Loaded 6.10 on a spare laptop last night to dip my toe back in the *nix water. For those who don't know I spent the first half of the 90's supporting Unix systems, but never bothered with it at home. Recently I've been getting a bit bored of the constant updates of XP, the gradually diminishing performance, running out of disk space etc. - any road up I thought I'd give it a go. Someone gave me the Ubuntu CD so I thought it would be as good a place as any to start as it has a reputation for being fairly friendly.

So - the good points:

It only takes up about 1.7 GB on the disk

It's quite nice and Windows-ey i.e. lots of GUI config ability, a reasonable number of apps etc.

The bad points:

It's quite slow, and seems to be hitting the PC harder than Windows 2000 did. (this is a Pentium III 650MHz with 512MB RAM. I'm basing this on the fact that the fan is on more of the time than not, whereas under Windows it was virtually never on unless you started up a few biggish apps. (the system monitor says it's only running at between 5 and 30% cpu, but I'm not sure I believe that).

It includes Firefox 2.0, which has crashed several times - I thought Linux was the choice for stability over Windows!

Gnome image viewer has also crashed on me a few times.

Font rendering is quite DREADFUL compared with Windows. The LCD in the Tosh is only capable of 1024x768, but still! It looks like something a kid drew with a blunt pencil in the font department.

The power management functions don't seem to work - but I'm not that surprised - Toshiba normally ship their own for Windows - not sure if they have any that work under different OSs.

So - and this is where the big can of worms gets opened - what should I try next? I have some votes for Fedora, but that seems HUGE by comparison - e.g. it needs a full DVD to install vs 1 CD. Any others? I realise everybody will just vote for their favourite, so perhaps some rules :rubchin:

Let's say it has to be downloadable on max 2 CDs

It has to be quite easily configurable and usable - Mrs Nick might also be using it

I really would like it to be able to display text on the screen rather better than U*****

Discuss...

Anything that effect Ubuntu will affect fedora too as they both use Gnome etc.

The font rendering can be fixed, Gnome can be sped up and my Ubuntu 6.10 comes with FF 1.5.something.

HOWTO: Hoary ClearType-like fonts - Ubuntu Forums

Display Microsoft fonts like on Windows - Ubuntu Forums

Nick,

It's true ubuntu is small. i.e. one cd, but then most of the extra's are downloaded, where as a centos, suse, fedora dvd will have quite a lot on the dvd disc.

ubuntu is about the most friendly start linux, my dad has fallen for it and is recycling old pc's for friends now.

Laptops are problematic for linux, drivers etc...the latter releases are much better and the chances are, fixes can be found, but it will involve the command line.

Personally, I'd go for suse, just replaced ubuntu and centos on my desktop with again...

If your concerned about downlad size, give me a shout as I've got a whole stack of discs from magazines etc.

I also prefer kde for some reason over gnome, but there's naff all in it for newbs like us

Oh naf firefox 2 on wondows caused me major grief s I've not even gone there on linux, yet.

I'm not so concerned about download size except that I only have one rather old and not very reliable CD burner at home (although it has very few miles under its belt it seems incapable of burning discs anything else can read) and no DVD burner. Oh, and the laptop I was using last night doesn't have a DVD reader, either.

I use a laptop 99% of the time both at work and home - if it's gonna work, it's got to be on a laptop (probably a Tosh).

command-line - well I'm not frightened of it, although of course there are a lot of newfangled commands in Linux that weren't in my old systems, but Mrs C needs to be kept away from command-line thingys

uwhat-now??

This is the tech shed, Tom, not the garage :P

I'd say stay with Ubuntu and work through the problems.

Ubuntu has one of the best support forums, either that or you could do what i do and run gentoo as well as ubuntu. (I'll hide now)

Nick, veering slightly off topic, but if your Tosh laptop is a recent-ish one with a "standard" optical drive unit, you can get a NEC DVD burner from Scan for not a lot of dosh. I bought one for Basil a few months ago as he had a problem with a HP/Compaq I think it was and it works wonders

Hmm maybe they don't have them at the moment :confused:

Stick with Ubuntu and have a poke around on the forums there are some guys on there that will be more than willing to help you out.

