is buying a 20gb hard worth it to play with linux?
 

Hi all
after failing at getting slackware 9 in to a GUI, i tought i take another shot.
so i tought why not get a new hard drive then use the crappy 1gb.
i looked at a computer store near me and tought about a 30gb so then i could have about 2-3 os on it to learn.
i am 15 and want to try and expand my knowledge more then just windows.
so do u think it be worth getting a 20gb hard drive to put in my old 466mhz celeron with 128mb ram and a geforce fx 5200(i know ur thinking WTF this card in a crap pc well it was the only pci card with tv output at the time i was buying)

the linux OS's i am thinking of putting on are red hat and suse.

what do you think?

Yea a 20gig or 40 gig is enough, but considering the price differences you're much better off getting a 60 or even 80, if you can afford it.

As for the distro choice, if you're planning to spend 10 hours+ per day playing around with your pc trying things out, stick with Slackware.

Good luck kid...
But I've never found a linux distro with Xfree that runs well on a crappy PC like that...
But if you can overclock your procesor then you should do that.

I've got Slack on a machine with about the same specs, except for a bit more memory. It runs X pretty smoothly. SuSE and RH are pretty bloated distros, they're not bad, but I wouldn't recommend them for a system with such low specs. Like Demonbane said, stick with Slackware, it's for your own good :D

YES!

Are you kidding? Fluxbox will run fine on that machine. Though a little more memory wouldnt hurt. As for kde and gnome theres no amount of hardware you can throw at them that will do anything but make them a little less slow.

It is tricky to get Slackware trimmed down far enough to run from a 1 Gig hard drive and still have XFree + WM + Apps, you really need at least 2 Gigs. Slackware also doesn't provide any extra help getting Xfree86 going other than what is included with XFree86. You are going to have to read the Docs on it, and it does have quite a learning curve. Don't give up, you can make it work.

Linux will run fine on that hardware. That overclocking suggestion is a good one if that is a Coppermine processor, just crank the FSB speed up to 100 mhz and turn the voltage up on the processor to where the PIII runs at that new speed and it should work great. I've got a Celerey-600E flying at 900mhz this way.

That said, your biggest problem is the 128MB of memory. It turns out, that by the time you load XFree86, and a bloated window manager like KDE or Gnome, then try to run a bloated app like Mozilla, you'll be way out of memory which will leave your system really thrashing to your swap partition/file. The earlier suggestions on using Fluxbox, Xfce, IceWM, WindowMaker, etc instead to save on memory are good except they won't be as easy for you as a :newbie: to deal with. They are still quite nice and usable, I use XFCE and Fluxbox a lot of machines myself. KDE and Gnome have become quite nice and easy to use in comparison. See if you can come up with another 128 MB to bring your total to 256, you'll be very glad you did.

I'll say it again:
VectorLinux will fit nicely on that machine of yours and leave some room left to fool around with.
It's basically a trimmed Slackware with a working X and the basic stuff you need to get your toes wet , so to say.
No KDE or Gnome or other bloatware ; IceWM , xfce and some other destop is what comes with it.
Mozilla Firebird by default installed as browser(=fast!!!!)
I've had SuSE in the 1.5 years before , but in the last moth , since I switched to Vector , I learned about ten times as much about Linux than before.
(This site helped a great deal too.)
Remarkable little fact about the VectorForums: There are NO newbies ; just different users with each their own level of knowledge.(So you won't find a "Newbie-forum")
I think , I can safely assume , I speak for the lot of the "Vectorians" and call you a hearty "welcome" over there.
(I go by the handle "SuSE-Refugee" there. Telling , isn't it?)

edit:- Damn! I just realise , I must sound like a cheap car-salesman.....
And I don't even get paid for it!

Mulitple OS on older machine
 

i am currently running suse 8.1 (just switched from slackware 9 b/c wine is included w/ the package) on a 400mhz P2 with 96 MB of pc100 ram, a 64 meg video card and a ethernet card w/ HiFi input. works great w/ KDE 3.2. Not sure about gnome, but i usually have more problems getting KDE going than Gnome. suse is runningoff of a 5Gb reiser partion with 141Mb swap, and i am also running windowsXP (trouble installing diablo 2 LOD) on an another 4gb partition. BLAH!
i have a 1.7Ghz HP networked via WIN2003 advanced server with the old man. everything works as it should the systems runs just as fast as it did out of the box. Good luck man!
:twocents:

BTW...
for memory on the old man i only have one 64MB PC133 simm and then i have a 32MB pc100 simm. i have to run everything at 100mhz bus speed but it works fine with both OS's

some of the older power supplies and motherboards
really don't like HDDs over 30g

at least in my experience

this is true, had a lot of problems with that building computers from scrap. this is back when a 250MB hard drive was a big deal

lol!

I bought a 120 GB hard drive for my linux. :) Got it for $80 at www.bestbuy.com a month ago. :)

Yes, Vector would easily fit (I have a copy crammed on a 330 Meg drive). The problem with it as far as a :newbie: is concerned is the lack of documentation that comes with it. Of course once you know about tldp.org, you can get it all there. The next problem is although I think it is a very nicely packaged little distro, it is kind of a pain when it comes to adding apps to it mostly do to "dependancy hell" problems.

I agree that it is a good one to learn on, but probably not the best first Linux for someone to experience.

When it comes to building up small highly customized Linux distributions, I've resorted to pure Debian (which I'm NOT recommending for :newbie:s because it is by far the hardest distro I've had to deal with!) because it has a superior package handling where you can specifically install and/or update just what you want and it will install anything it depends on to make it work, then even configures the app entries in all your window managers. With Debian I can get the same functionality from about 700MB install as I can from about a 1.2 Gig Slackware because I can leave out a bunch of stuff I don't use.

PS: I still love Slack however, just did the P-2-P "BitTorrent" thing on Slack 9.1 and put it on my "broken" computer that refuses to run any modern OS from Microsoft as well as FreeBSD, but has always run Linux great as long as I don't try to use DMA channel 1, or the embedded IDE controller.

I've found the easiest distros to learn on are MEPIS and KNOPPIX, mainly becasue they run from CD-ROM and are easy to install to the HDD as well and they just plain work out of the box (as opposed to debian).

They are debian based and come with apt-get and kpackage. It makes upgrading and installing most apps easy.

my question is...can i use knoppix as my mainly OS and if i could how can i......if not then they should make it as an OS like mandrake,slackware,etc....

quote:
Good luck kid...
But I've never found a linux distro with Xfree that runs well on a crappy PC like that...
But if you can overclock your procesor then you should do that.

I don't know about you, but that kind of computer is all that some people might have. Saying it is crappy, is pretty low. If you have some of those crappy computers laying around, then send them my way, I will get them to work and be happy at the same time.:tisk: