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Originally posted by Rory in Toronto Why don't you try installing one of the Live CDs first, to see if you have any success. That might be a good indication of whether loading that OS might be the right one for you.
Mandrake and Ubuntu have LiveCDs. SuSE has one, too. You could start with Knoppix, which is Debian based. I've tried all and they're all very easy. I like Ubuntu's new CD.
It would be interesting to see how far you get with these Live CDs.
Excellent point and I'm so excited about this whole new thing to Linux.... . To begin with, I first tried DSL's liveCD, and now it's embedded on my HD as the primary OS.
Call me naive but can I still run other live CD's?
I suspect what you may find is that you don't have much luck with these which means you'll have to maybe try some of the tiny linux distros, which you'll find at distrowatch.
Careful, though. Linux is addictive. It cost me a new computer because I wanted a computer separate from my Windows box, which I still need from work. Of course, I barely turn it on any longer. Nothing beats the world of Linux, imho.
Let us know how it goes.
Rory
P.S. And yes you can use other LiveCDs when a Linux distro is loaded on your computer. The point of the Live CD is that it runs directly from your CD-Rom and doesn't need your HD. But, it will act as a test for whether all your other components are up to the distro.
Last edited by Rory in Toronto; 10-17-2004 at 07:59 PM.
I suspect what you may find is that you don't have much luck with these which means you'll have to maybe try some of the tiny linux distros, which you'll find at distrowatch.
Careful, though. Linux is addictive. It cost me a new computer because I wanted a computer separate from my Windows box, which I still need from work. Of course, I barely turn it on any longer. Nothing beats the world of Linux, imho.
Let us know how it goes.
Rory
P.S. And yes you can use other LiveCDs when a Linux distro is loaded on your computer. The point of the Live CD is that it runs directly from your CD-Rom and doesn't need your HD. But, it will act as a test for whether all your other components are up to the distro.
Much respect for the info ... I will surely give it a try especially the Knoppix version live CD.
Statements made above about barebones linux running on low erformance systems are simply untrue. My IPAQ PDA has only 320 MEgs memory (32 Mb's of which is RAM), and this is with a CF card, and the StrongARM processor, together with the above specs, makes it equivalent in power/performance/capacity to a very old laptop/desktop system. I've been running Familiar Linux with the GPE wm in my PDA with perfect results and I can do just about everything most end users like me do in computers (web-browsing, email, SSL support, spreadsheet, latex, word-processing, IM, PIM p2p networking etc) with very few problems. And GPE is more resource hungry than fluxbox in regular machines.
Most of the live-cd's require 128MB of memory. I know Knoppix has an option to use icewm, but I dont' know if that brings down the requirements. Morphix has a light-gui option and it is supposed to be easy to install to hard drive http://www.morphix.org/.
Knoppix I belive has the choise of running a lighter windowmanager, but beware! Half your ram will be used for a ramdisk, but with a swapdisk (knoppix handles this when it sees that you have a small ammount of ram) It'll run.
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. To begin with, I first tried DSL's liveCD, and now it's embedded on my HD as the primary OS. 
It cost me a new computer because I wanted a computer separate from my Windows box, which I still need from work. Of course, I barely turn it on any longer. Nothing beats the world of Linux, imho.
