distro differences++ please share knowledge

[Sonic Surfer Boy]

distro differences++  please share knowledge

[Sonic Surfer Boy]

I am considering running windows on my ss51 and/or my old cele300 with an old Aopen mainboard wich functions as a fileserver for my home network..

Q: wich distro should I use for the ss51 (suse,mandrake,redhat...I have NO LINUX EXPERIENCE, so dont start discussing way over my head please...)
and why this distro... whats great about it, and whats not...

Q: wich distro should I use for the old cele300, and why?

I plan to use my ss51 as I do now under windows.. that is a machine for webBrowsing, divx/dvd-playback using tv-out,  java development(student), playing mp3, photo-editing

my server will only do fileserving for my small home network and some mp3 playback and web + a bit of light office-work

would be nice if you could list up what I could use instead of photoshop, winamp(mp3), mediaplayer(divx), powerdvd.... and so on...
Open office equals M$ office as far as I know and support M$ office files too

the important thing for me is that installing linux on ss51 goes without problems and that linux does the job I need it to do...

sorry for this huge thread filled with Q's, but I would love to try linux, and I hope it will be a great experience....

thanx...

Sonic surf ( hopefully running linux soon...)

[Azi]

<< I am considering running windows on my ss51 and/or my old cele300 with an old Aopen mainboard wich functions as a fileserver for my home network..

Q: wich distro should I use for the ss51 (suse,mandrake,redhat...I have NO LINUX EXPERIENCE, so dont start discussing way over my head please...)

and why this distro... whats great about it, and whats not... >>



Since you have no Linux experience I would recommend Mandrake to start out on. The biggest reason is that it will set everything up for you. That is also a disadvantage later on when you learn more about it. It also has 'wizards' and such to help you manage your system, which unfortunately means you don't learn how to do it on your own. But for a newbie, this is great.



<< Q: wich distro should I use for the old cele300, and why? >>



You may want to try another (not Mandrake) distribution for that machine. Mandrake runs poorly on older machines if you can get it to install at all. I will let others make suggestions. You may also want to look at Distrowatch



<< I plan to use my ss51 as I do now under windows.. that is a machine for webBrowsing, divx/dvd-playback using tv-out,  java development(student), playing mp3, photo-editing >>



webbrowsing: too many choices here from lynx to mozilla... netscape, opera, konqueror, galeon, skipstone to name the more popular ones.
divx/dvd:  xine or mplayer are my recommendations
playing mp3: mpg321, mp3blaster are two good text based ones and without question xmms for X.
photo editing: I would use gimp. I am not sure if there is a better editor for linux.




<< my server will only do fileserving for my small home network and some mp3 playback and web + a bit of light office-work >>



NFS or Samba for network filesystems (Samba if you want Windows machines to be able to connect)



<< Open office equals M$ office as far as I know and support M$ office files too >>



There are several other office suites, too. OpenOffice, as far as I know, is the most advanced open source one.



<< sorry for this huge thread filled with Q's, but I would love to try linux, and I hope it will be a great experience.... >>



Good luck with it and feel free to ask more specific questions. I am in a bit of a rush now

[Speed King]

For a beginner - mandrake

Office - OpenOffice

DVD/DivX - Xine

Graphics - Gimp

Open Source Software Options

[ByteEnable]

Mandrake 9.0 is the best choice for home multimedia system out of the box.  RH 8.0 still needs lots of tweaks and compiles to get to the level of Mandrake 9.0.

Byte

[Sonic Surfer Boy]

thanx for the great reply on this thread!

I am downloading Mandrake 9 as I am writing this....

one Q' : how do I check the checksum on the iso files I am downloading?
I wanna do this right, so I dont want any f***ed files...

the Mandrake site gave this info about checksum on the iso files, but I dont know how to get the checksum....:

MD5 checksum:
f7a093af34b8cbe1abc165213fea9deb Mandrake90-cd1-inst.i586.iso
05a3ccafaacc37d6d1e2f260fc274549 Mandrake90-cd2-ext.i586.iso
1a2fd731fb6e30d39b0b99f504b231b3 Mandrake90-cd3-i18n.i586.iso

any help?

do you know if the ss51 hardware is fully supported by Mandrake9.. or do I have to change code to get lan and stuff to work...?

I have an p4 1.8, seagate barracuda4 and geforce2mx (might get AIW 8500/7500) installed .. any problems ?

thanx

Sonic Surf (hopefully running Mandrake9 in tomorrow)

[SqueakyFoo]

You can get an MD5sum for windows here.

To use it open up a DOS box and type:
md5sum filename

Where filename is the name of the ISO file. After it generates the checksum compare it with the md5 number from the mandrake website.

There is a GUI version of this for Windows, but I can't seem to find it right now.

[Sonic Surfer Boy]

thanx for the md5sum...

It worked just fine, and I am now ready to burn the iso files....

a big THANK YOU to the linux forum here and the people replying to this thread..

I will install Mandrake9 tonight, so wish me luck...

thanx..
Sonic surf (now downloaded and ready to go..)

[Sonic Surfer Boy]

did a few search on linux over at the sff forum here at sudhian, and it seems that the onboard sound isn't detected/working... It's working under suse and redhat... do you know anything about this?

I really need the onboard sound, since I'm allways listening to music from my computer while working...

If suse is the only distro wich autodetects everything on the ss51, how is it for a beginner?

if suse is hard for a beginner I do have a soundblaster live 1024 I can use(but I prefer not to), and still go with mandrake, but I need lan to work, and I need sound since my mp3's are on another machine in the house...

thanx
Sonic surf( looking for onboard sound with linux )

[Sonic Surfer Boy]

after some serious searching on the sudhian forum I found that Mandrake 9 had problems with the sis integrated audio. I therefor continued my search for a linux with sis support.
I checked the mandrake, redhat and suse hardware support pages and didnt find a word about my chipset.

but I found reports that everything was working right out of the box with suse and redhat...

So I decided to go for redhat....

everything went smooth during the installation and I am now typing this in Mozilla running redhat8.0...

thanx

SoniXurf( finally running linux )

I will probably come back in a few days with a million Q's

[ierax]

I would suggest suse 8.1 , the latest vesrion of the distro . It has very good installation tools that make  the iinitial installation of the o/s and the installation of further software very easy.  

[DickDa]

Sonic Surfer Boy, I was not able to get sound working with Mandrake 9.0 on my SS51G.  Red Hat 7.3 worked fine right out of the box.  Both OS's needed a backengineered SIS driver to get an acceptable display.
I am very familiar with Red Hat, so I think that if I was willing to spend the time, I could have gotten Mandrake 9.0 working OK as well.  I was interested in Mandrake because the Kernel level is newer and I thought that I would get better USB 2.0 support.
-Dick