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[rastex]

First, my computer specs:

Athlon 64 3000+
Abit KV8-Pro (VIA K8T800 Chipset)
ATi x800 Pro
160GB SATA HDD
2x512MB PC3200 RAM
and I think that should cover the basic stuff.

Right now I'm running WinXP with Service Pack 1. Since most of my University is Unix based I'd like to dual boot with a Linux OS. I want to keep my Windows setup clean from X-Win, Cygwin and all that crap, and just have it all natively with Linux. Now, I've used Unix quite a bit on a very simple level for my courses, but I've never installed it anywhere before.

Now first and foremost my questions are, where can I go to look for any compatibility issues that may exist with my hardware and Linux. And furthermore, where can I go that'll give me a good step-by-step on how to install the OS, and furthermore, WHICH one should I install? I actually wouldn't mind paying for it if it's not too expensive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

 

[Teknopathetic]

Well, #1, I hope you don't plan on doing anything 3D related, because ATi's linux drivers SUCK ASS. Otherwise most other things work out well enough. Most linux distros (SuSE, Fedora, Mandrake) have a Graphical User Interface for installing the OS, and they're pretty easy to use. You'll probably want some free space to make into a seperate linux partition (8-ish gigs or so?).

Mandrake's pretty good, and you should be able to go download the ISOs (legally, and free), burn them and boot to the CD and go.

 

[Diablos]

Yeah, just stay away from linux. Ok? Ok.

You can't even get 3D SCREENSAVERS to work with ATI Linux drivers. Unless you don't mind like 10fps.

 

[rastex]

Ya, I knew there were some issues with ATi's drivers. I definitely won't be doing anything too graphically intense on them. Really, I just want a nice and easy way to SSH and Xterm into my university account, do some GCC compiling that type of stuff without bloating my Windows environment. So you suggest Mandrake?

 

[Teknopathetic]

Mandrake's probably the most user-friendly distro I've come across.

 

[Phoenix]

Suse 9.1 is by far the friendliest, easy to set up, and easy to maintain Linux distro out there any pretty much all of the professional rags that talk about businesses deploying Linux agree

 

[rastex]

Is there an AMD64 version of it? Right now I'm downloading an AMD64 version of Mandrake10.

 

[RedDwarf]

http://www.knoppix.com/
This is a version that boots from CD, so you don't even have to actually install it. Good stuff.

 

[Teknopathetic]

I'd say SuSE is the most "complete" and professional one, but Mandrake's the easiest to get set up.

 

[Wellington]

I dual boot Mandrake 10.0, haven't had any problems with it.

Fedora had issues with 9800s, may persist with the x800s.

 

[rastex]

http://www.knoppix.com/
This is a version that boots from CD, so you don't even have to actually install it. Good stuff.

Awesome, since all I really want to do is ssh into my university account and run some X programs, this looks like it should work fine. Thanks! So now I'm downloading Mandrake and Knoppix, I'll try both to see which ones work the best for what I want. Thanks a lot to everyone! I'll let you know how it goes.

 

[Phoenix]

I'd say SuSE is the most "complete" and professional one, but Mandrake's the easiest to get set up.

After using Suse, Mandrake just felt like a cobbled together kludge...

 

[Teknopathetic]

Phoenix: You've also (obviously) got some linux experience behind you.

 

[rastex]

Mandrake download stopped...

 

[GG-Duo]

I tried putting Fedora, and then Mandrake on my computer (Athlon 64 as well)

now it always hangs when trying to boot the USB drivers. only failsafe works ;_;

and i have not looked into how to get rid of the bootloader

 

[Wellington]

Boot with a boot disk (floppies still have a use!) and type 'FDISK /MBR' (minues the ' of course).

If that doesn't work, boot from the XP CD and go into Recovery Console and type in 'FIXMBR'.

 

[GG-Duo]

ooo. Thanks, I'll grab a diskette and try it tomorrow.

 

[rastex]

If I can redirect my own thread for a second, since I have some OS gurus here I'd like to ask you guys another question. This pertains to how an OS operates directly. When you call cin or cout, what happens exactly, as in what's the course of cout << "hello world!" << endl; from running inside your program to being displayed on the monitor as it travels through your operating system?

The one thing that I don't know about is how the OS hooks into the cout command. I mean, does EVERY command go through the OS? or does the OS have hooks or something that trigger when certain instructions are attempted to be executed?

 

[Hitokage]

Suse 9.1 is by far the friendliest, easy to set up, and easy to maintain Linux distro out there any pretty much all of the professional rags that talk about businesses deploying Linux agree

And if you want something a little more flexible, then there's Slackware for sane people and Gentoo for masochists.

 

[Chairman85]

And if you want something a little more flexible, then there's Slackware for sane people and Gentoo for masochists.

Gentoo teaches you Linux as you install, also its the easiest to maintain once the (brutal) install is complete.

 

[shoplifter]

Whichever version you choose, make sure it supports your SATA. Especially if it's a 64-bit distro. I've been waiting for a while for a compile that has built in support for my drivers. It's probably out there by now since I was fooling around with this 3 or 4 months ago.

