I use SuSE linux which can be installed by FTP from their mirrors.
(Be careful picking a mirror; ping each site for best response time.)
It is one of two distros (along with Redhat Enterprise) that is supported for the commercial software I use, and the one out of two that is free.

In the past, I've also used Debian & Redhat. SuSE, since version 7, has been easy to install & use with a full KDE GUI installed. Later versions of Redhat seemed to be progressing on ease of use as well, but then they went all commercial.

A couple of years ago (the later days of SuSE 7) I checked out Debian because I used it in the past. It didn't seem as easy to install & I found the packages available weren't as up to date as SuSE. Maybe a Debian user can correct me on this point.

Lately, I've seen comments from enthusiasts of Gentoo. When I downloaded & burned a boot CD, it didn't turn out to be bootable (probably my fault with the recording software).

So, I'm a happy SuSE (9.3) user once again, even though they've been recently bought by big, bad Novell :)

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This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours.

SuSE and Debian are the two I'm currently inclined to use. Debian for the fact it is the root from which Gentoo and others are derived. SuSE due to past use and the fact that the next release will be OpenSUSE project's SUSE Linux 10.0 (replacing SUSE Professional). Beta 1 and info links are at distrowatch.

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Thanks for the heads up on OpenSUSE 10. I'm tempted to try the beta version.
Hopefully it won't end up split in two versions like Redhat where Fedora is free but Enterprise is the one supported by commercial software packages.

Also, I wasn't aware of the link between Debian & Gentoo.

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This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours.

Check out this link. I went there because I have just ordered a new system and will install GNU/Linux Slackware 10.1 on it. Based on their tests I will use ext3, probably in writeback mode, although I will do more research first.

ext3 vs reiserfs

Keep crunching,

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David Stites
Pullman, WA USA

Also, I wasn't aware of the link between Debian & Gentoo.

I'm wrong. It looks like I misinterpreted something I read on the gentoo site.

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

I haven't been keeping up with the thread but:
I used RedHat 5 but went back to windows because my Matrox card's addons weren't supported. I used SuSE 7.2 and 7.3 but my rockwell based modem wasn't supported so it was back to windows again.

I don't know what Matrox Video card you have but I have a G550 dual monitor with 32 (whopping) MB of ram. I run dual 17" monitors. I have both monitors as two and I can stretch it out so 2 monitors have one window on Mandrake .
there are 2 things that I think that you need. A real modem or ethernet and an OS that works with them.
If you had ethernet card then this conversation would not be happening. I have been gone for a while... so so correct me if I'm wrong. If you use Dial up modem then your modem may be what we call a WinModem. Winmodems have less electronic circuitry and more software ingeniousness to achieve the same goal. In other word.. the modem used software to simulate the electronics of the modem. thus the modem didn't require so many expensive IC chips. This made for a lot of modems to be made for MS. From a Linux point of view these are known as winmodems since they didn't have all the hardware onboard . Prior to that there where modems that worked with unix and other systems. And these modems are still made today. I have an external 56K modem that works with any Linux sytems.
key word here is EXTERNAL. if you have and external modem then it will most likely work with linux.
If you have a WinModem then here is a good place to start:
WinModem
but it would be cheaper to find it where your are.
Linux and other OSes don't have the luxury of MS handing us our drivers. in some instances we have cooperation from then major vendor. whithout that we do it ourselelves which is a long road.

I haven't been keeping up with the thread but:
I used RedHat 5 but went back to windows because my Matrox card's addons weren't supported. I used SuSE 7.2 and 7.3 but my rockwell based modem wasn't supported so it was back to windows again.

