Linux

[Johnny]

Hello.
I've already been informed by Rebelious that one of his mates swears by it but it has problems running some programs or something.
What experiences/problems have people had with Linux.
My dad's a lazy bastard who lives in the sunny south and works for 2 weeks then gets 2 weeks off every month and has bbq's all the time, so he's gonna build me a new PC for my birthday 'cos this one is fucking pish. He's gonna give it plenty of "web oomph" 'cos that's what I mainly use my PC for. He's gonna put Linux on it instead of windows because it's sposed to be good, and he can buy it and put it on his PC and the ones he's making for me and the one he's making my sister without buying more than one copy.

Aye.. anyway. Any good? Major problems?

[paul engage]

Originally Posted by johnny

Hello.
I've already been informed by Rebelious that one of his mates swears by it but it has problems running some programs or something.
What experiences/problems have people had with Linux.
My dad's a lazy bastard who lives in the sunny south and works for 2 weeks then gets 2 weeks off every month and has bbq's all the time, so he's gonna build me a new PC for my birthday 'cos this one is fucking pish. He's gonna give it plenty of "web oomph" 'cos that's what I mainly use my PC for. He's gonna put Linux on it instead of windows because it's sposed to be good, and he can buy it and put it on his PC and the ones he's making for me and the one he's making my sister without buying more than one copy.

Aye.. anyway. Any good? Major problems?

If you're just starting out with linux, you could try the Mandrake 9.2 distribution- probably one of the easiest to use out there.
Problems typically involve configuring your X (display) server - esp for hw 3d acceleration. Can be a problem with newer boards like the radeon 9800XT. Also if you're installing to a SATA HD, you'll need either kernel 2.4.22 or 2.6 - Mandrake 9.2 will do for this- no kernel building required.

I like Debian better than Mandrake, but I'm using Mandrake 9.2 cos it was a lot easier to get working with SATA etc. Gentoo is where I'm heading next though.

http://www.gentoo.org.

Personally, I dont really like the KDE or Gnome desktops.. too slow and Windows-ish. Blackbox is a great minimal window manager. Fast and Light.

I'd also advise getting some Linux or Unix texts from O'Reilly, such as Linux in a Nutshell.. and learn how to use the bash shell. That's when you'll truly appreciate the power of Linux (plus the stability of course...)

[paul engage]

ha.. I finally got 3d acceleration working with the 9800XT. If anyone needs to know how to do it, let me know.

[AlanG]

its start of term, im sitting here with admin rights on a top of the range PC with 100GB of hard drive space and I havent fannied about with much so far.

woohoo, first ISO of debian comin down at 270k/s

now to read some bloody documentation, ive got a copy of redhat (about 4 months old) in the house so i can bring that in and fanny about too before I bung on whichever I prefer when I reconfigure my machine at home.

ive actually got an older copy of redhat I got about 4 years ago but never got round to installing/trying *embarresed geek face*

[humndislocation]

I've got redhat installed on my PC right now. It's a bugger if you've never used it before, and you're used to being able to do pretty much anything with windows.
It made me understand how people that are clueless about computers must feel about windows.

It's fun and interesting though. Kdevelop is nice for programming, not quite as good as Visual Studio .NET, but still very very good.

[paul engage]

I've never used kdevelop.. looks nice though. I just use emacs with make under blackbox..