 

[Hitokage]

Gentoo teaches you Linux as you install, also its the easiest to maintain once the (brutal) install is complete.

Um, right.

 

[Gattsu25]

Gentoo kicks ass

compile from source!

 

[rc213]

I tried Mandrake & Suse and neither had support for my SATA so i couldnt install. So u should probably make sure it carries drivers that support your SATA Chip or else make sure u have a IDE Disk. I did install them both on my 2nd PC and both were pretty easy to use.

 

[swoon]

yea. try knoppix and see what detects and what not. everything should work out of box, though

 

[Phoenix]

Phoenix: You've also (obviously) got some linux experience behind you.

Yeah, I use Linux a lot at work as it makes up the vast majority of enterprise servers. Between that BSD, and Solaris (shrinking), I see an insane amount of Linux/Unix.

 

[maharg]

Gentoo is anything but masochistic. It's very simplistic, and does pretty much all the work for you. I don't know where this idea of it being low level or difficult or even particularly useful for learning how linux works internally. It's just a linux for people who like to be able to easily update their packages in the BSD style, as far as I'm concerned. That it compiles them (without any effort on your part) instead of using binary packages really has no bearing on its difficulty.

And, I might add, that it makes sure that if there is a serious problem with your setup, you tend to find out a lot earlier, and you're much less likely to have linking issues.

It is a pain in the ass to install, but once it's there you pretty much need to know 3 commands to keep your software up to date. And one of those even goes so far as to rcs version your /etc files and do three way merges on changes made to them by you or by the package you install.

 

[iapetus]

Gentoo has never worked for me - too many basic packages have failed to compile for one reason or another. Perhaps it's the machine I tried to install it on, but it was a very frustrating process. Perhaps when it's a bit more mature...

 

[Hitokage]

Hehe, anything that has you actually compile and recompile KDE on your own is masochistic no matter what other niceties it may have.

Seriously though, Gentoo is great for working with an existing system(so is apt or swaret) but it ranks extremely low on the "just get me a sane linux install" factor, unless you can live with extraordinary opportunity cost.

 

[CueTheMusic]

Hehe, anything that has you actually compile and recompile KDE on your own is masochistic no matter what other niceties it may have.

yep, typing "emerge kde" is pretty tough

 

[Hitokage]

yep, typing "emerge kde" is pretty tough

30 hours of max cpu usage later....

 

[CaptainABAB]

If I can redirect my own thread for a second, since I have some OS gurus here I'd like to ask you guys another question. This pertains to how an OS operates directly. When you call cin or cout, what happens exactly, as in what's the course of cout << "hello world!" << endl; from running inside your program to being displayed on the monitor as it travels through your operating system?

The one thing that I don't know about is how the OS hooks into the cout command. I mean, does EVERY command go through the OS? or does the OS have hooks or something that trigger when certain instructions are attempted to be executed?

Basically, cin and cout go to the standard input and output provided by the OS shell. The compiler takes care of turning your code into the OS appropriate calls.

It also depends on your definition of OS - for example, for some people it's just the kernel, for others it's everything including the shell, utilities, KDE enironment, etc.

So much is done through the OS that I would venture to say that the only things that do NOT are internal program modifications - changing variables, calling methods, utilizing CPU extensions like MMX, etc.

 

[CaptainABAB]

Also, I would consider installing something along the lines of cygwin or vmware. Especially, if you don't have a separate partition and/or want to run both at the same time.

Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) is provided for free by Red Hat and is basically a set of dlls that emulate unix OS within windows. It also includes all the unix utilities (grep, etc.) and x-windows.

With a program like vmware, you are basically running an OS within a vm that passes all the x86 calls to your OS. With this, you can run multiple OS's at the same time (dependent on memory) and it's not just linux. You can run Windows 98 in a Windows Xp box, etc.

 

[rastex]

Basically, cin and cout go to the standard input and output provided by the OS shell. The compiler takes care of turning your code into the OS appropriate calls.

Aha, this is what I was looking for. See I wasn't sure when the interaction between the program and the OS came into play. So it's at compile time eh? Interesting... I thought it was at interrupt time, so the OS registers an Interrupt Service Routine with pretty much every single interrupt (hardware and software) and when they occur (such as writing to the screen or whatever) the OS code gets called for the ISR and handles the I/O accordingly. I think what you're saying is the way modern OSs work, there's a different way processes and the kernal can work with each other involving a context switch, not too sure how that'd work though for I/O... probably still just compiles to a specific type of call. Cool, thanks.

Also, I would consider installing something along the lines of cygwin or vmware

I want to avoid installing these things on my system since they add quite a bit of bloat (cygwin especially) and it just clutters everything up. I actually got Knoppix working and it's pretty damn sweet. The one HUGE problem is that it doesn't recognize my damn onboard NIC so I can't connect to the internet or anything. Other than that, it's pretty damn sweet and I don't even have to install anything. But right now it's useless without support for my NIC

 

[rastex]

Ok, so I found a driver from Via's site for my onboard LAN for Linux kernal 2.4 (which my version of Knoppix is) so... is it possible to install new drivers when booting from the CD? Via gives some instructions on how to do it, but I don't think they'll work because the way Knoppix works.