Linux Questions

[Itay Neeman]

Hi,

I am a linux newbie but I still like it. What I wanted to ask is could you help answer these 2 questions:
1. If I am a TOTAL newbie on linux, which distribution I should get?
2. If you give linux 5gb of a 40gb HD will that affect the computer?

Thanks,
Itay

[James]

1. Any is good but I chose to use SuSe as my first Linux and it was pretty reasonable for the beginner level.
2. No, as long as its on a seperate partition it should be fine

[hmahonen]

1. I would prefer trying RedHat, since it has a very nice graphical install program and it is rather easy too.

2. Yes, you will notice that approximately 12,5% of your harddiskspace available in Windows has suddenly disappeared. Otherwise I can't think anything else, unless you specify what you mean by "will that affect the computer".

[Itay Neeman]

Isn't redhat for much more advanced users? Last time I installed it had a DOS install which I never understood =)

Also, in affect my computer I mean will it affect the performance of it?

Also, can linux recognize a network running on Win2k or vice versa?

[hmahonen]

DOS install? Well, you can do that too, but if you get yourself a RedHat burnt on bootable CD and you have a CDROM drive, which supports booting directly from CD, it's easy as inserting a cd to your cdrom and restarting computer. The installing program will guide you from there then.

How do you except it to affect on your computers performance? Please be more specific, since it is rather hard to tell anything without knowing about what to tell.

But, in general, perhaps you will encounter somekind of increasement in speed, but that depends on lot of different factors, such as what programs do you plan to use, what are you going to do with it etc.

And to the last question, the answer is yes. Although I'm not too experienced about Linux and Windows networking and the communications between them, I do know that after configuring Samba to your Linux system, you can access it from Windows OS's - I can't see any reason why it shouldn't work other way around too

[Hierophant]

Linux supports mounting FAT and FAT32 partitions. I am not sure about NTFS partitions though.

[Elledan]

I'd suggest you try SuSe first. I believe that 7.0 is the latest version, but 7.1 is coming already

If I were you, then I'd wait for the first distribution of SuSe that has the final version of KDE 2.0 since that one is so cool.

Oh, and about how it affects your PC: It might become a Linux-only PC

[creole]

Itay...I do not use Linux yet (working on it) but pretty much everyone of the programmers in my office use it. Their preferences range from Debian to SuSe to Mandrake. I have read MANY reviews though that say the Caldera OpenLinux is the easiest install as it is all graphical. I found the full bxed version in CompUSA for $10 (yes I know that you download it for free, but it was worth $10 to have it burnt to CD with the manual and all the extras)

[Michel V]

I heard Caldera has lots of proprietary stuff. Like their format of RPMs.
In the end, it's easy to install, but it's not a standart Linux system so it would create problems sometimes with file exchanging.

[Son Nguyen]

I installed RedHat 7.0 and still very new with it
Do you think that a person use extensively Windows apps could survive when Linux is the only OS?

[Elledan]

Originally posted by Shin Ma
I heard Caldera has lots of proprietary stuff. Like their format of RPMs.
In the end, it's easy to install, but it's not a standart Linux system so it would create problems sometimes with file exchanging.

RPM's are actually quite common for Linux. Redhat, SuSe and some more distributions already support it.