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Wow Krogen. Talk about determination. You've tried quite a few distro's. Here's my experience, in order:
1) Red Hat 8 (this was a year or two ago. I didn't know how to burn ISO's, even though I had a T3+ line available to me. A friend whom I owe my experience with linux to, gave me the ISO's. RedHat and I got along quite well. It didn't give me too many problems, and things seemed to work easily.)
2) Red Hat 9 (never got to try it. Burned the ISO's wrong, troglodyte that I was (and still may be )
3) Fedora Core 1 (seemed O.K. But gave me hell whenever I wanted to install anything.)
4) Fedora Core 2 (Gave me so much hell I completely gave up on it, after badly crippling my 2nd install)
5) Tried to try Debian 3.0r1 ((By Fedora Core 1 I learned how to burn ISO's) but as a newbie got scared away by the installer)
6) Fedora Core 2 (I gave it a second try, but after trying to repair the damage done by attempting to install an .rpm got fed up)
7) SimplyMEPIS (tried this on my family's machine. It worked for a while, but after installing a few software packages, it started acting up. And it still acted far too much like a liveCD)
8) Gentoo (going from my previous experiences, installing Gentoo was like jumping off a cliff. I had to try the install 8 times over 3 days, but I never gave up, and I've now got a gentoo system that is running just peachy, in all its customized glory)
9) As much as I like Gentoo, compiling from source on all my family's machines does not appeal to me. I will probably install Debian proper on their machins this time. Either that or Ubuntu or Kubuntu.
And that's my experience over the last two years. I think I've progressed fairly far since not knowing what Linux was.
Couple days ago I got Vida Linux (VLOS) (which is based on Gentoo) to work on my PC. I tried updating my system with portage. It takes almost a whole day to download/compile everything.
Is it the same with Gentoo?
If that's what portage is about, I don't think I'll try installing Gentoo again. It MIGHT give you all the stability and all that but, woah, the upgrading takes way too much time.
Heh. at one day I'd say you got lucky. Just installing KDE took 48hrs on my machine. I haven't even attempted upgrading yet. I'm scared my laptop will overheat or worse, I won't have time to finish the process before I have to go back to my father's house. However, I've stuck with Gentoo for two reasons:
One: My system is the fastest its ever been
Two: The documentation on how to do EVERYTHING is absolutely stellar.
why do hardware comps not produce easy 2 instail drivers thats been the huge problem ive come across ? why cant it just be like a wizard like on windows make life so much more easy ?
ive had probs now with usb adsl 330 modem and on some on the linux distros no sound with creative Audigy 2 ZS
I think there are a lot of reasons for that, inspiredbymetal. One is that not too many people use linux, therefore hardware developers have no intention on making Linux drivers for their hardware. They are meant to be used on a Windows based system. Correct me if I'm wrong, but almost all Linux hardware drivers are open source developed by normal people.
Also, I don't see why your sound card won't work. It might be because it is too high-end. I have an Albatron motherboard with a built-in VIA sound chip and even though it isn't great, everything plays very well, I could say that I have less problems with it then in Windows. As for the adsl cable modem, get a router. It is an amazing, $30 upgrade. If you set it up correctly, you will never have to use a PPPoE tool again. And, as an addition, you can connect up to 4 PCs to it. When I got one, over a year ago, I was amazed by a simplicity and features of it. I got a Dlink 604 for $20. It includes a basic hardware firewall, dhcp (of course), no-driver installation, and also an easy setup for a console (like PS2 or Xbox).
Unfortunately, I can't make any recommendations about which distro is best.
Every distro I've tried so far has had some niggling little thing that's made ditching MS not quite practical.
I've had problems with modems, printers, scanners, NTFS, sound, networking (I've sorted the first 3 out, but not the last 2, yet), some of the above work on one machine / system but not another.
Currently running FC3 on one machine, MDK10.1 on the other. Others I've tried are FC2, Knoppix, Lycoris, (plus others I can't remember).