Failing that try SuSe or Mandriva as again like Colin i prefer KDE over Gnome.

or if you really really want to go all out get a Gentoo install going

If you want small - Damn Small Linux

DSL information

50Mb

I want a compromise (who doesn't ) - small enough to be installable, big enough to have some toys to play with - nothing worse than a computer with nothing but a bare operating system on it - I remember those days, and not fondly!

What's with Gentoo then? Is that the ultimate geek's OS?

Id like to say no ite not but you have to compile everything then install it.

A stage 1 install which is a small os with a shell takes about 24 hours to compile and install

Not quite sure why you'd bother, then. Being able to compile something hardly proves much, does it, other than the ability to follow instructions.

I'm getting less impressed by the minute - started following the instructions in that post above about improving the appearance of the fonts - went to restart X (however you do that) and couldn't log out! The button did sweet FA. Had to hard reset the machine...

Luckily I still have my Win2k CD handy. At this rate I reckon it'll be coming out in about 2 days time.

Oh, and I discovered tonight you can't read and write NTFS file systems, so my main machine DEFINITELY won't be getting converted for a while until I work out an alternative backup strategy (my external backup drive is NTFS).

Gentoo Linux -- Gentoo Linux News

Yeah pretty much they give you some course code and some instructions and that is your installer. Can be excellent for tuning to exactly what you want, but you need a very fast CPU or a lot of time to compile it all. It will however then run on a very very lowly system if you choose your options right.

Slackware is good for older systems, but probably a bit heavy going and i genuinely would stick with ubuntu as it is very well supported and easy to get your head around.

I actually prefere Gnome over KDE as kde has so many options and QT is IMHO horrible (no flamewar on QT vs GTK please).

This is the other side of the view on gentoo :

http://funroll-loops.org/

Seems to be down cached here:

Welcome to Gentoo is Rice, the Volume goes to 11 here.

HTH

QT? GTK? :confused:

Just to throw my two-pennorth in...Solaris 10 is free and rather good.

Rob.

Would you not need a Sparc-based computer, though, oh helpful one?

Would you not need a Sparc-based computer, though, oh helpful one?

Only if you were to download the Sparc version rather than the x86/x64 version...

Solaris Enterprise System System Requirements

Rob.

The man does have a point.

Solaris x86 is quite nice, althought not really for a 650Mhz PIII

Well if I thought it was going to change my life it could have my P4 1.7GHz, but there are issues to be resolved first - like access to my data.

Perhaps you're getting to Ubuntu from the wrong direction. I started with Slackware over ten years ago (ah, the 1.0x kernel...), then Debian in the late 1990's (around then I ditched Windows altogether), and now I use Ubuntu. As far as I'm concerned, it's really easy to install and configure, and does eveything I want it to do.

As for your fan problem (running continuously), I suspect that's nothing to do with CPU load; it's more likely that the ACPI (Advanced Control and Power Interface) kernel module isn't installed. If you're lucky, there may be a .deb package with ACPI in it - if not you can always compile a custom kernel. It should be do-able, just a matter of rolling up your sleeves and RTFM

I freely admit, it's probably too "easy". However, I'm not doing this as a learning exercise, or an initiation rite, but because I want something better than Windows. So far, it isn't, it's worse.

It did seem to do a pretty reasonable job of autoconfiguration (for example the settings for the font stuff were pretty much already as per the instructions in the howto posted above (which unfortunately also means the display probably isn't going to get any better)), sadly the next steps seem an order of magnitude more difficult. I don't mind RTFMing, but I'm not going to spend 2 days RTFMing every time I want to take one more step, or "compiling a new kernel" each time I want to switch on a feature that should work (the suspend and hibernate options are there, but don't do anything), but doesn't.

The fan isn't on continuously btw, just on and off roughly 50/50.

Ho hum...

Have just installed Mandriva 2007, works perfectly on my 2 year old box, options for acpi etc as you install, only thing that complained were the Nvidia drivers but they seem fine now they are installed. An easy distro to install and use, stable for me too.

My better half is running Mandriva 2006, she installed Firefox 2 a couple of days ago and hasn't had a single problem.

aj

Power mgt - are you sure that Ubunto has power mgt for your machine?

Firefox crash and stability - The point isn't that Linux applications are uncrashable; it's that an application crash under Linux crashes the application, without taking the operating system with it!

he is running a bleeding edge version of ubutu, which hopefully is a lot happier now