I don't know what Matrox Video card you have but I have a G550 dual monitor with 32 (whopping) MB of ram. I run dual 17" monitors. I have both monitors as two and I can stretch it out so 2 monitors have one window on Mandrake .
there are 2 things that I think that you need. A real modem or ethernet and an OS that works with them.
If you had ethernet card then this conversation would not be happening. I have been gone for a while... so so correct me if I'm wrong. If you use Dial up modem then your modem may be what we call a WinModem. Winmodems have less electronic circuitry and more software ingeniousness to achieve the same goal. In other word.. the modem used software to simulate the electronics of the modem. thus the modem didn't require so many expensive IC chips. This made for a lot of modems to be made for MS. From a Linux point of view these are known as winmodems since they didn't have all the hardware onboard . Prior to that there where modems that worked with unix and other systems. And these modems are still made today. I have an external 56K modem that works with any Linux sytems.
key word here is EXTERNAL. if you have and external modem then it will most likely work with linux.
If you have a WinModem then here is a good place to start:
WinModem
but it would be cheaper to find it where your are.
Linux and other OSes don't have the luxury of MS handing us our drivers. in some instances we have cooperation from then major vendor. whithout that we do it ourselelves which is a long road.

The hardware was what I had when the builds I mentioned were new releases. I bought all three as retail CD packages. The Matrox was a Millennium 2 8MB with Rainbow Runner and the TV tuner add-ons. The modem was a Phoebe Micro labelled as V1456VQH-R5 (Identified on the manufacturer website as using the Conexant chipset but the chip was labelled Rockwell) . Both are long gone. I'm currently using SBC DSL so I don't have a modem installed right now. My current video card is an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7200.

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

i have downloaded and installed ubantu for now thougfh with my anchent monitor it only seems to work with 16 colours (i know the monitor will handle at least 256 i think 16 bit aswell)
this in in 800 xs 600, (640 x 408 is just too small)

mabie if i purchase a KVM it can use my good monitor!

so far with ubantu it seems to be strugglening to run anything... could just be me...,
any ideas as to what i should do?

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[font='courier,courier new']Check your XF86Config file - The problem isn't your monitor as much as it is the video settings for your video card.[/font]

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I know I'll probably be told to "google it" for what I'm about to ask but I will ask anyway. I have googled it and looked on the novell site and after going through dozens of pages I'm no closer to an answer.

How do I run a full set of benchmark tests under suse 9.3?

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

As some may have noticed my computer has not been active in this project lately. This is due to problems with my promise raid controller not working properly with linux and problems with software raid not performing as expected. I have a solution in progress, the result of which will be I'll have two dual processor machines. The dual 700 I've been using will be demoted to non-raid operation and become a dedicated cruncher. I'm hoping the parts arrive by the end of next week and that I'll have the new machine running next weekend.

The new machine's components:
SuperMicro PIIIDM3
2x 800MHz P3 Coppermine
2x 256 MB IBM Reg ECC SDRAM
1x IBM DPTA371360 ATA66 Hard Drive
1x Sony DWQ-30A multiformat CD\\DVD R\\RW
3Ware 7500-4 4 port RAID card (JBOD\\0\\1\\5\\10\\)
4x IBM Deskstar 15.3gb ATA100 IDE 7200rmp Hard Drives
ATI all-in-wonder 7200 2x\\4x 32MB AGP video card
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Sound card

Anyone out there running a 3ware controller under Linux?
After many hours of research I came to the conclusion that 3ware is one of the few manufacturers of true hardware raid controllers. It took a bit of searching (and a bit of luck) to find a dual p3 slot1 motherboard with 64 bit 66MHz PCI slots. I hope I made the right choice.

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

I did notice and I was highly upset with you, until you posted the reason why.

I'll let you off the hook for now, but don't let it happen again or I'll send the nurses from my team (TFFE) loose on you. I don't think you want that to happen, then again maybe you do... ;-)


I've got an older scuzzy controller I'll give you, if you want it...

I did notice and I was highly upset with you, until you posted the reason why.

I'll let you off the hook for now, but don't let it happen again or I'll send the nurses from my team (TFFE) loose on you. I don't think you want that to happen, then again maybe you do... ;-)


I've got an older scuzzy controller I'll give you, if you want it...

gbg

I'm good on scsi controllers. I have an extra adaptec aha-2940 and an advansys abp-3925 that I haven't found a use for yet.
The motherboard I mentioned was high end in it's day. It has an onboard Intel 82559 ethernet controller, onboard Adaptec single channel ultra3/160 SCSI controller, and a two channel Ultra DMA (UDMA/66) controller. I'm looking forward to putting it all together and testing the new computer's performance. Based on past experience I'm expecting the total for the two computers to be about 16-18 work units a day. Not bad for a couple of old p3 machines.

