Newb seeking distro advice

Welcome to Mepis Ant jam. You are opening a can of worms (or at least a room of contention) by asking for recommendations of a single Linux distribution.

Since you're here at Mepis.org, may I suggest SimplyMepis?

A couple of issues. Since you mention that you have some SATA drives, if you use Mepis you will need to get the most recent version 3.4-3 since the earlier 3.3.1-1 doesn't do well with SATA.

If you are wanting to play with different distros. (this is an excellent way to learn Linux and the similarities/differences) I would recommend setting aside a hard drive just for that purpose. One you can put in and take out and keep from messing up your live system, at least for the moment.

Another recommendation is to simplify your system, at least at the beginning. Put together a system with a single hard drive, CD, (floppy?), network card.

I like a number of the current distros that have GUIs as a front end. Distros such as Mepis (there it is again!), Knoppix, DamnSmallLinux, PuppyLinux, Kanotix, PCLinuxOS... Check out www.distrowatch.com for LOTS of options. Focus on those that have "Live CD" capabilities such as those I mentioned above. This will allow you the most flexibility of "try before you (might) buy". You can test your hardware without going through the installation pain if it doesn't work. However, I've found that, if you have fairly generic hardware, if one distro will work, the others will too. But YMMV

By using a distro that gives you a GUI, you can still open up command lines that, unlike in the Windows world, are REAL HONEST TO GOD COMMAND LINES. Trust me for the moment when I say you can open enough command screens and terminals and who-knows-what to keep you busy for a long time!

If you're interested in really-really learning lots about Linux then check out gentoo and LinuxFromScratch. Both of these focus on BUILDING LINUX the way you want. Oh, I almost forgot Slackware. The Grand Dad of Linux distros that does a lot from command lines and configuration scripts.

Also, for authors, check out anything that Marcel Gagne has written. And Robin Miller's book, advertised on this site is good, but the copy of Mepis included in it is now dated

One more thing and then I'll shut up! Check The Linux Documentation Project (www.tldp.org). That is a site with LOTS of technical documentation.

And one more thing (again?) is Tux Magazine, which is a good PDF-only (but free) magazine desiged for "newbies". Lots of good articles. You can find it at www.tuxmagazine.com.

OK, I'm sure plenty of other folks will hammer you with other suggestions

Good luck and let us know how things come along with you!

Jon

Thanks for your advice Jon.

I've decided to start with your recurring recommendation - Simply Mepis. I've booted the live CD of it before and like the looks and feel of it and was already leaning that way.

Now I have to decide how to install it and have it boot. I found that my BIOS will allow me (as most modern BIOS will) to select the hard drive to boot from. I will keep the entire secondary SATA drive partitioned for Linux. Rather than let Grub mess with the MBR on my main drive, I'll manually select at boot up which drive to boot from, XP or Linux.

But here's a thought for Grub - I could let it be installed to my secondary Linux drive and allow it to modify that drive's MBR and give me a choice of which Linux distro to boot from, after installing alternative distros, right?

I also assume that I could manually edit menu.1st in the grub folder and have XP become a boot option without modifying the MBR on my primary XP drive, true?

I hope these questions make sense. I appreciate your help Jon!

My system is not laid out this way, so I'm sure if I'm wrong that someone will correct me

If you don't want to modify your primary drive at all, including the MBR, then you will need to create a "boot floppy" that has GRUB on it. To boot OSes other than the primary (Win XP on /dev/hda1), then you would insert the floppy prior to boot, boot off it and choose the "real OS" that you want to run. Then, as you add/remove operating systems from your SATA drive, you would modify menu.lst on the floppy. This is probably the best approach since poor Windows XP gets confused if it has to share the drive with other OSes

Generally the creation of GRUB the first time will be (semi-)smart enough to add any existing OSes. However, after it's been created, if you add yet-another-os, say PuppyLinux, then you would have to manually edit GRUB to tell it where to boot PuppyLinux.

