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Geek Culture / Choosing a Linux

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H4ck1d
18
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Joined: 27th Dec 2005
Location: Yes
Posted: 2nd Dec 2006 00:05
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Today my dad called from work and said a guy at had a sunbox workstation that he was offering if I wanted. Heck yes. So right now I'm trying to figure out what OS to put on it, probably Linux. I want something that is fairly simple to set up (not terribly complicated or technical) and fairly good-looking. Right now I'm looking at probably Gentoo or possibly Debian. Does anyone have any suggestions or know of a good Linux or possibly other distribution I should use? Thanks!

-H4ck1d

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Lucifer
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Posted: 2nd Dec 2006 00:09
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i like ubuntu.. it looks great!



One is the lonliest number...
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H4ck1d
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Posted: 2nd Dec 2006 00:16
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I really like the look of Ubuntu too, but it doesn't work on sparc platforms

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Seppuku Arts
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20
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Joined: 18th Aug 2004
Location: Cambridgeshire, England
Posted: 2nd Dec 2006 01:56
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Hmmm...

Mandriva (Redhat based) is something to look at as well as - This one appealed most to me, but because I was using a Virtual machine, I had issues getting it to work with my graphics card, problems relating to the virtual machine and not mandriva, the only linux I have had running virtually is SUSE and that is because I downloaded a pre-setup virtual file. But I can tell you the installation was very easy and straight forward, addressed the partitions, installed it, asked what extras you want to use then the set up of admin and user accounts and security and then configuration which is detects everything for you there, but you can make your tweaks from there in the configuration. And then finalise.

Redhat/fedora
SUSE - I've tried it on a Virtual Machine that was limited to 128mb ram, didn't perform well for it, but then that's most likely because it was running on a virtual machine regardless to the amount of ram I gave it. On a normal machine, things should be fine.
Debian - I installed this on a virtual machine as well, like Mandriva and for the same reasons, didn't work. But it was a very straight forward installation. If you just download the base version to install, after installing the base version, you can choose the components you want installed and download and install them, which is cool.
Ubuntu - Easy to install, heard about problems relating to ATI gfx cards, well not problems as such, but some difficulties setting it up for it, so I'm told

"Cut down the gods if they stand in your way" - Hakamoto Tsunetomo
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Kentaree
22
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Joined: 5th Oct 2002
Location: Clonmel, Ireland
Posted: 2nd Dec 2006 02:04
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It's a sunbox, install Solaris!

Nephin Games
Devhat Developer Network and IRC Channel
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Raven
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Joined: 23rd Mar 2005
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 2nd Dec 2006 03:34
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yeah, Solaris (Irix) is your best bet, but this said it depends on the actual specifications of the machine.

if you go the Linux route;

Ubutu offers the best distro
Novell SUSE offer the best compatibility
RedHat Fedora offers the least headaches

imo, I generally run DSL (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org) as I can copy to disc/usb stick/flashdrive and it runs identically to hard disk installation. it's also fairly idiot-proof

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400, 512MB DDR2 667MHz, ATi Radeon X1900 XT 256MB PCI-E, Windows Vista Business / XP Professional SP2
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indi
22
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Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Earth, Brisbane, Australia
Posted: 3rd Dec 2006 03:09
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Dear Raven,

Irix is for SGI machines, its SGI's native format Operating System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX

A Sun machine running SOLARIS is a complete different system altogether.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Solaris

I think once again, your misleading yourself with misinformation
Maybe its SOLARIX in your world, lol where do you make these assumptions about stuff, it cracks me up.


ubuntu does run on sun and is apparantly a good combo, however solaris is native to Sun sparcs etc..
http://www.ubuntu.com/sun

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Retarded Sausage
19
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Joined: 22nd Aug 2005
Location: canadia
Posted: 6th Dec 2006 09:07 Edited at: 6th Dec 2006 09:08
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because Gentoo is not complicated or technical at all
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AlexI
19
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Joined: 31st Dec 2004
Location: UK
Posted: 6th Dec 2006 13:44
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Open Suse 10.2


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TDK
Retired Moderator
21
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Joined: 19th Nov 2002
Location: UK
Posted: 7th Dec 2006 06:25
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There's also Xandros 3 OCE which is aimed at Windows XP users.

It installs like XP (four mouse clicks if I remember correctly) and everything tends to work when you've finished.



