chrisc

I have a very shit system and I'm thinking of ditching Windows and
using Linux because I believe it's faster. Also my current edition of
Windows is Windows 2000, and because I'm living in South Africa now, I
can't afford to keep up with Mr Bill Gates prices for operating
systems. The system I have access to is an:

AMD 733MHZ.
512MB of ram.
12GB Hard Drive.
US Robotics 56k modem.

Thats about it. Ok here's what I'll be using it for. To browse forums
on the web. Access my email on the web and using standard email.
Watching DivX, playing mp3s. Using a Microsoft Word program or
equivalent. Burn CD's, DVD's. Reading and posting to USENET. And the
most important of all plugging in my removable USB 250g hard drive,
which contains a NTFS (I think) data partition with 40g of information
I do not want to lose. One of my main questions is how friendly is
Linux with USB stuff now? I'll plan to use my digital camera with
linux, which is USB. Also is there any easy to use torrent software for
Linux? So basically whats the most user friendly and best edition to
use?

jjim

well if your asking here that would be mandriva 2007 --
gone in less than one second---------->>>>>>>>>>>>
jjim..........registered linux user 281836

bacchus

everything is good but the size of your drive, you need some viagra
for that thing. When I setup mandriva I use about 8-10 gig (this box has
12gigs) for the root for breathing room although it normally only uses
about 4-5 gigs. I use 700megs to 1gig for swap files and like lots of room
on the home for me, like 40-120gigs.

In your case you could use like 6gig for the root, 250megs for the swap
file and the balance for home. You would be better to swap the 250gig for
the 12gig or find a 40+ hard drive.

Other than that Mandriva will drive everything you want to do easy, I do it
all day long.

Yes there is a nice bit torrent software available, do you want me to tell
you or do you want to find it on your own? More fun exploring all the
software at http://kde-apps.org/

get mandriva install and come back here and asked about the software you
need at that time. People here know which packages rock and which ****. it
will save you hours from playing around with shitty stuff.

frank peelo

If you were coming from something ancient (and small) like Win98 (I
don't know how Win2k compares) then you'd have to be prepared to see a
slowdown. Things are just bigger these days, even if they are Linux, and
they take longer to load. But that machine is a monster speed demon
compared to my laptop; it should be fine for Linux.

As has been pointed out, the hard drive is not huge; this is OK if all
your important stuff is going to be on the web or on the USB HD anyway,
as you imply. In this case, you could leave everything as one big
partition, and don't worry too much about the home directory on the PC.


The big problem would be this hard drive. USB should not be a problem,
but NTFS might be. Until recently, writing to NTFS partitions was
something that Linux did not really do. I haven't got any NTFS drives
anywhere near my Linux box so I don't know how much things have changed
in this area. Current edition of Linux Magazine has NTFS as its cover
story so I guess it's possible, but I hope someone else will comment on it.


The camera should be fine if it's PTP or one of the ones supported by
gphoto2. Is it a very new camera?

I don't know torrent. However, the reason for that is that, until very
recently, I had only a 56k modem too, with per second billing on the
phone. I cannot see how torrent can usefully be used over a modem like
that, unless you don't have phone bills.

Get a live CD (Mandriva One) and try it out, then you'll see.

Frank

whiskers

Only fly in the ointment might be the modem; if it is a 'software modem'
then getting it to work with anything but Windows could be a pain. The
best recommendation, even for Windows users, is to get an external
'Serial' modem that needs no special software to run. The real ones
generally have lots of LEDs on the front, an on/off switch, and their own
power supply. They are about the size of a paper-back novel.

You mean web forums? Most grpahical browsers available for Linux can
manage that, but web forums are always a pain over a dial-up, no matter
what OS you use.


OpenOffice.org, or others. You can even run MS Office under a proprietary
program called 'Crossover Office'.

Usenet was invented, and designed to run, on Unix-type systems ) (So
was the internet, of course, and the WWW).

NTFS is Microsoft-only; Linux can read from it, but do not depend on being
able to write to it. Copy the data (using Linux) to a partition formatted
with one of the Linux file formats (Mandriva currently defaults to ext3),
or to FAT32 which can be read and written equally well by Windows and
Linux. Data matters more than the hardware or the OS; back up, back up,
back up ...


