of debian becasue debian and slack are not to be touched unless you are a bonified guru, which leaves me out and in the dust. But this is truely nice. Maby I will take a deep breath and try the infamous slack next and see if it hurts or not.

Now if I can get the setting to where I like them, and do as vees is suggesting maby this laptop can get to linux fulltime and I won't have to put win2k back on.

ONE OTHER THING,
Should open office 2 take a VERY long time to open up? (sys: ecs laptop - 384 ram - transmeta 1 gigapro cpu (600mhz))

Thanks, I will try this tonight vees.:newbie:

I recently installed Slackware 10.2 and Dropline Gnome on my daughter's 1 Ghz Toshiba laptop after she had virus problems with Windows. We set it up to dual boot for her.

It takes a long time to install and configure (updates, 2.6.16 kernel compile, install Dropline, add additional packages, etc). but Slackware and Dropline have really brought the old machine bck to life for her. She plays dvd and divx movies, connects to her ipod, and generally leaves Windws behind as much as possible.

This is her first experience with Linux and it is working out very well, with excellent overall performance on the older hardware.

Bob

Hi cayzar,

KDE is really nice for sure, but it is a ressource-intensive desktop. Try Fluxbox. It is beautiful and very light and fast. That's what I ended up using most of the time.

OpenOffice is a memory HOG! While I used to like OO, I get really pissed at the bloat which OO 2 generates. You might wanna ask yourself whether you need all the OO features. Because if the answer is 'no' you might want to try either Koffice's KWord or even Abiword. These two are lighter and faster.

For slower machines the difference between KDE+OO versus FluxBox+Abiword is ABSOLUTELY HUGE!

A well configured GNU/Linux box should run *well* on a 450MHz processor with 128MB and very decently on a 300MHz with 64MB. If the choice is between processor power and RAM always pick more RAM.

I really want to stree something here: DEBIAN IS NOT, NOT AT ALL, for "gurus". Heck - I am really a glorified newbie (ex-Mandraker) and I had NO problems switching to Debian. Also, if the Debianb-Sarge installer gives you a headache (which it should not, its rather good except for sometimes sound - then run Alsaconf - and X) you can always install an almost-Debian with Ubuntu or, even better and closer to Debian, Kanotix.

The Debian, Kanotix and Ubunutu communites are very helpful. For Debian, make sure to post on www.debianhelp.org and you will see for yourself how helpful folks there are. And any problem they could not solve WILL be solved by the Debian mailing list.

I should add that the folks here on the Debian forum are very good also.

Yes, Debian *used* to be on the harder side (Woody could be nasty to install). This is LONG OVER.

Try it - it will be the best IT decision of your life!

Cheers,

VS

Well I got DSl running on a old Compaq deskpro 2000 and it runs like a charm!

DSL is for sure the most capable distro which can be run on older hardware. In particular when DSL's "extension" (downloadable and automatically installable applications) are included.

I run DSL on a 450MHz laptop, all of it in RAM wth the 'toram' option and its fantastic. The backup/restore option automatically backs up all my work on my hard disk, it is hyper fast and beautiful to the eye. I love it.

I'm not sure what the problem with the various laptops you're trying is, but you're probably going to have to do some learning and tinkering to get the system to run as quickly as you need.

I've never had issues with Slackware being slow, myself. Disable the running of services you don't happen to need (apache, sendmail, sshd), use a lightweight windowmanager (fluxbox or maybe IceWM), and you really ought to be fine.

You'll also eventually want to recompile the kernel for your system. IIRC, most kernels are compiled for the i386 architecture by default.

I have been loading linux on three different laptops all older. I got rid of two of them am only working with the ECS 1 gigapro (600 mhz) 384 ram, laptop now.

I have been installing choosing default options, as I am a newbie. all have run very slow.
As a said debian ran the best but the video will not go over 800x 600 when all the others gave me 1024. Dunno what is going on there.

Do not get me wrong I am not insulting linux here, but I am getting frustrated.Awhile back I used linux alot. I user mandrake and it was slow but on 'linuxnewbie.org' they said it had a lot of bloat and to try red hat. I did and it was awesome. red hat 5 then 6 then 7 the I dropped out becasue not time and my kids want ed to play games on the computer - yada, yada, yada..... But that was a desktop and fairly powerfulr for the day and age.

These laptops have been my first laptop-linux expiriences and I am ready to give up and go back to windows.

No offense but win2k ran much better than any flavor I have tried.

I WOULD MUCH RATHER LINUX, for a number of reasons though.

question, why don't I need to shut down all the services and and recompile kernals on a desktop but but I do on a laptop? From everything I have read on the distros I tried and from the help here, all of them should run fine on this laptop, but none of them do. No fancy installing or heavy customizing, just put in the disk and take the defaults.

I just want to load it and run with it. However I will take a look at the services and see if I can find the information on shutting the services down. when I ran one of the commands suggested here, I saw a number of items running but without some sort of key or reference you cannot tell what they do.

The help and advice here has been great and I am apriciative for it.

However if this laptop cannot get up and running smoothly soon then it's back to winblows and wait for the possibility of maby getting better hardware to handle the load linux presents.

i'd go with VectorLinux. www.vectorlinux.com

i'm using the soho version on my thinkpad 390x, pIII 450mhz, 128mb-ram and i'm using fluxbox as my windowmanager. you cant go wrong with vectorlinux.

when i have everything working, plus firefox and abiword running in the background, only 38mb of my ram is taken up!

vector is slackware based so its rock solid as well, but has hardware autodetection and autosetup scripts that are easy to use, and also a (graphical) package manager with all the repository links included.

only one cd to download :D

Tried vector too. Very nice. I liked it.

I wonder why these are so smooth for everyone else. I am selecting only defaults on any given run of the mill install, and these distros all run like molasses. AARRGGGHHH!!!!!

Anyway, no net at home and am at work now. will try more of this tonight.

need to find out how to identify a service then find out how to shut it off for good (so I don't have to do it every boot).