Hi Eveyone, I am NEW(bie) to Linux but have heard nothing but great praise about it as opposed to Windows. I have a 7 year old Gateway Desktop with 512 mb RAM and 80 Gb hard drive, an Intel Pentium 4 processor. What would be a suitable Linux OS for me to use (and to get to know how to use) what if any AV/ASpyware products would work with it. I have heard about Red Hat and IP COP. I am a security conscious user and do a LOT of internet browsing. Thanks!

Slackware!

But Slackware does not have a good package manager that will handle dependencies for you!

It depends on your circumstances. If your computer was a top of the line computer, for instance it has 256 mb of ram and has a 1 ghz processor you can pretty much run anything, though it may not be the fastest. If it is a lower\menium computer w\ 128 MB, you should then be careful. You could use any distro, but use a light weight desktop environment like XFCE or LXDE or else your computer will run slow.

-Once I had a 9 year old Compaq Presario(256 MB RAM and 700 megahertz processor), and I tried putting GNOME and it was disasterous.

-I put KDE 4 on a 2005 Dell with 256 MB RAM and 2 GHz processor and it ran OK, but after I upgraded the memory it worked better.

Some posible forms of linux you could use are(if it fits the first scenerio):

Xubuntu
openSUSE with XFCE
Debian with LXDE or XFCE
Fedora with LXDE.

Also, some of the desktop effects and splash screens will work slower or not at all, so be careful with desktop effects. Don't expect the boot splash to work.

Good Luck!

What?!? That's TINY!

My computer has 6GB of RAM, and about 660MB of it is used just running GNOME and a few programs.

That is sometimes a good thing because the dependency handling can f the system up.
@OP
with 512, you could run GNOME so Ubuntu will work.
Also think about debian.
P.S. there is about 1000x less linux viruses over windows.

Slackware ftw!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MTK538 well you obviously don't know slackware.... slackpkg / slkpkg / sbopkg .......all of which will guide you for dependencies....

Hi,

You know this from experience?

Slackware is not a hold your hand distribution. If you need something you could use 'SlackBuilds' to acquire SW. 'pkgtool' is the basic manager but others are available. I really don't like it when someone spreads rumors that have no substance, especially when that someone doesn't know what they are talking about.

The core install has a lot of SW available for the user to choose and when you need something there are multiple packages available. Slackware is the oldest stable GNU/Linux distribution. As a Slackware user, I know that dependency is not a problem for the informed. But if you do break the system you can always recover without too much effort.

Of course there is the LQ Slackware Forum to get the best available help when things need to be polished when you get stuck.

Ok,help me out here Slackers as i'm a Debianite .
I understand Slackware does have various options for package management,as mentioned above.
So i looked a little deeper and found this quote:

I got this from the following link:

http://www.slackbook.org/html/package-management.html

So my question is how do you deal with dependencies at install?,and also how do you remove said dependencies if you want to remove packages?.

the_trooper: There are many ways to determine what dependencies may be necessary for a package to function. You must take your mind away from the "slackware" issue, and think more in terms of "Linux". Any package of software, developed for Linux, is bound to have some sort of documentation. (Key word here, documentation) Most of the time, the author of any software will post on their website, the packages that are necessary to install onto your system for their software to work correctly. As they say, "With great knowledge comes great responsibility." There is research involved with Linux. It was designed that way to weed out all the newbs... just kidding. But seriously, Google whatever package your interested in. Find the authors web page. Search forums for those who have asked the same question you have before you.

OR
Read this, (here's that documentation I was talking about.)
http://www.sbopkg.org/docs.php

THEN
# installpkg http://sbopkg.googlecode.com/files/s...arch-1_cng.tgz
# sbopkg

sbopkg is an awsome package manager imho, very user friendly, and it will tell you when your missing a dependency and the dependencies package name, so you can look that up, and install it too.

1 members found this post helpful.

Esteemed fellow members;

Please think twice about recommending Slackware to a newbie. Also, when someone asks which version of Linux to start with, squabbling about the merits of dependency-checking package management is almost certainly not going to be helpful.

Mikey*;
1. http://distrowatch.com ...Anything in the top 5-10 on the "hit list" will be a good starting point. (I have run MANY versions of Linux on a 700MHz P-III with 320M of RAM.)
2. Don't worry about viruses when getting started. Many of us have never had a virus issue (In my case, after ~6 years and 100 different installations)

@trooper;

Please do not hijack existing threads with an unrelated question. Look at the original post and ask yourself if the OP even knows what you are talking about---much less whether it is addressing his/her question......

I strongly agree.

I threw Xbuntu onto a lappy that came my way.
it had 256Mb ram & a 20Gb hdd, don,t remember the cpu size.

The W2K that was on it - got zapped - it was not running too well, anyway.

the Xbuntu seemed to work quite well, after it was installed.

the only problem was with the cd drive, which was somewhat dodgy.
so, the install took a few attempts to get it to succeed, ok.