USB works very well with Linux.


Ask in this group, and you'll be told "Mandriva 2007". Other distros are
available )

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~

james d. beard

Mandriva requires a Pentium-class CPU (586; I assume the AMD would qualify).

Plenty. About half that will go for operating system and
ordinary system software plus Open Office and other things.
You will have about 6 GB for /home where you keep your personal data.


Downloading 3 or 4 install CDs, or a DVD, will be painful to an
extreme, and updates may run 700 MB on top of that. There are
a couple of Linux magazines (LINUX FORMAT is one) that provide
DVDs with install versions of Linux, Mandriva among them. I
think the LINUX FORMAT issue with Mandriva is usually the
December or January issue (printed in UK -- may take a month or
two to reach your location), and in the U.S. cost about $20.
CheapBytes on the web would be an alternative, but I have read
that one of their CDs was found to be corrupt recently. Perhaps
that has been fixed.

NTFS is proprietary. Mandriva can read it, but trying to write
to it may be difficult or impossible, and probably will
never be reliable.

Mandriva, plus the help you can get on this forum, would likely
serve you as well or better than any other distro. Debian and
Susse are rock-solid reliable, but may not have all the
capabilities you might want as early as available from Mandriva.
Ubuntu/Kubuntu have a following. If you prefer easy
compilation rather than easy rpm package installation, get one
of them.

Downloading or buying a one-CD Live Linux version for test
purposes is likely a good idea. Knoppix is popular, but
Mandriva has a one-CD version, too. You can try several,
without installing anything to your disk. But when you decide
what to install, it usually works better if you install from a
full installation set of CDs or a DVD.

Cheers!

jim b.

--
Unix is not user-unfriendly; it merely
expects users to be computer-friendly.

gopostal

I know I am next to worm shit in the pecking order around here so factor
that into how much credence you put into my opinion but I have tried to no
avail to get mandriva to access my primary HD that is NTFS. It will see the
drive as attached hardware but will not look onto the drive at all.

patrick

Try out http://pclinuxos.com which is Mandriva done right, liveCDrom,
with docs on the desktop!

Read the entire thread, and PCLinuxOS would do just fine, in fact, am
using it on 300Mhz and faster, units here, though I do have broadband
cable Internet.

Installed, it runs up to 50X faster. Have installed on about 100
systems, without any grief. It wants 5.8Gb of drive. Have done it on
4.3 Gb.

Yes, on my 733mhz gigapro via system with an 8.4 Gb drive, Pclinuxos is
faster by a large margin, that Microsoft Win2k! Plus, has 20 desktops!

ramrod

I run Mandriva+KDE on a 500MHz Celeron without any issues.


Mandriva.
--

RLU #407952

lordy

Remember it's not so much Linux being friendly with USB stuff as vice
versa.

.. I have USB printer, scanner, camera, HD etc. all set up automagically.
Some things (eg WebCams) still not there in general and you have to stick to certain
hardware,

However your NTFS file system will be a pain to write to from Linux
(again blame Microsoft, who seem hell bent on writing their own file
systems when perfectly good ones have existed for decades. I wonder
why...)

Use Captive NTFS (which users your NTFS driver from a windows
installation) OR buy Paragon NTFS for Linux. There are also free native
Linux NTFS project but I don't use NTFS so haven't kept up with its
progress. Last I looked it could read safely and write to a drive with
little fragmentation (Fragmentation - Another feature that Microsoft likes to
include in their file systems)

Hard question but . Ubuntu and Mandriva usually are good for newbies
(with Windows Expectations).
The most important thing in this regard is that they have good device discovery and are
configured to do a lot of automatic stuff out of the box. I would say.
Also that certain Package combinations are configured to work together
(eg Gimp & X-Sane etc)

One thing that Mandriva STILL doesn't do, is set up additional urpmi/smart
repositories during installation. This would save a lot of headaches.
There must be a reason for it..


That's a different question and needs qualification..

Lordy