Re: Newbie Help Requested
George L Smyth said:
> So can anyone give me some pointers on installing Debian? I am close to
> the give-up stage, but am hoping that someone can speak in baby words that
> will allow me to get this thing running (it's not nearly as simple as
> Windows).
if your close to giving up, stop right there. Debian is not for you, at
least not yet. Debian is a very advanced Linux distribution not targetted
at newcommers.
Mandrake is probably the best "freely available" easy-to-use linux distro
available that I am aware of. The others, such as SusE, Xandros, and perhaps
even Lindows I do not think are freely downloadable in an installable,
current form.
If your planning to run X windows on a linux system(the most popular graphical
enviornment), I strongly reccomend getting a monitor that is capable of
1024x768. X windows in my experience is much less useful on any lower
resolutions, Unix(and to some extent Linux) are designed mostly for
workstations which typically have much higher resolutions, as a result many
apps(as you have seen) are not as useful(or in some cases usable) at lower
resolutions. I do consider 1024x768 to be the minimum resolution for X
windows for any day-to-day operation. There is a workaround, you can
use "virtual" desktops to get more screen real estate(which means when
you put the mouse at the edge of the screen it scrolls that direction to
reveal more of the desktop). Most users do not like this though.
Linux may not be for you, at least not yet. If you want to try it I would
reccomend a monitor that is capable of 1024x768 at a good refresh(even
my 15" monitors from 1997 are capable of this, good being at least 72hz),
and purchasing a copy of SuSE Professional, or perhaps Xandros, I haven't
tried Xandros myself but SuSE professional makes an excellent distribution
for newcommers to linux. Both my sister and mother use it daily and they
like it a lot. It is not free, the full professional version runs about
$80. I also reccomend checking hardware compadiblity first, your system
sounds old enough that it will run fine but you never know. Most companies
do not allow returns of software once opened.
Also for the best experience you do need a much faster system, modern
desktop distributions(if thats what your looking for) like to have in
the range of a 400+Mhz CPU minimum and 128MB ram would be scraping the
barell(my sister's computer is a p3-500 with 512MB, I found that her
earlier system a dual p2-233 with 384MB was still sluggish even with
2 scsi drives in raid0). You can of course get by on a 166, but you
will not be able to experience the more modern enviornments to their
fullest extents.
Now this totally depends on what your goals are. Even myself I run
a light desktop enviornment(afterstep) which would happily ride along
on a 166mhz machine(my desktop is 1.3ghz/768MB). But it comes with none of
the bells and whistles so many computer users seem to look for these
days.
Others may disagree, infact I'm sure some will. And thats fine, I
am only speaking from my own experience with Linux since 1996. It has
been my primary desktop/server OS on all my systems since 1998 and
I haven't looked back.
good luck, and do yourself a favor, for now do not try to install debian,
your not ready for it yet. Debian is for more advanced users or those
users who really want to dig deep into the OS, this means a lot of
complex operations needed which other distributions such as mandrake
make easier to accomplish(but debian does the opposite, other operations
are really easy where mandrake or others may be really difficult).
nate
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