following this with interest. i posted aquestion which is kinda related in a way, but its still with admin, i believe

where are you coming from? (any programming experience? any SW installation experience?)
What level of linux you want to achieve? (become familiar.. student SW-developper.. hobby.. )
what hardware you have to run linux?
Knoppix and TinyCoreLinux were my HARDCORE starter distro (thanks to them I could learn A LOT).

sounds complicated! although possibly isnt as complicated as it sounds (i hope!)

im also hoping my post appears (possibly wont as i think my log in timed out and id forgotten to tick the keep me logged in box) as it had much of the info requested there for my case and this is my first potential excursion outside of the realms of windows!

CentOS for newbies? Interesting...

Hi.Only shows these 2 posts for you...

most important is your hardware? If it's old and slow or new with "security-features" (to kill penguins ) and so on... then the tasks you want to do?

obviously ive lost the post then. not sure where to put it now but i will add it here and will start a new thread if its needed.

first off im pretty much a total novice. the system ive got lined up for this is a Fujitsu stylistic 4120 tablet with the wacom pen touch screen stylus, pentium 3 m processor (933mhz i believe) 512mb ram and 30gb hdd. it originally had XP tablet edition on it, somewhere along the line got wiped and ended up with normal XP pro on (so now i have to lug a keyboard and mouse around as XP didnt support touchscreens) so im thinking remove the XP and install linux as it sounds easier than trying to get a newer windows and make it run on a machine that cant physically run the minimum amount of ram (768mb max for the machine!)

overall its a spare machine that i would use for light web browsing, possibly as a digital photo frame or similar (possibly some basic games for the kids) and another possible would be as a car computer of some sort (not sure if it would be up to the job for that)

all suggestions welcome!

Searching: "Linux on Fujitsu stylistic 4120" brings up some interesting leads ...

1 members found this post helpful.

Good evening.

Most of the Linux-systems that I have installed during the last five to ten years, came as a give-away with one of those computer-magazines that are either specialized on Linux or else featured some distribution or other in one of their issues.

That said, most of these DVDs (previously CDs) are Live-systems. As you are in the UK, I doubt that it will take long to identify a few such magazines wherever you use to buy them. The best tip that I can give you is: Try out some Live-systems before installing any of them permanently on your computer. This possibility is too simple to neglect.

If you want to get the most of your testing, look out for specimen of different origin, as distributions are often derived from just a few ... how would you call that..? "Root-systems"? I don't know. Examples :
Ubuntu and Mint have Debian as common ancestor. If you know to install a Mint-system, you will most likely have no problem with Debian or Ubuntu. Another family comprises Sabayon and Gentoo, or Fedora and SuSE.

My experience with new users of Linux shows me, that the choice of the desktop is often more important than that of the underlying Linux-distribution. You can then include that as a criterion and take care to test different desktops with the Live-systems. Gnome, Mate, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Cinnamon, Unity ...

You will see the philosophy of each environment and it will facilitate your decision for the Linux-distribution which already comes with your preferred desktop-environment.

1 members found this post helpful.

do they? they might do if i had the first idea what they were talking about in them! that is part of my problem. you almost have to imagine ive never used a PC in my life, from the programming point of view (hence posting in the newbie section!)

sorry. i never realised it was as complex as all this

It is when the Fujitsu is mentioned and gets even worse when specs are so low hoop jumping is required to get a good smooth computer experience going.

My lowest spec touchscreen netbook has 1 gig of ram and a single core atom N270 processor that works the touchscreen with the "onboard" software application for touchscreens. The debian kernel 3.16 suffices for getting the driver to work from the kernel out of the box on that netbook.

Fujitsu? I don't know. This is not a plug and play piece a gear you are talking about here.
It is going require some experienced TLC to get things sorted in linux because of the low specs.

It would probably be easier to install the touchscreen driver for XP. Install a Touchscreen application .exe that is compatible with Windows XP. For you anyways. Me? I am used to these kinds of problems and
have experience bug testing distros in alpha release stages and alpha software troubleshooting techniques also.

Kinda like. I know how to speak Spanish, Ukranian, and English.
You still are stuck with only English.
Not talking down to you. Just stating facts.

You probably need to start your own thread and supply all info you can into that thread to get
better support than in this thread. Just thought I'd mention this.

1 members found this post helpful.

It is low specks and some learning (either way) but I would still go for it, start by learning to boot Linux. Maybe in Virtualbox or live? The first link in my signature will help some and when you'v learned a little start a new thread on it, in the appropriate place, giving as much info as you can...

Hay Rokytnji checkout the second post, in the nineth link searching Duckduckgo for "Linux on Fujitsu stylistic 4120:" http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/mob...ux-tablet.html

also searching "install Linux on a tablet" and such.

Edit\add: #6 in that link:

Quote:

Purchased a usb cdrw drive, and will try that as soon as I get a minute. Meanwhile, I tried several flavors of linux on a notebook with convertible touch screen, and most worked out of the box. Slitaz and another minimalist distro didn't activate the screen, but antix, suse, mandriva, ubuntu, lubuntu, and crunchbang all worked just fine.

...not sure if the Fujitsu is the "notebook with convertible touch screen" tho?

from what little i know of the system, theyre primarily a stand a lone system, although a docking station was available with such things as a disc drive, keyboard etc so that it could be converted to a laptop if you desired to do so.