Can anyone point me in the right direction please?!

I am new to Linux, I consider myself an advanced user of all Windows versions (built/run few networks).

I have tried a few Live CD's and got on okay, but when it comes to installing a distro on to my hdd I come unstuck.

I recently downloaded openSUSE 10.3 GM-KDE, which after much research thought would be a good place to start, however, the installation process told me my 8Gb HDD(edit - sorry 4Gb) was not big enough.

So I went ahead and tried to do an install of Knoppix v5.1.1 2007-01-04, I managed to get to the option of which install I would like, selected the correct 'radio button' and could not find the described 'go' button to continue the install!

I have also tried Feather and Antix7 on Live cd but did not get on too well with exploring the OS.

2 other distros I downloaded but did not get on with are- PC-BSD and Puppy-3.01-seamonkey. My reasons for not liking them was the lack of GUI and being left in a 'DOS-like' environment I am not used to (apart from DOS!)
I realise that command line stuf is what Linux is all about (to the more hard-core) but I dont want to jump in the deep end just yet!

So to sum up! I really like to look of openSUSE (HDD to small), I liked Knoppix (would not install), I did not like Feather and Antix7 (due to interface), PC-BSD and Puppy-3.01-seamonkey (do not like the command line interface - assuming I ran the live cd correctly)

Can anyone offer guidance before I go downloading more distro's, waste more cd's!

Many thanks - in anticipation!

Laptop specs- (runs Win2k okay)
Toshiba Satellite 4030CDT
Pentium 333Mhz
128Mb
4Gb
CD only
USB (not bootable)

I suggest that you try Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and Xbuntu in that order. The Ubuntu series have a good set of defaults which tend to work on a wide variety of hardware. The difference in the three distributions is the desktop installed. Kubuntu = KDE, Ubuntu = Gnome, and Xbuntu = XFCE.

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Steve Stites

Many thanks for the prompt reply. Will do that ASAP.

You might also want to look at PCLinuxOS.

This is an easy to use distro, features KDE as the default desktop.
http://www.pclinuxos.com/

Kanotix, which is based on Knoppix, has good hardware detection and (for my internet connection) ethernet setup. It's available as a liveCD, but it's also easy to install.

For a list of distros, go to distrowatch.com. You can select from the top 100 distros (scroll down the page a bit, and they're listed on the right-hand side of the page). Or, at the top of the page there is a drop-down list box that you can select distros by name.

Also at the top of the page, in the right-hand side of the banner, click on Search. Then scroll down the page, and you can select distro by category (livecd, forensics, scientific, etc.).

go ubuntu without a doubt, I did a fresh install of 8.04 today and it went sooo easy I almost forgot how much I dislike XP :P

goto www.ubuntu.com

click the link for download, and chose the appropriate architecture etc

takes about 1.5 hours on 2mb connection to download

burn to disk, boot from it, click click click install job done

To add to what the others have commented on here, I've never had an issue with ubuntu not picking up hardware, didnt even have to install printer, just plugged it in

Good luck!

But....if you have only 128 MB of RAM,then already given advices about distros want be good for your laptop.I can remember two distros at the moment that will work with that amount of RAM,Puppy and Absolute Linux.

on 128 of ram, those live cd's are going to be painfully slow.

http://easys.gnulinux.de/en/

There's a link to the "EasYs GNU/Linux" homepage.
While I realize you have a number of options and offerings in the previous posts, I felt it worth mentioning that I have had great success installing & using Easys 3.0 on my old Toshiba laptop, which runs a Pentium II or III 399Mhz CPU, 128MB of ram, a 6GB hard disk, DVD reader, Trident video device and ESS sound card.

I set the drive up with a 4GB Ext2 partition for the installation, and the remaining 2GB for swap space (due to the small memory of the laptop). I set the video driver to 'vesa' after installation/reboot (I think-- it may have already been vesa, but might have been 'trident' too..) and the sound was automatically detected, I just had to unmute the mixer and turn up the volume (as is usually the case after a fresh install).

Easys is a Slackware based distro, configured to be super easy to use, and retaining complete Slackware compatibility, for package installation. While Slackware is big and 'Unixy' and relatively complicated (allegedly) for new Linux users, Easys is super easy indeed. It comes by default with the 'one application per task' mentality, rather than a large selection of applications to choose from that all do the same thing.

I have Absolute Linux here too, but that wouldn't install on my laptop for some reason, nor will Ubuntu.

Easys just released version 4.1 a few days ago (I just looked on Distrowatch.com) and so is still maintained. It uses KDE (KDE Lite?) as the default desktop environment.

Best of success, with whichever you settle on

Sasha

Puppy Linux has a graphical interface, but (from what I've read on the Puppy forum) the Toshiba laptops had a problem. As I understand it from the release notes for the new version of Puppy, fixes for the problem were worked on in the latest version. You might like to give Puppy 4.00 a try and see whether it will work on your machine.

You don't have enough ram for Ubuntu (and maybe other bigger distributions) - it says on their site that you need at least 256Mb.

There seems to be some doubt about whether that is a 4G or 8G hard drive. And are you devoting the whole hard drive to Linux or are you still trying to keep a partition for windows (which will reduce the effective size of the hard disk for Linux)?

You ought to be able to install SuSE in 8G, although on a machine of this spec it might not be the best idea. One of the distros specifically targetted at older machines would be more reccomended, primarily due to the amount of ram.

Anything with Kde or Gnome as a user interface will be, at best, unexciting in 128 M and you would be better considering something using, say, Xfce or another compact GUI (so, Xubuntu rather than Ubuntu or Kubuntu, or any of the specifically-targetted distros like Puppy, DSL, etc).

That said, if you aren't impatient, and you don't intend to use many big programs KDE or Gnome should work, just slowly.

This is one of the cases in which I'd want to allow a little more than 2x ram for swap, though, just in case you ever open OpenOffice...

Sorry- my bad! 4Gb of mayhem to play with. Un-partitioned as yet.

I would try dsl damn small linux.

I just tried Puppy 4.0 (!) on an eBox (same miniPC as a Zonbu). The whole distro is just 196MB and it runs like a dream in 69MB of RAM. The fastest Linux I have even seen.
Really give it a try remember the lastest is the greatest = 4.0 !! It has a very nice grafic interface, no commandline needed untill you get bitten by the pinguin bug

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