If you want the ability to have multiple OSes and you are devoting a drive to it then one recommendation I have seen on a number of sites is to pre-partition the drive. I don't recall you indicating the size of your SATA drive, but assuming a 100 GB drive, you could split it up into ten 10 GB partitions. Eight to ten GB is plenty for Linux experimentation. If you do this, allocate at least one physical partition. Why? Because Linux can boot from "Logical" partitions, but some other OSes (Windows and the *BSDs) cannot. So if you want to test how (differently) things run here are two options.

The first has a single physical partition:
/dev/sda1 Physical 10 GB
/dev/sda2 "Extended" 90 GB
/dev/sda5 "Logical" (First logical partition always starts with 5) 10 GB
/dev/sda6 to /dev/sda14 "Logical" 10 GB

The second creates all the physical partitions you can, and then uses Extended/Logical partitions:
/dev/sda1 Physical 10 GB
/dev/sda2 Physical 10 GB
/dev/sda3 Physical 10 GB
/dev/sda4 "Extended" 70 GB
/dev/sda5 "Logical" 10 GB (see how well that works? (grin) )
/dev/sda6 to /dev/sda10 "Logical" 10 GB

Anyway, go nuts and let us know how it works

Jon

If you don't want to modify your primary drive at all, including the MBR, then you will need to create a "boot floppy" that has GRUB on it. To boot OSes other than the primary (Win XP on /dev/hda1), then you would insert the floppy prior to boot, boot off it and choose the "real OS" that you want to run. Then, as you add/remove operating systems from your SATA drive, you would modify menu.lst on the floppy. This is probably the best approach since poor Windows XP gets confused if it has to share the drive with other OSes

but if you have a BIOS that lets you choose the start up drive at boot (eg pressing F8 on my old one) you can put grub on mbr of any drive.

If you really want to learn and aren't willing to sacrifice your XP then i suggest you try and pick up a spare computer to learn linux on, espeacially if your going to mess around with many distro's. Linux is working it's way towards friendliness but in many ways is not there yet. Even more if your just starting with linux because every one makes that one newbie mistake that wipes your system.

I hadn't seen those recommendations before about pre-partitoning, but I did figure out to do that very thing. My second SATA (/dev/sdb - by the way: does "sd" mean SATA or serial drive?) is an 80 GB drive. So I created a primary swap partiton of 750 MB and an extended part with a 10 GB "root" and a 10 GB "home" logical drive. That leaves me over 50 GB to partition off for further disto installs in the future.

I was kicking around the suggestion to install Grub to a floppy but I'd have to go out and buy / install a floppy drive. This is the first machine I decided to build without a floppy drive simply due to the fact that it'll boot from CD.

Anyway, I select the drive to boot from through BIOS at startup (F8 key). I did install Grub to /dev/sdb (my secondary, non-XP SATA - the one that has Mepis installed) and everything seems to work peachy. When I boot the Mepis drive Grub even gives me the choice to boot XP from /dev/sda but when I tried it the system just hangs. But that's no big deal - I'll figure that out another time.

Now my problem is that Mepis won't detect the wireless LAN. I've been to different forums and one pointed me at some NdisWrapper program that has a wireless tools program. I need to figure out how to extract the Ndiswrappper download (a file with a tar.gz extension) and install it to Mepis. The program came with pretty good installation instructions which I printed out from XP, so hopefully everything will go smooth.

By the way, FYI I'm using the latest and greatest build for Simply Mepis - 3.4.3.

Thanks Jon and everyone - I'll keep you posted

ant jam

Ant jam, it sounds like things are coming along. Great to hear it!

For your wireless stuff, please start a new thread and give us some specifics on it and we'll see if we can help.

Regarding the "sd" in "/dev/sd?". Actually it stands for "SCSI Drive". The older IDE drives all go by hd? for "hard drive", floppies go by "fd?" and the "other interface" is "sd?" for SCSI. The reason is that the underlying code for handling hard drives is more flexible when using SCSI methods. So CDs, USB drives and SATA drives (and perhaps all other drives that come out in the future?) will be designated with "sd?"

