Hey,

Ive got a problem. I have minimal experience with linux, and have been unsucessful with many distros because of my damned USB Cable modem (Motorola 4200).

The problem, as ive worked out, is that 2.6 kernel distros fail to detect my modem, whilst 2.4 distros detect it fine. The problem is, all the latest and greatest distros are 2.6!

Can anyone offer a solution as to how I can fix this, why it occurs, any ways to change 2.6 to 2.4, or any good 2.4 distros!

Thanks =D

Slackware 10.1 uses kernel 2.4.29
this is the best Slackware ever............

Hi,

Good 2.4 distro (i.e. the very best ):

Slackware 10 - actually now updated to 10.1 but I haven't tried this yet.

Cheers,

Steve

slackware IS the best linux distro you will ever find. It works, its clean, it doesn't violate your mother without asking. Slackware is simply put the distro. Gentoo is also quite good aswell as debian, but nothing can touch slackware in my book.

All well and good, but I hear slackware is difficult, and I have minimal linux experience.

Seems like a large leap to go from windows XP to slackware

hmm well you can try ubuntu beacause im my experience they have great auto hardware detection but then again its 2.6 so you can try up to you

I thought this once too. I started using Linux after messing about with a few live CDs just over a year ago. Initially I used SuSE 9.0 - I got it up and running on my old machine, and I was getting there, but found it difficult, frustrating and very slow (PII + KDE = - shame there's no yawn!).

I had read about Slackware on several websites as well as this one, reading that it was more difficult to learn, but it was also much cleaner, much closer to Unix, gave you greater control of the system etc. so I made the decision to switch to slackware 9.0 2 months after installing SuSE for the first time. I think I had a few problems initially, and I think after about a month I rebuilt the system with Slackware 9.1 from scratch. It really wasn't as difficult as you might think, I think the hardest thing was the fact that although the base system is superb, and very well set up, Slackware doesn't do everything for you. You need to edit config files at the command line. There are no or very few GUI tools. This is A Good Thing. You learn how the system works, you know how to sort it out when it's screwed up, and nothing happens that's out of your control. I have come to believe that this is far better than the fast majority of unreliable GUI tools that appear in some distros. Slackware is also well documented, so you can usually find out a large amount of info through a google search or searching this site when you do have a problem.

Not only do I think that the system works far better and is far more stable this way, but it will also mean that you'll know how to administrate a Linux based system far better than you would other wise. Personally, from switching to Slackware and learning this system, this has allowed me to gain employment as part of a team of Network/System Administrators supporting a number of high usage Unix/Linux systems (our main webserver gets about 35,000 hits an hour, and somehow we keep it running on it's quad 250MHz UltraSparc CPU's and 16 scsi disks), compiling custom kernels (e.g. for a high performance squid-cache farm for around 24,000 users) building systems from scratch etc. All skills that I initially developed through Slackware.

So there you go, hope that encourages you! Do it. You know you want to. And if you like it, buy the CDs, they're a bargain and it sounds like Pat needs the cash!

I've gone on far too long, but you sound like I did once!

Cheers,

Steve

You could try Arch Linux, it's not a newbie distro either but it offers a 2.4 kernel as an option during install