new linux convert here!

Message

JPLeonhart · Post by **JPLeonhart** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 1:20 am

I need help...

I can't boot kororaa on my PC... turns out.. I need to upgrade my RAM

I've read about gentoo working fine on a PII 128MB set I would just like to confirm it

well my PC specs are: PIII 667MHz, 256MB RAM, 32MB Nvidia riva/TNT2 M64 running on a FAT32 XP (does that matter?)

hope u guyz enlighten me

THANKS!!!!!!!!!

Dlareh · Post by **Dlareh** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 2:32 am

It'll work, but be prepared to spend a lot of time compiling. Best to let emerges run overnight.

JPLeonhart · Post by **JPLeonhart** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 3:28 am

Dlareh wrote:It'll work, but be prepared to spend a lot of time compiling. Best to let emerges run overnight.

OVERNIGHT????

and compiling?? i need to compile gentoo? i don't have compiling tools and i dunno much programing...

and uh... what are "emerges"?

Dlareh · Post by **Dlareh** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 3:33 am

Gentoo builds everything from source. If you want to install kde, for example, you need to run:

Code: Select all

emerge kde

Which will take like 24 hours on a PIII like yours.

See also the GRP: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2 ... #doc_chap2

Donman · Post by **Donman** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 3:47 am

JPLeonhart, it is OK. You do not need to know much about programming, and everything you need (the compiler tools, also known as the toolchain) are provided for you. Seeing as how you are new, I might recommend asking yourself how patient you are. If you are patient, you can get Gentoo up and running perfectly on your hardware. I used Gentoo on an old Pentium laptop with only a mere 64 megabytes of RAM, so what you have will work. Big programs like KDE or GNOME (different Desktop Environments) will take a while to compile on that hardware, so if you plan on using one of those it would be best to compile overnight. However, there are other Desktops out there you can used, called Window Managers. These would take less time to compile and would eat less resources as well.

Emerges are what you do when you install a program. To install programs in Gentoo, you just type:

Code: Select all

emerge <whatever_the_program_is>

If you do decide to use Gentoo, just follow the official installation guide, it is available on the main page. It'll get you set up all the way. Then, from there, you can continue to learn the ins and outs of Gentoo, and Linux in particular. It will take a little time getting installed though. No more than a couple of days though. If you do not have that kind of time, you can always try one of the other Linux distributions, such as Red Hat, Suse, Debian, or Ubuntu. However, if you do have the time, I would highly recommend going with Gentoo. It enables you to learn a lot about Linux, and you are in full control.

Hope this helps you out, do not let the compiling or configuring of Gentoo scare you away from it. It is a fine distro in my opinion.

JPLeonhart · Post by **JPLeonhart** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 4:06 am

so your saying i have to wait atleast 24 hrs for installing gentoo on my sys

hmmm... maybe I'll try the Live CD first

or do i need to wait overnight for it to boot??

i got a copy of ubuntu just now... live-cd and... it kinda creeped on me...(too slow....)

JPLeonhart · Post by **JPLeonhart** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 4:12 am

Donman wrote:Hope this helps you out, do not let the compiling or configuring of Gentoo scare you away from it. It is a fine distro in my opinion.

nah it won't...

I just want to try how stable Linux platform is...

and BTW the kororaa penguin is CUTE

actually that penguin got me into linux

now I need to upgrade my RAM.... (d*mn kororaa penguin!)

Donman · Post by **Donman** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 11:09 am

The kororaa livecd is old. If you just want to try Linux from cdrom, I would suggest Knoppix. It works much better. I was never able to get kororaa to boot on much of anything.

fangorn · Post by **fangorn** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 12:24 pm

I second that.

To get a glimpse of what linux can do for you, just put in a live cd (knoppix is one of the usual suspects, as the DVD version has pretty much every program a user will ever want to test, but it also is a little bit bloated

Most distributions have a live cd to see the system before installing it)

What you can expect when installing gentoo is a lean and mean linux system which can do exactly what you want to do with it, and nothing more. This comes with a small amount of learning the ins and outs of the linux system and gentoo

so be aware that you will have to invest some time to achieve this.

JPLeonhart · Post by **JPLeonhart** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 6:58 am

can anyone suggest any other distro (aside from knoppix w/c is.... good too...thanx to fangorn and Donman) which my system might be able to use??

and good for begginers too

my specs are already posted here

Dlareh · Post by **Dlareh** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 7:02 am

Try Ubuntu

JPLeonhart · Post by **JPLeonhart** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 7:05 am

ummm.... Dlareh.... look up there.... my third post...

fangorn · Post by **fangorn** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 8:21 am

There are several distros that specialize on small systems for older hardware (Damnsmalllinux, puppylinux, ... come to mind). You could try any distro that uses something other than KDE or Gnome as default, even Xubuntu (XFCE) or Flubuntu (Fluxbox, is that the correct distro name?

