Re: I want to migrate to Linux

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:22:51 +0000, pcbldrNinetyEight wrote:

General Schvantzkopf <schvantzkopf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:CpmdnbRc9NJPO1nanZ2dnUVZ_obinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx:

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.


Biostar NF325-A7
http://www.biostar-usa.com/mbdetails.asp?model=nf325-a7

Sempron 3100+ 64bit

Patriot 512MB DDR 400, PC 3200 (one DIMM installed in each machine)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220027

Seagate Barracuda ST380215A 80GB IDE HD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148236

ZOGIS GeForce FX 5500, 256MB DDR, 128-bit, AGP 8X, VGA
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131014

Sony DVD AW-Q170A
http://www.cyberguys.com/templates/SearchDetail.asp?productID=12666

IN WIN IW-J619T2.J350L+ Beige Mid Tower 350W
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811108056

For the first of my twin PCs I built in November '07 I initally bought
two Kingston DIMM from Newegg. One was bad and one was good. I returned
the bad and they sent me bad in return. At that point I gave up. When I
built the second PC in January I installed one Patriot 512MB DIMM.

WIN98SE will not run with more than 512MB installed. I have a plan to
modify it to accept 1GB but I haven't tried yet.

I don't usually have more than about six apps open simultaneously. I can
easily up both machines to 1GB each if this will improve Linux
performance. If I dual boot I will be required to make WIN98SE accept
1GB of ram but that should be possible.

I will reply to your other post later today with a list of apps for
which I seek Linux equivalents. Thank you for your help.

You should definitely up the RAM to at least 1G, preferably 2G which is
what your motherboard can handle. Run Win98 in a VMware virtual machine,
2K or XP would be better if you have install CDs for them but you can use
W98 if you don't. You will be a lot happier with a Win98 VM then with
native Win98. The VM will be more stable than native Win98 because it
won't have as many driver issues. A VM divorces the hardware
compatibility problem from the software compatibility issue. For example
your issue with total RAM goes away, you will just set the VMs RAM space
to be whatever Win98 can handle. You also don't have to worry about
drivers because the underlying Linux OS is taking care of that problem.
The Win98 VM talks to generic VMware devices, VMware takes care of
translating between Linux and Windows. Finally when W98 does crash it's
no big deal, you just restart the VM, it's no different that any program
that crashes. You can also run Win98 without the burden of antivirus
programs as long as you don't use it for random interconnect access. You
will be using Linux for web-browsing, e-mail and for downloads and Linux
is immune to viruses. The only web access that you will do from a Win98
VM is to do software updates from trusted sites, and those accesses are
safe. If you do try something stupid like browsing porn sites from Win98
and get infected it's easy to fix, all you have to do is restore your
Win98 VM from your backup. BTW a VM is just a big file so making a backup
is just like backing up any file. A Win98 VM will be pretty small as long
as you don't keep any data in it which you wouldn't want to do anyway.
You will keep all of your data on the Linux host where it can sit on a
modern file system instead of FAT32 and where it's easy to copy between
systems and to backup. The Win98 VM can access those directories via
SAMBA, if you do a network mount in Win98 they will appear as Windows
disks.
.

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