For those that do not like long posts, it is safe to skip to the penultimate paragraph.

My sanity - which has been hanging from a slightly singed, hair-width length of cotton over a tall cliff with a roaring furnace at the bottom for several months now - has just been met by a hooded figure with a pair of scissors, who goes by the name of SuSE Linux. If there was a thread to complement success stories called 'failure stories', then I'd have posted this there. I have tried Mandrake 9.1, Gentoo 2004.0, Fedora Core 1, Linspire 4.5, NetBSD and finally SuSE 9, after a series of particularly unpleasant episodes with Windows.

Mandrake worked OK for about the same length of time that I was entitled to free technical support, after which it began freezing up when certain programs were launched, the sound didn't work, and for an encore, KDE suddenly refused to recognise that my image files existed.

Hence I downloaded 6 more OSs to try - a quest for the best distro - comprising Fedora Core 1, SuSE 9.0, NetBSD, Gentoo 2004.0, Debian 3.0r2 and Slackware 9.1 - most if not all of which you will notice are now out of date. I tried Gentoo first, which took a whole day to install, and I made the horrific mistake of using 'genkernel' which seemed conveniently to compile in all of the kernel modules that I happened not to want, and few of the ones I did.

Next, I found Linspire 4.5 free with a magazine, which I decided to take a look at. I tried installing it on one of my PCs, but when it had reached 90%, it produced an error code, and reset uninstalled. When I successfully got it installed on a friend's computer, I found that it wasn't immediately compatible with their - or my - Internet hardware, and it was therefore, to put it bluntly, absolutely useless.

Following this episode of despair, I ventured to install NetBSD, which I realised was in fact Unix. Of course, I made the mistake of trying to install it on the same computer that I had just failed to install Linspire on, and hence, it didn't work either. Coming to the conclusion that I may have a problem with that hard drive, I tried installing it on a different computer of mine; it worked. Unfortunately, even after several days of hard work with it, I could only get to the stage of using 'twm' on X, and I gave up to its sheer complexity.

At the other end of the spectrum was Fedora Core 1, which was very easy to install and run. I was probably too optimistic, because it was barey two hours before... well, suffice it to say: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...&goto=newpost.

And after that, I found a success story on LinuxQuestions that detailed the wonders of SuSE. I tried to install it on the computer of mine with a 550MHz processor, 320MB RAM, and plenty of HDD space, and after waiting 3.5 hours for it to install, I was finally met with this error message:
'Error 18: the selected cylinder exceeds the maxium supported by the BIOS'.
Yes, perhaps I should have tried this on a faster computer, and yes, I still haven't tried Debian or Slackware, but since they are generally regarded as more complex to install, I am frightened that it will all go wrong yet again but in a much more explosive fashion.

Finding myself in the embarrassing situation of having no fully working operating system to turn to in this time of crisis - except perhaps if I buy an Apple Mac - I turn to LinuxQuestions for advice or consolation of any nature. Thank you. (Please don't misunderstand me - I am not trying to invoke a distro war by saying such bad things about them, because I know that plenty of people have got all of these distros to work perfectly. If I come across too strongly, it is probably only because I am so frustrated by all this hassle).

I see you had most success with the RedHat derived distros of Mandrake and Fedora, and suggest you try Mandrake 9.2. I havent tested my 10 install much but know my 9.2 install is rocking.

Are you aware of any hardware issues your current machine has? Both in terms of compatability/drivers and also ago/condition?

If you haven't already tried Slackware, definitely give it a shot. The reputation that it's "hard for newbies" or "hard to install" is absolutely baffling to me, as I thought it was a snap. The main difference with installing Slack vs. anthing else is that the Slack installation process uses a set of primitive looking menus rather than a fancy and slick GUI, and that from time to time you need to manually type in some info (horrors!) rather than clicking on an icon. (The info you would need to type in comes down to typing in the names of the mountpoints for your partitions, assuming you are using a separate partition for /home or /usr, etc. )

I would recommend checking out this link for a well-written summary of the Slack 9.1 installation process, along with some screen shots of those menu screens. Honestly, installing Slack is not that difficult, but most of all, it's an excellent (I would say the best) distro out there. Note: obviously the "best" distro is a subjective call, and others may disagree.

Good luck with it though; I would encourage to stick with it even if it has been frustrating thus far. -- J.W.

Thank you for your positive comments. I will definitely try Slackware if I can find a convenient recess in one of my hard drives for it to reside. I am not aware of any hardware issues with my PCs - I always check the Linux compatibility databases/howtos before installing, and I have never considered the PC I'm using now to be old or out-of-condition. The PC that has the 550MHz processor is probably too old - but after checking the system requirements for all Linux distros, I see that this should not really be a problem.

Thanks again.

Definitely check out the link I cited earlier -- that way you'll have a clear picture of what to expect during the actual installation. Good luck with the project. -- J.W.

