...Linux with a short learning curve. Suggestions?

[font='fixedsys,courier']There's no such thing.[/font]

Now don't say that, you'll scare him away.

Linux is not hard to learn to use (well, most things). Getting a system set up to replace a desktop is quite easy. If you use an ethernet connection to connect to the internet and the hardware is a year or two old, all you need to do is pop in an install CD and it will take care of itself.

Mandrake, and Redhat (Fedora) are well supported, have plenty of documentation, and are generic enough that most *nix users can help out with any problems you have.

Once you learn the file structure, bash (shell), and the basics on editing .conf files you're most of the way there.

When I went through this, I had one box that I did nothing but try different distros on. My main desktop was a Windows PC, but I had the other Linux box to cut my teeth on. If I hated the distro or I corrupted it or anything went wrong, I didn't have to worry about losing important documents. I could just wipe the whole thing and start over.

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7,049 S@H Classic Credits

Now don't say that, you'll scare him away.

ampoliros you do realize that you are trying to convince a confirmed Apple Bigot that anything but Mac OS X is good...

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I'd rather speak my mind because it hurts too much to bite my tongue.

American Spirit BBQ Proudly Serving those that courageously defend freedom.

ampoliros you do realize that you are trying to convince a confirmed Apple Bigot that anything but Mac OS X is good...

Apple bigot is incorrect. Apple Enthusiast yes, but I do use multiple platforms, and recognize that each and everyone has its place. It is true that I prefer Macintosh and OS-X for my personal work, and my photography, but I will use any platform that gets the job done. Hardly a bigot. My farm consists of 2 Macs and 6 Windows PC's. I would like to try out 64bit Linux on one of my AMD 64' boxes, to get a feel for it, and see how well it works with a real 64 bit OS.

ampoliros, thanks for the suggestions. I have had problems with Red Hat before, but have heard some good things about Mandrak (now Mandriva) for ease of setup. I'm downloading it now, to try it out.

Any other suggestions?

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Team MacNN - The best Macintosh team ever.

[font='fixedsys,courier']Ahem! I can speak for myself with respect about Apple and I won't begin discussing the issue here and now. All I will say is that my first Mac was a [font='Chicago, Charcoal, Lucida Grande, fixedsys']IIsi[/font] running [font='Chicago, Charcoal, Lucida Grande, fixedsys']6.0.7[/font], so I'm very much not full of it. Moof!

Now, the point I failed to get across is that Linux, like it or not, is 95% text-based. Good GUIs are hard to set up, and until then you're at the mercy of the command prompt. For instance, one distro of note does not include any useful GUI (Anyone who's tried to compile and run Qt and KDE on Darwin/x86 knows what I'm talking about).

If you don't know how to get around without a GUI, you'll be as good as dead. If you're not familiar enough with bash, ksh, or csh, you'll learn very quickly what not to do. All it takes is time and exposure to really learn Linux.

Meanwhile, I'd suggest you join a Linux users' group and ask 'round, or head to your local library for books.[/font]

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[font='fixedsys,courier']Now, the point I failed to get across is that Linux, like it or not, is 95% text-based. Good GUIs are hard to set up, and until then you're at the mercy of the command prompt. For instance, one distro of note does not include any useful GUI...

If you don't know how to get around without a GUI, you'll be as good as dead. If you're not familiar enough with bash, ksh, or csh, you'll learn very quickly what not to do. All it takes is time and exposure to really learn Linux.[/font]

You have to learn bash (or one of the others).

[font='fixedsys,courier']Meanwhile, I'd suggest you join a Linux users' group and ask 'round, or head to your local library for books.[/font]

That's probably the best advice given on this thread. There are LUGs in even the smallest of towns. Seek them out.

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7,049 S@H Classic Credits

you people are crazy, advising stage 1 on a p3 500. it will be 4 days before he knows whether or not he can get a working kernel. i found its much easier on slower systems to do a quick stage 3, go right to compiling the kernel, and boot into your own working system much sooner. successive emerge worlds will eventually take care of the optimizations.

im also suprised no one suggested hardened gentoo for a headless server. i've got that on a p3-450.

Debian SID all the way - I've tried the rest now I only use the best.

Gentoo is great if you want to waste days compiling stuff just to find out that you get a 1 or 2 ms speed boost when you run a program. Those days that it took to compile everything will need an awful lot of 1 or 2ms runtime savings to make up for the massive overhead of compilation.

In most circumstances, optimisation done by gentoo will make no difference at all for example you can still only download data or email as fast as it is sent to you even if the recieving program is optimised.

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Part of Teamseti
For SetiBoinc status graphs visit Teamseti status graphs

This system needs to be up and functional this week. While I am more then capable of getting Gentoo functional I simply don't have the time.

Right now it's down to Fedora or Debian. Debian has the net-install going for it. While Fedora is the Red Hat Core, and the bulk of my class will end up being Red Hat users. So it's down to a coin toss :)

NA heads or tails --

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I'd rather speak my mind because it hurts too much to bite my tongue.

American Spirit BBQ Proudly Serving those that courageously defend freedom.

[font='fixedsys,courier'][realizes the gravity of the question, and kneels down for a quick paryer]
Our parent process who art somewhere in ps, `init` Be thy name. Thy Penguin come, thy subroutine done, on /dev/cpu0 as on /dev/cpu1...

