Greg's yearly shot at nix

[Santilli]

Greg's yearly shot at nix:

I've got RH Valhalla, 8.2 Mandrake, and both 462 and 50 FreeBSD.

Going on a separate gigabyte mobo, P3 450 Quantum LM, TNT video, and all the usual other suspects.

Any comments on the above???

Are they getting better with new releases?

s

 

[CougTek]

FreeBSD is only at 4.62 now (and only since August 15th - two weeks ago), not 5.0. How can you have a copy of an un-released version? I personally would like to give FeeBSD a shot someday because I heard great things about it, but my practical knowledge about it is close to nil.

I tried Caldera a while ago, Mandrake 8.1 last year and RedHat 7.3 a few months ago. Only RH has been good enough to my taste to remain on one of my computers. Probably because of KDE 3.0, which looks great.

Your hardware is fairly standard stuff so drivers support by the OS shouldn't be a problem. My current installation of RedHat 7.3 is on an Athlon classic 500MHz, with a TNT2-Pro graphic card and Quantum FB+ LM too (hard drive shouldn't be a trouble-factor, unless the controller if it's anything exotic).

 

[Santilli]

Check the FreeBSD mirrors. 5.0 is avaliable.
s

 

[Tea]

Exotic? No, nothing fancy, Coug, just a Promise Fasttrack.

(Runs and hides.)

 

[James]

Greg,

As usual, Coug is right - the current release of FreeBSD is 4.6.2 (go to www.freebsd.org, look at the right hand side of the screen). 5.0 is going to be the -CURRENT branch or something similar and is likely to be buggy. Go with 4.6.2 - just download the 2 floppies, follow the instructions in the FreeBSD handbook, and your machine will download the latest -RELEASE branch (ie. 4.6.2). It's all a bit intimidating at first, but the instructions are pretty clear.

 

[LiamC]

Santilli,

I was playing with Mandrake 8.0/8.1 for a few months, but things kept crashing and updates were a pain. So I gave it a miss. A few hardware changes and I tried to boot Mandrake again only to find I've lost the 8.1 install disk.

But I'd downloaded Lycoris (Redmond) a while back. This things looks like XP and is about as easy to use and setup - except it hasn't got ADSL (pppoe) support. Sure you can download Roaring Penguin and stuff, but only as source as RP only supports RH with a binary - ie, download and install. With source you have to compile it, and that's where I ran into a few problems, otherwise Lycoris is very impressive.

This was on the weekend. Today I ran out and bought one of those newsagent Linux guides with Red Hat 7.3.

Less than 1 hour later, this post is coming to you from Red Hat 7.3 and Konqueror, on ADSL with my Brother Laser configured and access to all my Windows FAT32 and NTFS files. Firewall is in place. Next is SAMBA and shares and if everything goes according to plan, it might stay that way. This machine I use as a File-and-Print server (and NAT box) for mine and my wifes PC's, so having it sit in a corner is fine as usually no one touches it. But without a doubt, RH7.3 has been the least painful Linux experience. I quite like this. Having said that, Lycoris was an eye opener in ease-of-setup stakes and I will revisit it simply because it looks good and is so easy (providing you have a modem and not ADSL or cable).

 

[SteveC]

Mandrake 9.0 RC1 was just released, and the final version should be available fairly soon. I've used 8.2, and found it fairly stable and it had no problems with any of my hardware. I haven't tried Redhat in a while, although 7.3 in supposed to be a very good release. I'm going to be giving Gentoo a try in a few weeks when the 1.4 release comes out, since I've heard very good things about it.

Steve

 

[The JoJo]

I've tried Mandrake, SUSE and lots of others, but I keep coming back to RedHat.

My 2 cents...

 

[CougTek]

Any chance that F@H works under FreeBSD? I downloaded the 4.6.2 iso and I'm damn tempted to give it a shot, be it just to compare how it fares against Linux (RedHat 7.3, kernel 2.4.18, KDE 3.0).

 

[LiamC]

Re my earlier post about how smooth the RH install went. Well it wasn't quite that smooth.

When it came time to partition the drive - the RH installer made some changes and away things went. What it did though was move some partition number around - and this temporarily hosed W2K.

You see, I have a drive which just contain O/S's and a drive that just contains data. W2K is installed on a logical drive (D & the BOOT.INI file looks something like this

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows 2000"

Of course the partition number has changed because the RH install changed it - end result W2K wouldn't boot and the repair process couldn't find the W2K installation.

Once I figured out what was going wrong, all I needed to do was edit BOOT.INI, but it was a little traumatic. But it took a little while...

Backup your data first!

 

[time]

That sounds more like the Red Hat installer than the picture you first painted. :-?

 

[LiamC]

Yeah, but apart from that glitch is was as smooth as any install I ever had. And in the past, the glitch would have toasted the W2K partition and all the data

Disclaimer:
I have been trying to get a workable Linux install off-and-on for a couple of years now, so when I buy major hardware, I check for Linux compatabilty now as part of the buying process.

The cruncher will be how easy it is to get SAMBA up and running, IP masquerading and Open Office.