Atleast you can get them to install :'(

I can empathize with you. Do try Slackware. If you've gotten as far as you did with NetBSD and Gentoo you shouldn't find it any trouble. I'm really poor at commandline and even I can set up Slackware! The installation isn't as pretty as mandrake and Suse, but it's so simple and logical and it's never gone buggy on me. I just installed it on my husband's box after weeks of frustration trying to get SuSE, Mepis and PCLOS to work correctly. Every one of them was beautiful but had bugs I couldn't resolve.
A lot of distros are putting in NVIDIA drivers to start by default, and firewall GUIs by default, etc. I have more problems dealing with those things when they _don't_ work right than I do with Slackware, which insists I set all that stuff up for myself if I want it.

Here are some tips for installing Slackware:

Use cfdisk to partition when it prompts you. I recommend you choose the Newbie option for selecting packages and take your time to read the prompts carefully. Things you need will be installed by default. The rest will be verbosely described so you can decide if you want it or not. You'll learn a lot about what's going into your system.

You will have to set up X after installing, so write down your video card information (amount of memory it has) and your monitor's horizontal and vertical refresh rates ahead of time. When you're done installing and you boot to a terminal screen, type "xorgconfig" (w/out "").
Once you have X configured, type "startx" and there you are. If you want to change your default window manager, type "xwmconfig"

Look in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and uncomment anything you want to have start at boot, like lp and parallel port if you have a parallel port printer.

Use the command "adduser" to add a user. Edit the /etc/group file to give users permissions for various things. It's actually really simple, and it just works ;-)

HTH,
Siri Amrit

i'm running both suse and slackware on a 500mhz pc with 191mb ram...they both run fantastic. don't give up yet, and take it from me, if *I* can install and run slackware, anyone can.

Some thoughts before "@new try"
suse installation said>Error 18: the selected cylinder exceeds the maxium supported by the BIOS'
and you did say >and plenty of HDD space...

maybe here resides some hardware configuration problem?
is it some machine from year2000 something, without bios update and new harddrive on it?
Is your hdd size correct under BIOS and proper disk translation method enabled?what disk size, manufacturer
how big is your / partition you are trying to install to?
some machines can't handle 8 gig barrier limits, some 27, and etc.

Just in case.

Another vote for Slackware from me, I tried RH9, then FC1 and had various problems with installations, up2date, sound, dependencies etc,etc and as a total noob Slackware was easily the most simple installation.

If you haven't already read it do a search for Shilo's great "How I do it all" post, it helped me (and it seems many others) a lot.

The best part is that when you google for ideas they (almost) always seem to work in Slackware when in RH9 or FC1 I had many circular problems.

HTH,

mark

Do you have your hard drive set for LBA in your BIOS? I think you may need that if Lilo is going to look for a /boot partition further out than 8 gigs.

Siri Amrit

Thank you all for your help. I will certainly take heed of your advice, tigerflag.

The HDD I tried installing it on was a Maxtor 15GB, which I think was bought before 2000 some time. The BIOS is set to 'Auto' as far as the HDD's properties are concerned, and I have already tried it in LBA mode, which doesn't make any difference. SuSE did not set up a /boot partition - just a swap partition and then a root partition, both of which begin well before the 1024 cylinder boundary. The total size for the installation was about 8GB, and SuSE said it would install about 1.5GB.

Have you tried a live CD like Knoppix?
Not so much for your only OS, but to use as a backup if/when you have major problems.
Do you set aside a partition for a backup of your personal files?
Have you checked out your hardware?
Do you "tinker" too much?

Generally Linux (at least some distro) will run fine. I do have one "rogue" computer that fails to boot any "live cd" but Vector (not Knoppix, not DSL, not Slackware Live CD, not F.I.R.E....), or recognize it's network card (bad reiser card or mainboard?). Windows 98 runs fine, but it will not stay there (as the only OS) much longer.

Personally I do not recommend distro hopping without knowing (or believing) that there is a real reason for changing. I also do not recommend switching cold turkey from Windows. In this scenario you would be able to pursue difficulties with Linux (as long as you are interested) from familar Windows and move when you knew you had a working solution (if you were still interested).

Perhaps a dual/multi boot is your best answer here. One Windows and one or more Linux partitions. Evaluate and decide what works for you. It will be a bit of trouble for a while. But you will know that you have what you want in the end.

I have tried LiveCDs - MandrakeMove and SuSE Live-Eval. I do have a spare partition but I don't use it for back-up of data; I use CDs for that. And I already have a multi-boot OS setup. On my main computer, one hard drive runs Mandrake and Win XP Pro; the other runs NetBSD and Gentoo, and I want to put Slackware on it as well. You see, I try out all these distros, encounter problems with them, but then I get too scared to get rid of them in case I lose something or mess the whole PC up. Installing more is the only tinkering I do.

I have checked my hardware against compatibility databases and it all says that it should work with Linux.

There's one thing I'd like to ask about multi-booting Linux. I have Mandrake and Gentoo on the same computer, and to change from one to the other I reboot the computer and select the other from LiLO. However, would I get the same effect by using the 'CHROOT' command to change the root directory?