Re: Help

[Simon Kitching <simon@ecnetwork.co.nz>]

On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 15:29, Yossi d Esrig wrote:
> I wanted to wipe my laptop (ibm notebook) and put linux on it. I can't
> figure out which distribution is right for me. I just need it for
> personal use. I actually only need it for the C compiler. (As of right
> now, I'm having techinical dificulties installing a c compiler on my PC)
> I also do not have internet access on the notebook.
> Also, once I download linux, how would I go about intstaling it? My
> laptop is quite annoying 
> in the fact that it can hold either a 3 1/2 inch drive OR a cd drive, but
> not both 
> at the same time, without turning it off in between.
> Please help. Thank you.

Well, as you asked on the Debian Linux list, the answers may be a little
biased :-). Note that all that follows is just my personal opinion. In
fact, you're likely to get half a dozen contradictory replies to this
question. Good luck sorting them out.

Options considered: 
  Fedora, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Gnoppix/Knoppix.

Assumptions: You want some kind of GUI.

Because of your lack of network connectivity, you'll need a distribution
on a CD. And I presume because you're asking this question that you are
fairly new to linux so would prefer something user-friendly.

Debian has excellent features for keeping your OS up to date over the
internet, but that's obviously not an option for you. And because
Debian's stable release is now so old, a copy of debian 3.0 on CD is not
really appropriate for a personal (non-server) PC. You can get a copy of
Debian's "testing" release on CD, but without network connectivity you
won't be able to update anything that's broken. Its not likely that
critical stuff will be broken, but with a "testing" release, nothing's
guarunteed.

Because of the CD-based approach, I think one of the first 2 on the
above list will suit best. If your laptop is oldish (<256MBytes ram,
lower than P3 1GHz?) then Fedora will probably not suit. The latest
releases are pretty heavy users of memory and CPU.

Personally, I would therefore recommend that you obtain a copy of the
latest Mandrake release. It's user-friendly, not *too* heavy on
resources (I believe), reasonably up-to-date.

Or possibly you could select Knoppix or Gnoppix. These are Debian-based
distributions that can be run directly from CD (not installed onto a
hard drive). But they *can* be installed onto harddrive too. This will
allow you try out Linux on your laptop first before doing the install.

Of course, if you like the philosophy of open-source, then you may wish
to select Debian even though it isn't quite the best match for your
requirements. Debian is a community as well as a distribution, and
running debian will allow you to participate in the development of a
linux distribution far more easily than other distributions will.

And if you intend to get into some serious linux work later, then
starting on Debian may be a good idea. Debian provides a reasonable
desktop OS but really comes into its own when you need robust secure
servers etc.

In the end, just about any Linux distro you can get on CD will do the
job for you. They all come with compilers. And anything at all modern
will boot directly from CD (provided your laptop supports this) so you
won't need to plug in the floppy drive at all.

Regards,

Simon