Building a linux system

[mcpherson]

Hey im new to the linux stuff (and the open source.) and im wondering what advice you can give to me over the next few months as i build a new system with linux.
im already familiar with firefox (which is brill )
but linux.. well tried dling some of the distros and..well.. suffice to say im not using getright+dialup ever again..
im not subscribed to the mag yet but as soon as i get the money i will be

anyway

a mate is getting me the parts... budget of £250.
putting together roughly, this system:
AMD 2400~3200 CPU,
512~1GB Ram
40~120gb hdd
either AGP 8x or PCI-E on the mobo.

so with a distro that runs quick on a pentium 350mhz will surely run mega fast here

anyway
im stuck on what distribution to use once its built up.

oh and after that im converting current pc to linux and making it a web server

anyway
OS.
Red hat-Fedora is on the list so far.. what alternatives to that is there?

note: im a student so £50 a week. and 90% of that will be used on the comp so free software is a must.




this has been triggered by how bad microsoft are.
KMFMS (german for, No mercy for Microsoft)

[guy]

You'll get a lot of different opinions/recommendations from us lot.
If you like to play around, try them all.

If you just want to fire-and-forget Linux, I'd suggest Ubuntu Linux latest release.
You can download and burn a live CD version (runs from CD without installing first) to try out. If you like it, download and burn the HD version.
Or order the CD's for free, though they may take a week or three to arrive. Not many distros offer that.

Once you've got to know Linux a bit, you'll be better informed about what distro to install on your web server.

[fingers99]

You'll get an aweful lot of opinions here. I'd stay clear of PCI-E for the moment, if I were you.

Any Debian based system makes good sense (more so to my mind on a desktop than an rpm based one if only because you 've generally got a better choice of packages). Ubuntu, Kanotix, Kubuntu......... Kanotix has the possible advantage of being made in Germany............ or even Debian itself.

[mcpherson]

nice..
erm

i really really should get the mag lol.

always seeing it in the trafford centre but never money to buy it (at one time when i was trying to get a livecd to boot my comp up, the distro had been corrupted. getright dl accel and dailup *shudder* .at the time, i saw linuxformat, saw the distros on the cd.. and thought... should i .. should i...? nooo.... ill get caught lol.)

anyway

thx. debian.. ill look it up later.

http://www.kmfms.org
^what has finally ticked me off about ms.

[towy71]

'scuse me but surely you mean http://www.kmfms.com/

[davecs]

My recommendation for a complete newbie is PCLinuxOS. See debates elsewhere.

The reasons?

1 - Provided you can get round repartitioning your disk, the rest of the setup is very straightforward. Should take less than 20 minutes from a single CD. Three flavours available, Nvidia, Ati, and vanilla, depending on your graphics card.

2 - Software is optimised for a standalone computer plus internet type environment. Though you can add stuff later if you want.

3 - Plenty of help at www.pclinuxonline.com

4 - Updates/Additional Software easily added via internet.

So far, so 100 other distros, but my clincher:

5 - Integration, ESPECIALLY MULTIMEDIA. Real Player / MPlayer built faultlessly into Firefox "straight out of the box". Only one tiny program called "libdvdcss0" needs to be downloaded from the PCLOS site to play encrypted DVDs. Complete Internet/Multimedia box!

Oh and it's default look and feel is just made to work, not overdone. Nice.

But as someone said, ask 100 people and get 100 opinions.

If you are VERY computer literate and don't mind following instructions carefully and waiting a few days for the perfect system, you could try Gentoo instead.

[bunyip]

Hmm, my German is a bit rusty, but surely KMFMS means 'No pity for MS', whereas I agree it should be no mercy for MS, which would read 'Keine Gnade für MS' -> KGFMS.

Anyways, I agree about staying away from PCI-e atm, too early and too soon. AGP 4x/8x is cheap as chips on ebay atm, and any possible bugs have been ironed out re GNU/Linux drivers.

As regards which distro, well you've really asked a question that has never been asked before and will never be satisfactorily answered. I think it's safe to say that for 'fire it up and let it install distro', Debian, Slack & Gentoo might be something you might want to look into 6 months down the road. Fedora Core, Mandrake/Mandriva & SuSE have always been pretty straightforward for me whenever I wanted to get a box up & running quickly. I don't know much about Live CDs, never had the need nor the inclination to try them out.
As a student, do you have a Linux/OSS/BSD user group at your uni, or in your town? If so, they should be able to help as regards spare distros on CD or DVD, as it would be in the spirit of Open Source'ness. Failing that, in the spirit of Open Sourced'ness, drop me a line, and I'll ship a couple of my spare CD's to you.