Happy hacking (the good kind)

Jon

SATA and some other drive types are setup as pretend SCSI drives, dates back to when unix only really liked SCSI

Another thought might be to create a FAT32 partition if you want to share files between linux and windose ... they can both read and write to FAT.

Wayne

Great suggestion Wayne!

I've noticed that XP doesn't "see" my newly partitioned (ext3)Linux drive. And I was wondering (haven't checked on it yet) if Linux can find the XP drive.

I recently downloaded the latest driver for my wireless LAN card via XP. Now I need to be able to get it over to the Linux side of the house. A FAT32 part sounds like the key.

For browsing the overall system (hard drives, folders, files) what is the linux equivalent to windoze explorer or "my computer"?

You guys rock! Thanks for the guidance.

Regarding whether Linux can "see" the XP stuff, the answer is "yes". Linux can "understand" the underlying NTFS file system used by Windows, however there's a catch. Because MS has not given any info away on the subtleties of the file system, most Linux distros will mount any NTFS partitions as "Read Only". That's one of the reasons behind Wayne's suggestion. It is possible to write to NTFS partitions, but some folks have sometimes had some problems...

Regarding "My Computer". When you get Mepis up and running (or many other distros for that matter), if it uses the KDE "Desktop Environment" then it will have the equivalent search and view capabilities. In KDE you will have an icon that looks like a house. That's your "home" folder. It actually runs a tool called Konqueror which is like Firefox, the browser, but it can do lots more. It too is a browser and a general system viewer. The GNOME environment also has a similar tool. So after looking around for a little while I think you'll feel at home in Linux. There are similar tools that work the same and many of the tools are better (in my opinion).

Jon

Hi Jon,

Yup, I did figure out some things with Konqueror. My main problem with it (and I'm still rather fuzzy on this) was how to get to and browse my hard drives (mainly the XP SATA). Eventually I got to the mount folder and saw the devices there but initially they acted as empty "folders". For some reason when I came back to them later in Konqueror, I was able to "see" their files - including everything on the NTFS part. Is this a mount/unmount thing happening automatically? Or is there a better way to access hard disk contents using Konqueror?

Also, how do I save my view settings in Konqueror? I like the folder hierarchy view in the left pane and detailed file view in the right.

Thanks Jon!

The experimentation / learning process continues - ain't it fun?

About not being able to boot to XP from Grub on your linux drive. You might have to go in and edit your menu.lst . For some reason Mepis adds XP to Grub as being on (sda1,1) when for it to actually boot you have to change it to (sda1,0). Hopefully that'll work for you so you don't have to press f8 everytime you boot. I usually don't pay attention when I boot so I would end up having to reboot like 7 times to get what I wanted.

Well ant, I'm not sure about being unable to view the SATA drive, but I'm sure someone will chime in with the answer

Regarding saving the various views in Konqueror. Start up Konqueror by clicking on the house icon. Make your changes.
Click Settings and then Save View Profile "filemanagement"...
Here you can either save your settings under the default name of "filemanagement" or you can give it another name. Also, you can optionally click on Save window size in profile. Finally, click the Save button.

You're done

Jon

Thanx Flam - I'll give it a stab!

Great Jon - many thanks!

Also, guess what? My wireless works! Yay! I'm on-line with Linux - Ndiswrapper hooked me up. All I had to do was manually un-install each individual default driver that was already there and then install the one wiki/ndiswrapper had referred me to download (which I obviously had to do earlier through XP) and then Bam - "driver installed, device present" (or something like that). I clicked on the Firefox icon and went for a cruise- Nice! Now I can really roll up my sleeves...

Speaking of Firefox, I like to get my news from Foxnews.com and they have free video segments for different news topics. The videos played right away - I didn't have to download and install any plug-ins or extensions or anything but the one problem I am having is that the audio and video are way out of sync. Is there a way to fix that?

what's up with that - I got my internet and now I'm griping about something else already - never satisfied

What do you think my next move should be now that I'm on-line (in terms of upgrading, installing, etc...)?

Ant