Re: I want to migrate to Linux

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:13:38 +0000, pcbldrNinetyEight wrote:

General Schvantzkopf <schvantzkopf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:Cpmdnbtc9NLUF1nanZ2dnUVZ_obinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx:

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:55:56 +0000, pcbldrNinetyEight wrote:

I want to migrate from WIN98SE to Linux and am looking for advise.

I recently built two Identical WIN98SE PCs. Even though I expect these
machines to last many years I know someday they will wear out and
WIN98SE compatible hardware will not be available. I have no intention
of ever buying MS OS again so I must take action so I can continue
building and using PCs in the future.

One PC will serve as a test machine and the other will be my primary
PC. My plan is to start by booting from a LiveCD, then install Linux
in a dual boot with WIN98SE, then install just Linux. If I am
successful I will abandon WIN98SE on both machines.

My priorities in order of importance are: Support for my hardware. (I
omitted a list for brevity in this first post but will supply if you
are interested) Support for WINE so I may continue to use my current
software for which there are no Linux alternatives.

I need to get this OS up and running quickly with little previous
knowledge. Until I have time to learn the syntax of Linux I need to
pick a distro that supports point and click as much as possible. I
have told my wife that she too is migrating to Linux and she also
needs a point and click OS.

I am considering the following distros and given my goals I would
appreciate your input and or additional suggestions: PCLinuxOS Ubantu

I chose this NG to post because it looks fairly active. If there is a
better NG for my questions then please advise. Thank you for your
help.

If you are on dialup you will want a stable distro. You have probably
figured out that there are a lot distros available and they all have
different objectives. Some distros aim to be up to the minute while
others are targeted at people who want a distro that will be supported
for a very long time and which requires the least amount of work to
maintain it, these types of distros are called "stable". From a users
point of view a stable distro will tend to have fewer features and it's
components will be older and have fewer features. However they also
have very many fewer updates than the cutting edge distros. In the
Redhat family the cutting edge distro is Fedora, the stable distro is
Redhat Enterprise Linux. Fedora generally has hundreds of megabytes of
updates a week, RHEL has 1 or 2 megabytes per week. The reason that the
update burden is so low on RHEL is that it only provides bug fixes and
security patches, there are no new features or improvements as there
are on Fedora. The free version of Redhat EL is called CentOS. The
latest version of CentOS is 5.1. I recommend that you give CentOS 5.1 a
try. In the Ubuntu family the stable version is designated by the
extension LTS. The latest leading edge Ubuntu is 7.10, the latest LTS
version is 6.06 LTS. In both the CentOS and Ubuntu LTS cases the
distros are vintage 2006. I get the impression that you aren't using
leading edge hardware so the age of these distros shouldn't be a
problem for you.

You guess right. I don't own, can't afford cutting edge hardware plus I
value reliability over performance.

The advantage is that you will be able to update them using dialup
because they have so many fewer updates.

Excellent.

Actually I'm
making an assumption that Ubuntu LTS is like CentOS because I'm a
Fedora and CentOS user, I play with Ubuntu but I don't like it so I
don't use it regularly. I can say with certainty that you will be able
to do CentOS updates without a problem with CentOS 5.1.

I will add those distros to my list. Thanks.

Please post the specs for your machines. If you don't have a lot of RAM
you will want to be looking at a lighter weight distro, Xubuntu for
example. If you have 1G then you can run anything, 512M will run a Gnome
system but you'll probably want to limit the number of applications that
you have open at any one time. You can even run a Gnome system in as
little as 384M but it's not particularly pleasant. Xubuntu uses a lighter
weight window manager so it runs better on low spec machines. It won't be
quite as user friendly as Ubuntu, but it's probably better than Win98.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Linux hype ....
    ... on a Linux newsgroup people will tend to say `no'. ... I'd so far not recommend most Linux distros to non-techies ... machines with different distros on them. ... Networking, in particular NFS, can cause interesting interlocking ...
    (uk.comp.os.linux)
  • Re: I want to migrate to Linux
    ... WIN98SE compatible hardware will not be available. ... I am considering the following distros and given my goals I would ... very many fewer updates than the cutting edge distros. ... The free version of Redhat EL is called CentOS. ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: I want to migrate to Linux
    ... I recently built two Identical WIN98SE PCs. ... My plan is to start by booting from a LiveCD, then install Linux ... I am considering the following distros and given my goals I would ... The free version of Redhat EL is called CentOS. ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: I want to migrate to Linux
    ... I recently built two Identical WIN98SE PCs. ... If I am successful I will abandon WIN98SE on both machines. ... I am considering the following distros and given my goals I would ... The latest version of CentOS ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: Which Linux OS best for beginner to setup as Web / Mail server / Internet sharer and firewall?
    ... > B. Firewall ... store and serve to the win machines / D. AV scan the ... You might want to look at the Smoothwall Express and ClarkConnect ... These are small dedicated router/firewall distros. ...
    (comp.os.linux.networking)