[NBLUG/talk] Suggestions for newbie Linux Person

[Lincoln Peters]

On Sunday 25 September 2005 09:37 pm, Walter Hansen wrote:
> I want to set up a dual boot for my wife. I'd like a distro that looks
> nice in x-windows and is easy to update and such. I was thinking fedora as
> it seems simple these days, but thought I should ask for sugestions. This
> is for her "new" PIII-700 that's running W2000Pro (already installed). 

I haven't played around with it a whole lot, but I've heard VERY good things 
about Ubuntu as a desktop Linux distro.  I also seem to recall that at least 
a few people (some of whom are on this very list) have been having rather 
serious problems with recent versions of Fedora, and I don't think that your 
wife would appreciate having to deal with problems.

> I 
> was going to partition the second 20G drive 50/50 and put the distro on
> the first and then make the second a FAT32 that would be accessable from
> both. I set up the first as a FAT32 as NTSF had issues under Linux last I
> remember. 

There is a trick used in Knoppix to safely access NTFS filesystems.  If I 
remember correctly, it essentially runs the NTFS driver from Windows itself 
in a sort of virtual machine, which delivers much better reliability, but is 
a lot slower (virtual machines tend to have lots of CPU overhead).  You might 
be able to set up the same thing on Fedora or Ubuntu, but I don't know how 
(I've never had to set up a dual-boot system with Windows NT/2000/XP).

> She wants to poke arround with Linux and I wouln't mind playing 
> with a desktop more. I generally play with servers in a shell enviornment
> or webmin so I'm a little lacking on x-windows knowledge.

I am aware that both Fedora and Ubuntu can automatically set up an X-Windows 
environment with most mainstream video hardware.  If you're worried that this 
computer might have an obscure, unsupported (or very difficult to configure) 
video card and/or monitor, try booting the computer from a Knoppix CD.  If 
you get a KDE desktop without having to pass any special boot parameters, 
then you can expect the same from Ubuntu or Fedora.

If the video works under Knoppix but not under Fedora or Ubuntu, then I'm not 
sure what you'd want to do.  There was a time when you could simply copy the 
XFree86 configuration from Knoppix into another Linux installation, but since 
neither Fedora nor Ubuntu uses XFree86 anymore, this trick won't work unless 
the current version of Knoppix uses Xorg (the X11 system that Fedora and 
Ubuntu now use).  I can't tell from the Knoppix website if this is the case 
or not.

-- 
Lincoln Peters
<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

"Nature is very un-American.  Nature never hurries."
-- William George Jordan