Am thinking about trying Debian - I was before I read this thread, and it almost seems like I'm ready to give it a try, and what I've read here seems to justify that.
Thanks to all who've contributed to the thread, you haven't just helped the person who asked the original question.
Yes. Get a router they are a great help. Having used routers for my entire linux career, I've no idea how linux gets along with PPPoE, but the tools do NOT look fun. Any router will work. I mean. I've got a super cheap westell router that came from Verizon, even IT works fine. It's a worthwhile investment. and yes you will still be able to use your machine as a webhost.
You may need to do something called "port forwarding" though. Basically, with port forwarding, every time someone types in "www.whateveryounamedyourwebsite.com" a request gets sent to your IP (Internet protocol) address. This is assigned to your modem. When your modem gets a packet (or a set of packets) requesting your website, it sends this data to the router, and the router (provided you set up port forwarding) knows that these packets are destined for your website, because they are requests for http/port 80, so it sends them to whatever local machine accepts http requests (that would be the machine with the website on it). You can (and will need to) set up your router so's it knows which machine hosts the website, but it's not too complicated.
That probably wasn't at all clear. If anyone can explain this in a more straightforward manner, please do so.
Originally posted by inspiredbymetal sounds like alot to setup
which modem would u recomend ? is there tutorials on setting that up ?
and is linspire worth paying for ?
I think you meant router, possibly? I'd recommend any cheap dlink router. Buy it from BestBuy, CIrcuit City, CompUSA (if you live in the USA), they all should have a bunch. In most newer routers, you don't have to setup anything except your network card - configure it to use DHCP. In some cases, you will have to unblock ports (such as 6881 if you are using bittorrent), which would be an example of port forwarding (I guess...). It is fairly easy to set it up. And there's always PortForward.com to help you out (great website).
inspiredbymetal: The modem you have is fine, and if I were you I'd get a Linksys router. THey're cheap, effective, and you can use bittorrent and whatnot without unblocking any ports. Besides, they allow you to do port forwarding.
Oh, and I don't think Linspire is worth the money. The point of Linux is FREENESS. Anyone who charges money for linux is a businessperson, not a nerd, and they have no business working with Linux. If I were you I'd go with Debian. I've used several derivatives of Debian and I've liked them all
Oh. And I've been meaning to ask. What country/state/city do you live in?
Just another newbie weighing in on the subject. I started out using Slackware and didn't have any problems except a display problem or two and a internet problem. Both were quite easy to fix, and were because I didn't read something. It took me four days to install and configure. It probably could have been done in a day if I really wanted. I only installed it because two of my friends use it, and I admit I might have installed something else for ease though I would regret that now if I would have known about this forum before installing linux.
In my mind the four days wasn't so bad since I hadn't used this pc for a year because I thought it was dead after a series of windows errors(the reason I obtained linux). I wasn't even aware of half the hardware that slackware detected and the kernel had plenty of things built into it(lucky for this latecomer). They have a book on the site, little bit dated but I found other sources of information, so it really just took a lot of reading. When I am not busy again I'm going to install Slackware on my laptop(it helps that I know the lowdown on every single piece of hardware in it) and get rid of Windows for good. I've seen a few other distros in use, too but I really like Slackware. So basically I'd like to say Slackware is not as hard to use even for us newbies as people say it is IMHO, and that we are not stupid, just ignorant. I found this forum to be good for alleviating the latter.
Last edited by MurOllavan; 06-23-2005 at 03:08 AM.
Originally posted by MurOllavan So basically I'd like to say Slackware is not as hard to use even for us newbies as people say it is IMHO, and that we are not stupid, just ignorant. I found this forum to be good for alleviating the latter.
I have to agree. I'm using Slackware and am a newbie. There's a lot of on-line books and help web pages. There's lots of dedicated Slackware forums. Not to mention it's been around almost forever. With that kind of longevity, it makes sense that there will be a lot of people that can offer help.
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