Hi everyone, Mike here and new to this forum

Hi everyone. I'm Mike and I'm a lapsed *nixer. I've not touched any flavour for over two years now and only tinkered with a Sharp Zaurus and an old laptop for about a year before that. My bad!

My first linux distro was RedHat 4.2, from a CD bundled with a book, way back in 1996. I was a sys admin for a network of a mixed bag of Irix, Solaris and HPUX systems, a few linux boxes and a number of thin clients (we called them X-Terminals then. LOL!). Back in the day, building from source, hand cut configuration and kernel rebuilds mandatory. csh, sed, awk and, of course, Perl. Happy days.

Unfortunately, there are a number of Windoze only applications that I have to use in my job which precluded linux. However, with the latest release of Crossover Pro, there's hope that I can use some of them through that. Yay!

Anyway, I'm rusty and my knowledge is behind the curve, so please be gentle with me if I ask something dumb. Make that *when* I ask something dumb. LOL!

I'll be looking to convert a HP 2133 from the dark side (Vasta Bloatness to be precise), to try out Crossover and see if it can unshackle me from the Redmond infection. So, Via Chrome graphics. Mmm! Interesting!

Take care

Regards

Mike

Hi and welcome to LQ Mike, the only dumb questions are the ones left unasked. Welcome back so to speak.

Welcome and I agree with Larry, feel free to ask away!

Sounds like you learned Linux the way I did. Taking a old redhat Cd years ago and tinkered with it using source. Can't say I didn't feel like pulling my hair out at times but I did learn. Yeah things have changed a lot. And don't worry most of us don't bite (hard).

-Jessica-

Welcome

Which distro are you planning to go with? Been a good year for releases, PC-BSD/Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora plus many more released good versions.

Hi. Thanks for the welcome guys. Yes, I feel like Grandpa saying 'back in the day'. When you could partition off 512MB of disk space and fit a full linux distro in there - mail, proxy server, firewall and all. LOL! Kernel rebuilds were the norm (probably the first thing after completing the install). It's the 'kitchen sink' approach of Windows that's especially annoying, leading to ever more bloated operating systems. Oops! Raging against the moon.

Which distro? Well on the old laptop (Dell C400 cannibalised from two machines being scrapped by my employer about 5 years ago, due to coffee spills etc), I forced RedHat, SuSE, FreeBSD, Mandrake (as was then), Solaris 9 (what was I thinking? LOL!) on there at one time or another.

Naturally, I've been surfing for information on what's best to install on the 2133, it being a netbook with via chrome graphics and 'interesting' chipset generally. I've noticed the appearance of 'netbook' distros but, on balance, the best thing seems to be to choose a full distro and selectively customise the install to suit (i.e. lighter X server etc). Just like the old days - changing config files, building from source, maybe a kernel recompile. Looks like I might just lose any spare time I'd gained two years ago when I stopped. LOL!

Of course, then there's the OQO 01+ I acquired on ebay. Not to mention my two year old main laptop.....

Happy days! LOL!

take care everyone and have a good one

Mike

A real Linux user

I mainly like Arch Linux and Slackware. Two fast distros that give you just what you want and let you customize the system from the start.

We can always use as many Linux users here that know the system inside and out.

-Jessica-