)

That comes, in most cases, with the effect, that you dont get these "most wanted" features like automount of hotplugged usb devices, ... and all that "usability" bullshit windows copied from MacOS

At least not out of the box.

Dlareh · Post by **Dlareh** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 2:34 pm

So keep trying it. Learn to use a different window manager.

neuron · Post by **neuron** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 2:45 pm

for a low end ubuntu setup you could also try xubuntu.

Abraxa · Post by **Abraxa** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 5:10 pm

Just curious... how come no one here recommends Debian, SuSE or RedHat?

-Abraxa

Mike46 · Post by **Mike46** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 5:52 pm

Abraxa wrote:Just curious... how come no one here recommends Debian, SuSE or RedHat?

-Abraxa

Well...before I decided on Gentoo as my distro of choice I was running Debian. For a low end system it might be a good choice, I found it generally ran faster than Unbuntu using the same window manager. I'm sure there are reasons but I didn't dig too deep into them.

Also for low end systems debian would be nice since its all binary packages so no waiting over night for compiles. However I'd suggest playing in the testing branch of Debian stable is a tad bit dated... Debian and Gentoo are the only two distro's that I've found that I like how package management is handled.

Tried Redhat use it a little at work and kind of hate it. lol

Ejunkie · Post by **Ejunkie** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 6:30 pm

Abraxa wrote:Just curious... how come no one here recommends Debian, SuSE or RedHat?

-Abraxa

i think becuse redhet and suse are both commercial, and debian is most likely outdated.

mimosinnet · Post by **mimosinnet** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 7:10 pm

I started with Linux (Mandriva) a couple of years ago, and with Gentoo from last August. I have no idea of programming and all knowlege I have on computing comes from using Linux.

What I do to work with gentoo is to follow the [really good] documentation or the forums, and keep learning as I follow the instructions. I am really enjoying myself!

[/quote]

Nevertheless, "patience" (as suggested earlier) is the word

, but it is really worth it

Dlareh · Post by **Dlareh** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 7:13 pm

Abraxa wrote:Just curious... how come no one here recommends Debian, SuSE or RedHat?

Why we don't recommend Debian: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-510150.html

SuSE and RedHat are commercial, yes. There is OpenSuSE and Fedora. OpenSuSE is fairly unknown (little interest) but Fedora is sometimes recommended.

I for one would never recommend an rpm-based distribution unless you can afford and have a use for a RedHat or Novell support contract.

dmartinsca · Post by **dmartinsca** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 9:03 pm

I ran openSUSE 10.1 for a while on my laptop -- after updating some crucial packages it worked fine and I would say is VERY noob friendly. However, this comes at a cost: 5 cds for the distro + 1 for non- open source software. To be honest, it's pretty bloated and I wasn't impressed with the speed, even with 1.87Ghz dual core, 1GB ram, and a 7200rpm HDD. Slap that on some older hardware and I get the feeling things are going to come to a crawl.

For the past couple of days i've been playing with zenwalk linux 3.0 on an old P3-500 w/ 192MB ram. It uses the xfce desktop which is nice and easy on resources compared to KDE or Gnome. I must say I rather like this distro for older PCs. A 450MB download gets you a decent range of packages for desktop/multimedia use and more can be installed through their package manager which if i remember correctly is slackware based with support for dependencies. If install/compile time is an issue you may want to give this a try.

Dlareh · Post by **Dlareh** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 9:05 pm

I doubt it's any better than Ubuntu. But suit yourself.

I try to stick to distributions people are likely to know about, so we can exchange knowledge more easily.

sonicbhoc · Post by **sonicbhoc** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 9:26 pm

I like to recommend pclinuxos to people because it is one of my favorite binary-based distros, and the greatest liveCD I've ever used. The last time I checked, it was gaining popularity over at DistroWatch (but I haven't been there in ages).

I got Gentoo working on a Pentium 1 with only 32 gigs of ram and 10 gigs of HD space, with a full working KDE install and ipppoe. It was a trivial matter, as I didn't have to use that computer for a while... if you can get over the compile times and be patient with the system, Gentoo is one of the best distros out there. It does what you want, the way you want it to.

That's my two cents.

meranto · Post by **meranto** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 10:04 pm

sonicbhoc wrote:I got Gentoo working on a Pentium 1 with only 32 gigs of ram and 10 gigs of HD space

I wish I had that PC 10 years ago

Enverex · Post by **Enverex** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 10:11 pm

JPLeonhart wrote:ummm.... Dlareh.... look up there.... my third post...

It "crept" because you were booting it off a CD, ALL Distros will run like crap (and take ages to boot) from a LiveCD as it's booting an entire OS off a compressed CD. If you actually install the distro it will be several hundred times faster.