It can even run some Windows software using Crossover (you only get a 1 month demo of it with the free OCE version though).

Worth checking out if you don't want to get into the techy side of things. Not sure about minimum specs required so you'd have to try it for yourself.

TDK_Man

DB Tutorials, Hints & Tips, Utils and lots more...
TGPF - TDK's Game Programming Forums
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H4ck1d
18
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Joined: 27th Dec 2005
Location: Yes
Posted: 7th Dec 2006 16:08
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Thanks for the input guys! I tried Gentoo, but the setup was too frustrating, so I tried Debian, but couldn't get the mouse to work... then I looked at Solaris and found out it was actually free! So I've got Solaris installed and it runs beautifully, even on the horrible 333 mhz processor . Thanks again!

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Raven
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Joined: 23rd Mar 2005
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 7th Dec 2006 17:29
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Quote: "I think once again, your misleading yourself with misinformation
Maybe its SOLARIX in your world, lol where do you make these assumptions about stuff, it cracks me up."


I think perhaps you should find out what Solaris 10+ runs on before making snap comments.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400, 512MB DDR2 667MHz, ATi Radeon X1900 XT 256MB PCI-E, Windows Vista Business / XP Professional SP2
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PowerSoft
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Joined: 10th Oct 2004
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 8th Dec 2006 20:41
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Best Recommended Live CD?

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Jeku
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Joined: 4th Jul 2003
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Posted: 8th Dec 2006 21:49
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Ubuntu.

http://www.codercafe.com - My blog
Ben Stein's Christmas Thoughts
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Raven
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Posted: 8th Dec 2006 23:59
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I couldn't get that working.
Downloaded several complete disks of it and each one i burnt on (tried several CDRW) and it keep saying the disk was 'damaged'

This said other live cd linux burn and ran just fine.. any known issues with 6.1?

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400, 512MB DDR2 667MHz, ATi Radeon X1900 XT 256MB PCI-E, Windows Vista Business / XP Professional SP2
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Mikey P
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Joined: 23rd May 2005
Location: Manchester, UK
Posted: 9th Dec 2006 00:16
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I got an ubuntu cd in the post and it worked fine. Well 4 ... they were free - fairly sure they still do this...

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

It's an older version, but Ubuntu seems capable of downloading the updates itself to update to "Edgy" or whatever the latest 'stable' version is.

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Oddmind
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Joined: 20th Jun 2004
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Posted: 9th Dec 2006 02:52
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gentoo was awesome, i've never manually compiled my own kernel before, it was so intersting and scary. I never thought I would make it thru the installation alive, but once I booted it up and put my head above water it was all great. Still had some graphics drivers problems but thats the nature of this beast. Radeon x800 GTO2, just lost interest and stopped fiddling.

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mm0zct
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Joined: 18th Nov 2003
Location: scotland-uk
Posted: 10th Dec 2006 02:22 Edited at: 10th Dec 2006 02:24
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well sorry to hear some people have had problems with it but i happily have fedora 5 and 6 dual booting with windows on 3 different comuters, one desktop with 5, specs in sig, one desktop with 6 with 512mb ram, sempron 2800 and a radeon 9600, and my laptop core duo 1.8, nvidia 7600 and 2gb ram is alkso running 6. all these machines i have working with full 3d acceleration, sound, networking (and wireless in my laptop but i'll admit that was a pain) relatively painlessly. the entireity of edinburgh university's computer labs are running a customized fedora 5 too (hundreds of computers)

admitedly i have become quite familiar with the linux environment though so things may not seem quite so painless to the complete novice.

if you are going to try fedora i recommend going to the following sites to configure them as rpm (software/driver etc) repositories:
http://rps.livna.org
and atrpms (google it, i'm lazy

the sites have instructions for doing this, livna has drivers for nvidia and ati graphics cards as well as many other usefull packages

AMD athlon 64 3000+, 1GB ddr400, 720GB total hdd, ati radeon x700pro 256mb (pci-e) 17" tft(@1280x1024).
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PowerSoft
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Joined: 10th Oct 2004
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 11th Dec 2006 23:07
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Yea I sent off for that ShipIt thingy, now to wait the alleged 6 - 10 weeks....

The Innuendo's, 4 Piece Indie Rock Band
http://theinnuendos.tk:::http://myspace.com/theinnuendosrock
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