Linux for noobs

[Mistshadow]

quote:Originally posted by Unforgiven1:
well, I actually had the same problem at first. So on the second try before I installed it, when I booted from the live CD, I turned off acpi at the boot prompt and then it was flawless.  I run it on my laptop actually, and it's the first distro I've found that's correctly identified every single peice of hardware on the thing.

Thanks for the tip.  

[preacher]

quote:Originally posted by Unforgiven1:
resizing an NTFS partition doesn't have to be brain surgery.  You can..errrr...obtain a copy of partition magic 8.0 and that is really easy use right out of windows before you even think about Linux.

No need to buy a seperate utility. mandrake can non destructively resize NTFS partitions. Believe me, because I did it.

[Unforgiven1]

did I say buy?  

[Kintaro]

They all suck ass.

www.slackware.com

[preacher]

quote:Originally posted by X11: ILL CAP YO ASS.:
They all suck ass.

www.slackware.com

Well X11, the person is looking for a newbie distro and slackware is known for not being for noobs. I'd  say Mandrake or Suse.

[WMD]

quote:Originally posted by ThePreacher:


Well X11, the person is looking for a newbie distro and slackware is known for not being for noobs. I'd  say Mandrake or Suse.

Plus, Slackware relies solely on the kernel source for its drivers.  Hardware support ain't great.

I'm a newbie and I did Slackware, but luckily it was an older, standard machine, and even then it took weeks to get everything figured out.

[insomnia]

quote:Originally posted by ThePreacher:


Well X11, the person is looking for a newbie distro and slackware is known for not being for noobs.

Actually, Slackware was made(by Patrick Volkerding)
to make Linux easy, using the KISS(Keep It Simple Stupid) way.
It's also the fastest way to really understand Linux.

Try(and use) both.    

[ January 27, 2004: Message edited by: insomnia ]

[Mistshadow]

quote:Originally posted by Unforgiven1:
well, I actually had the same problem at first. So on the second try before I installed it, when I booted from the live CD, I turned off acpi at the boot prompt and then it was flawless.  I run it on my laptop actually, and it's the first distro I've found that's correctly identified every single peice of hardware on the thing.

Thanks agian, I've just installed it and it's working fine now. Now my husband doesn't have to use Windows to go online and he can keep the Windows partition for his games and stuff. Not only that, but it'll tide me over quite nicely until my SuSE Pro gets here.  

[restin256]

quote:Originally posted by Unforgiven1:
resizing an NTFS partition doesn't have to be brain surgery.  You can..errrr...obtain a copy of partition magic 8.0 and that is really easy use right out of windows before you even think about Linux.

SuSE 9 installer automatically resizes.

[Uipe]

just a warning BACKUP all important things first lol   .
I had never heard about mepis and I use linux for some time now I gess I will give it a try on my next project.

[Mistshadow]

quote:Originally posted by Mistshadow:


Thanks agian, I've just installed it and it's working fine now. Now my husband doesn't have to use Windows to go online and he can keep the Windows partition for his games and stuff. Not only that, but it'll tide me over quite nicely until my SuSE Pro gets here.    

Well, I was wrong. It just took it a little longer to get really buggy this time. Everything keeps reverting to root-only; pretty damn soon I won't be able to do anything with my regular account. My dsl connection doesn't start up at boot like it's supposed to, so I have to su root to pon dsl-provider. I have sound as a regular user for some things but not for others, while root has sound for everything and this is after I changed the permissions to eveyone for all system sounds. And Mozilla only lets me write so much in a post before it just won't let me write anymore. Apt is screwing up (I wish it worked on any debian system even half as perfectly as they say it does) and the second cd is almost useless as the update script on it doesn't seem to work. Apparently, to make use of it anyway, you're supposed to ap-get update from the second cd only and then apt-get install each package. And using a GUI front-end like kpackage, while apt has always worked better for me from a shell. Well, that's a big help, why not just apt-get everything from the debian servers anyway?  

And one last thing that bugs me; I try to make it log me in with the splash screen of my choice (putting it in root/.kde/share/apps/ksplash/pics) but it's still logging me in with that Mepis splash screen which I don't really care for. Like, may I customize my own computer, please?

Don't get me wrong, Mepis is going to be great if a lot of these bugs are worked out. I especially like the shortcut icons on the desktop for removable disks and to mount partitions, as well as the Mepis installation center, system center and user ultilities (the latter would probably be used the most as it gets rid of spam and crap - or at least it's supposed to, I haven't tried it yet). The documents icon/shortcut is kind of unneccesary though, as the usual icon for home is on the panel. But I think it would be best to wait for it to mature.

Wonder how much it'll cost then? It seems like everyone who makes a debian-based distro wants money for it, and lots of it. Libranet is up to $75 now and the only original software on it the libranet admin menu; the rest is the same debian packages that all debian distros use. No, I'm not saying that's wrong, but it is greedy if they're not including anything more original than that. At $75 you'd expect it to be better, and it is good, but it's not any better than SuSE or Mandrake. SuSE Pro almost doubles the amount of packages you get from Libranet for $5 more.

Ok, I'm done fussing for now. I've just been screwing with this all day to no avail and I'm really irritated.