HTH
bunyip

[towy71]

the live cds are good for testing out a system but for beginners if you really don't want to get your hands dirty tinkering under the hood Mand.... whatever is definitely the easiest <duck> </duck>

[M0PHP]

If you try Ubuntu, UbuntuGuide.org is a great place to get the newly installed system up and running. And if you don't like the user interface (Gnome) - get hold of Kubuntu which uses KDE.

Hope your first experience goes well, let us know what you choose.

[jer1ch0]

Hi, sorry to bust in to the thread but can someone explain the difference between Mandrake/SuSe/Fedora and Debian based distros. Or is there a difference?
I tried all the big names and been impressed. However installing extra apps has often led to dependancy problems. Am I right in thinking that apt-get in Debian based distros deals with this problem in a better way?

[andychannelle]

I'm a bit of a fan of Ubuntu, with the exception that it doesn't have an integrated firewall, and the ones available in Ubunutu Universe are not particularly new-user friendly (in my experience). Kubuntu is good too if you want KDE. However, I would usually recommend SUSE. Version 9.3 is absolutely stonking thanks especially to the addition of Beagle and F-Spot which are available out of the box. If you're skint, you can download 9.2 from th'Internet and then, if you must, update all the bits using YaST with usually no worries about dependencies.

I built a Linux box last year with a motherboard bundle from Novatech which included MoBo, Athlon 2800+, 512MB and they even threw in a GFX5200 graphics card. I stuck in a FireWire card, Pinnacle TV Card kept my old hard disks, Audigy card, DVD-Rom and added a cheap DVD/RW and still had change from £260.

[davecs]

All user-friendly distros take care of dependencies within their software update systems, only a few expert ones don't. RPM, APT, DEB, portage, they all work. One of the confusing things for a new user with Mandriva/ake, is what software to select for installation. Some distros, on the other hand, have a fixed "starter" set and you can add/delete as well as update later.

I mentioned PCLOS earlier. That is a distro that runs as live or installs. It installs with a fixed "starter" set of software. Less confusing. But is the software selection good?

Well follow this link and see what someone else thinks: Mrs Devnet is a woman married to a linux geek who hates linux but carries out an experiment with her husband to see if she could ever like linux. The experiment is still ongoing but this is her summary of PCLOS.

[fingers99]

Hi, sorry to bust in to the thread but can someone explain the difference between Mandrake/SuSe/Fedora and Debian based distros. Or is there a difference?
I tried all the big names and been impressed. However installing extra apps has often led to dependancy problems. Am I right in thinking that apt-get in Debian based distros deals with this problem in a better way?

The difference is that Mandrake, SuSE and Fedora (and others) are rpm based, while Debian is deb based. Some other distros Ubuntu, Mepis, Kubuntu use debs but from their own repositories, which are smaller than the "real" Debian ones. Kanotix and Knoppix also use the "real" Debian repositories.

Out of the box, Debian (include Kanotix, Knoppix) has a far better packagement system than the mere rpm based systems although, it must be stated, there is an apt available for them, too, although it can't give you the choice/range that a Debian install can. Essentially, apt-get resolves all the package dependencies for you, easily and transparently.

Gentoo is another ball game: packages for Gentoo are recompiled to suit your processor. This is good for speed (although there are tools to do this on Debian systems, too) in operating a program, but pretty hopeless if you don't have a fast computer or broadband.

[nelz]

Out of the box, Debian (include Kanotix, Knoppix) has a far better packagement system than the mere rpm based systems although, it must be stated, there is an apt available for them, too, although it can't give you the choice/range that a Debian install can. Essentially, apt-get resolves all the package dependencies for you, easily and transparently.

As does Mandrake's urpmi. the basic RPM system is just that, basic, but the distros have, in the main, addressed the shortcomings and introduced good dependency handling.

Gentoo is another ball game: packages for Gentoo are recompiled to suit your processor. This is good for speed (although there are tools to do this on Debian systems, too) in operating a program, but pretty hopeless if you don't have a fast computer or broadband.

While a fast computer is handy, but by no means essential. I don't understand why you feel broadband is needed. Why does downloading the source require so much more bandwidth than downloading pre-compiled binaries?

However, I wouldn't recommend Gentoo for someone new to Linux.

[fingers99]

Why does downloading the source require so much more bandwidth than downloading pre-compiled binaries?

Well, binary for source package, it doesn't, of course. But there's a shedload of stuff that needs to be downloaded. With Kanoptix or Knoppix, you'll be downloading updated packages (as you would for Gentoo) and a handful of multi media tools at the most.

As does Mandrake's urpmi

Sure. It's nice to hear someone saying nice things about Mandriva! But there simply isn't the choice of packages that the native Debian repositories can give you, even if, I suspect, you include source rpms from other distros.

It's interesting to note how other distros have rushed to apt, while no-one is rushing to YaST!