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

It's controlling a WangDat 3200....


just so you know...

OK, my 3ware 7500-4 controller arrived here today. I'm still waiting for two more round ide cables to arrive (for the drive that I'll connect to the motherboard and the dvd burner) but I can use flat ribbon cables for now. I'm ready to start putting it together but I'm trying to decide whether to set up the drives as a raid 5 array or a raid 10 array. I'll be running four Deskstar 75GXP ATA100 hard drives (DTLA-307015) on it. Granted they're not massive drives but suffice for my purposes. Suggestions from anyone with a 3ware 7500 series card would be appreciated.

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

OK, the computer's running. I'm running win2k for now to test it's performance. Unfortunately I ran into an error message when I tried to install SuSE 10. The problem is with the xorg x11 package. Maybe it's time to run a cleaner in my cd-rom. I did a checksum when I burned the CDs and it installed fine as an upgrade to SuSE 9.3. I'll try again when I've picked up some DVDs to do a backup of win98 and win2k. The 30GB raid 10 array is ready and waiting.

The PIIIDM3 is an interesting board. It's has the intel 840 chipset but uses pc100 ram with two channels interleaved to increase speed. It may only be a dual P3 computer but the first two units I'm running using P3-YAOSCW-K-r8.1 look like they'll finish with a processing time around 5.5 hours.

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

OK, the computer's running. I'm running win2k for now to test it's performance. Unfortunately I ran into an error message when I tried to install SuSE 10. The problem is with the xorg x11 package. Maybe it's time to run a cleaner in my cd-rom. I did a checksum when I burned the CDs and it installed fine as an upgrade to SuSE 9.3. I'll try again when I've picked up some DVDs to do a backup of win98 and win2k. The 30GB raid 10 array is ready and waiting.

The PIIIDM3 is an interesting board. It's has the intel 840 chipset but uses pc100 ram with two channels interleaved to increase speed. It may only be a dual P3 computer but the first two units I'm running using P3-YAOSCW-K-r8.1 look like they'll finish with a processing time around 5.5 hours.

I had problems like that. I had to reinstall Linux using a boot floppy, because the generic CD-ROM I was using had issues with Linux and created CRC errors, media errors, or worked but had corrupted Linux install files as a result.

Eventually I had to replace the generic CD-ROM with a name brand one that Linux listed in its Hardware List as working with Linux.

Just like Windows, Linux has an hardware compatability list somewhere.

Oddly enough Windows tolerates generic hardware more than Linux does. That is why Windows 2000 will work great, but Linux will have issues.

BTW the Linux version of BONIC works great, but the Windows version causes me lockups, reboots, and shutdowns. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

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I am from District 268 in the Deneb Sector of Vilani Space.

OK, SuSE 10.0 is up and running. It seems the problem was related to installing from my Sony DWQ-30A DVD burner. I installed using my Toshiba 32x scsi cd-rom extremely quickly and with no problems. Well, almost no problems. I can't boot windows (98se and 2k are also installed on this computer). It seems there's a problem with grub.

With the hardware changes it looks like the average work unit time has decreased from just over six hours to around four and a half hours.

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Some help maybe:

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?threadid=376031

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/pdf/Linux+Win9x+Grub-HOWTO.pdf

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+Win9x+Grub-HOWTO/proc.html

Let me know if any of these help.

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I am from District 268 in the Deneb Sector of Vilani Space.

i have since installed slackware 10.2 and it wiorks fine, especially wirth xfce at the window manager instead of KDE

if you need help the best forum i have found is www.linuxquestions.org

the eople there are usially very helpfull though i suggets searching the forum for you quetsion forst and only posting if there isnt an answer that solves your problem.

vert rarely are you told to RTFM or STFW though the less severe "google is your freind" somtimes crops up.

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