Hi everyone!

I no this has most likely been asked before, but i have had a look and could not find a answer.

I need a small distro that will be on 24/7, used as a gateway to the internet (so must be easy to set up to a dial\ADSL line) and to store files. It will be set up in a mirrored array and i would like it to be less that one gig in size. I have used RedHat 9, but as its not supported anymore and im not sure where to go? There has been so much news about large companies buying small Linux distros im not sure what one to pick that will still be around in the future AND still ran by the community.

I would like a distro with a GUI and is easy to use like RedHat 9, as i am new to Linux.

Your help is appreciated,
Tim

how about fedora core 2.

if you are accustomed to redhat 9, then the transition will be easy.
fedora core 2 is is pretty much the same as redhat 9 in my opinion.

well... its got a completely different kernel, and uses all the up to date packages.
and looks alot nicer.. (also performs quite a bit better too)

things like the services interface, and network contoll interface are very very similar.

if you were happy with redhat 9, then definatly go for fedora core 2.

Thanks for your advice.

Its just i herd alot about other distros, i thought it would be a good time to change?

If you think it will be ok, then i will give it ago.

I would like to hear anyone else opinion...

Try Debian or Mandrake 10

Thanks for youe input, could you tell me why you think that? And why to choose one of them over the fedora core 2.

Thanks, im just trying to get as much info as i can, as the one i choose i will most likey use for life!

Well ii'm rather new too and installed both Fedora Core 1 and Mandrake 10. Between the two, they're equally easy to install. But i've found Mandrake had alot more things actually working straight out of the box. Fedora required me to install alot of extras to make even basic stuff like MP3s work.

If space is really a problem try something like Knoppix, which is a live-on-cd distro [no installation, runs totally from cd]. I think it's based on Debian, so probably a good way to test how good that works without changing your system. And if you need to go even smaller, i found a little distro called Feather Linux which is only 64MB and runs from my USB flashdisk [boots from it and all that]. Fun :P

Thanks for your advice!

Space is not that much of a problem for me, less that 1 Gig if fine. (that CD linux does sound fun!)

Im not to worried about playing mp3 and stuff as the box will just be a file server and share access to the internet.

Thank you again and i would love to hear anyone elses opinion

Supposedly Fedora will be a community release forever, but who knows. Debian is the only distro set up that way. It should never die. Mandrake has always been free as well, so even if the company goes bankrupt, the source will live on. There are others, butof the ones I have tried so far, they have the most complete sets of software and they are both well-supported. I have had good luck with them as well. I have tried Slackware and tis marvelous (if you install swaret the minute you get on the net), but the learning curve is high. If you have the time to compile, Gentoo has a decent install as well. Of the 20 or so distros and Windows versions, and FreeBSD and NetBSD variants, that I have installed and used, when my hard drive crapped out and left me with the little 4 giger on the shelf, I installed Mandrake 10 as my main working OS.

Hello

You could try Xandros desktop 2 easy to use easy to configure and the people on the forum are helpful. Take a Look at www.xandros.com

and here http://forums.xandros.com/

good luck

Mathew

Thanks for your post.

But im looking for an open source distro

I suggest trying morphix - http://www.morphix.org/. I downloaded it recently, took it for a spin, and am actually impressed. It is a Debian-based Live-CD, which can also be installed to a HD. It's auto-detection is brilliant. My sometimes tricky cable modem was detected instantly. I was impressed with the amount of software they crammed into it.
The current version is not yet on a 2.6 kernel, but they are working on it.

Hi guys

Thank you for your help so far.

Now i am thinking of choosing Mandrake or Fedora, but there was one thing i forgot to say! The processor will only be 333Mhz, what one do you think will run best!

Thanks again
Tim

you could run either of those most likely on that processor without much problem. where you might run into problems is the amount of ram. to run smoothly on such an old system, it is often the case that you have to really trim the kernel, as it resides in memory at all times, and a bloated kernel doesn't leave much room for apps in your ram, causing you to use lots of swap which runs off of disk and is MUCH slower. also, you might look into running a smaller desktop environment/window manager, as kde 3.2 will likely CRAWL on that system if you get it running.

Thanks for your reply

I did use RedHat on a 500Mhz CPU and it ran SO SLOW! That had 128MB of RAM.

How about Trustix. Based on RH, no GUI but depending on installed packages only about 300mb.