[looks around to make sure nobody's looking, and hands the Wolf the FC3 CDs]

Red Hat is the de facto as far as Linux goes. Debian is a fine distro, and I'm not about to start another distro-war thread (Take it to the Café boys), but if you look at the two distros side by side and ask "Who uses these?" and "Where are they implemented?", you'll find that the big bucks are in Red Hat's corner. And as we learnt from Microsoft, the company with the biggest friends can muscle its influence over those who don't.

So when you class starts bing about Ubuntu, Kubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo, Knoppix, etc., look them dead in the eye and ask them to name one corporation that uses those distros. The power-ball is in Red Hat's court, and therefore, Fedora wins.

Now before everyone flames me for it, let's change the OSs around: What about teching Mac OS vs. teaching Windows? Again, it'd Windows hands down because Microsoft has its fingers in every single sector of the computing market: In databases it's Microsoft and Oracle. In smart-phones it's Palm and Microsoft. In browsers it's Microsoft and Mozilla. In video games, it's Sony and Microsoft. In word processing, it's Microsoft and Sun. In spreadsheets, it was Microsoft and Lotus, but it's now Microsoft and Microsoft... What would be the benefit to your students to be exposed to Xcode if Visual Studio is everywhere? So my point is this: It'd be in your class's best interest to be exposed to Fedora, because when Linux gets used by businesses, Red Hat will most likely be the one runing on the mainframe.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think there are some people here who want to burn me at the stake... Aaaaaaaaaaaagh![/font]

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[font='fixedsys,courier'][realizes the gravity of the question, and kneels down for a quick paryer]
Our parent process who art somewhere in ps, `init` Be thy name. Thy Penguin come, thy subroutine done, on /dev/cpu0 as on /dev/cpu1...

I guess that was heads!!! I should know better then to ask you a simple question..

cp /dev/null simple_questions_for_na.txt

.o0(now if I didn't need to pay to access the site to download the free Darwin I might have included that too).

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I'd rather speak my mind because it hurts too much to bite my tongue.

American Spirit BBQ Proudly Serving those that courageously defend freedom.

I should know better then to ask you a simple question..

[font='fixedsys,courier']But you did get a simple answer: Follow the money, and go with Fedora.[/font]

.o0(now if I didn't need to pay to access the site to download the free Darwin I might have included that too).

[font='fixedsys,courier']First off, Darwin is BSD - This is a Linux thread. Second, it is free. Third, I've not gotten it working on x86, and (fourth) it is a b to get KDE and/or GNOME compiled and running.

As far as bad distros go, Darwin is one to avoid, and one that isn't suitable for teaching.

.o0(OTOH it's got the best console character map I've ever had the pleasure of looking at...)[/font]

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Second, it is free. Third, I've not gotten it working on x86, and (fourth) it is a b to get KDE and/or GNOME compiled and running.

That is 8.x There is a 10.4.1 version of Darwin, but the only place I have seen it is on Apples developer site.

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I'd rather speak my mind because it hurts too much to bite my tongue.

American Spirit BBQ Proudly Serving those that courageously defend freedom.

[font='fixedsys,courier']Yes. Darwin 8.1 is the core behind OS X 10.4. Darwin 7.0.1 was 10.3, 6 was 10.2, etc.

It's a moot point anyway.[/font]

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I am considering migrating from WinXP Pro to linux and was curious if anyone knows which (if any) of the current distributions support the Promise FastTrak66 RAID controller (PDC20262).


Thank you.

I am considering migrating from WinXP Pro to linux and was curious if anyone knows which (if any) of the current distributions support the Promise FastTrak66 RAID controller (PDC20262).

If I were you, I would run the card as just a dual channel IDE controller and not in any of the RAID modes. This has always been easier for me.

It's been proven on many occasions that linux software raid is quite comparable in speed to many hardware solutions. It is true that it is more work for the processor to send all the data twice, but I have always found software raid nice abnd easy to monitor and use.

And putting each drive onto it's own channel (eg, only one drive per cable) makes it very fast and easy to set up. In fact this computer has two Promise cards in it for a RAID 5 configuration. (Three drives plus one spare.)

That being said, you can very easily run the hardware raid, just get the proper drivers from promise and install them when you install the chosen linux OS (installation guide will tell you how). And you may not have to do this as the FastTrak66 has been around long enough that it's probably a module that can be built built into most 2.6 kernels during the install without your intervention anyway.

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7,049 S@H Classic Credits

Well, it looks like I'll give Fedora Core 4 a try. The last install disk is downloading now. I selected this distribution due to the association with RedHat and the fact that Promise offered drivers for RedHat 7.2

As with any recommendations, I've found that taking them all with a grain of salt, and reading the hell out of the respective user forums for the product can sway my decisions pretty easily.

I was tempted to go with FC4, but saw an unusual amount of 'problem' posts in the FC user forums for it. So went with FC3 until FC4 goes gold. And yes, I am a newbie to linux, so don't want to complicate things with any alpha, or beta distros.

Taking the easy way? Oh yea! But learning many things along the way.

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It is a sad sad day when someone takes your spoon away from you...

Taking the easy way? Oh yea! But learning many things along the way.

[font='fixedsys,courier']That's the spirit![/font]

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