Solaris and Linux are similar enough, both are system V based. FreeBSD is however a bit different under the hood. You might want to take that into account, otherwise FreeBSD is excellent. BTW guys, I'm thinking of turning my home desktop computer into a media centre. I'm not keen on WinXP media centre edition, so I'm looking towards Linux. What setup would be most suitable (distro/software/wm). Anything to watch out for?
Are you doing a dedicated box for recording tv, watching dvd's & playing music? Check out episode 2 of Systm for a demo of a dedicated linux box running MythTV: http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/media Official MythTV website: http://www.mythtv.org The install can be a pain but there are some really good guides. I recommend the following install methods: http://www.wilsonet.com/mythtv/ http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html Check out this thread for a presentation I gave at my local LUG on MythTV: https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=190639&highlight=mythtv
Go for SimplyMepis 3.3.1 or PCLinuxOS (there are others, but these are favorites of mine, and they are cheap/free). These distros have all of the media codecs (like mp3, for instance), loaded and preconfigured by default, as well as media software for playing CDs, DVDs, buring CDs and DVDs, editing media files, and the list goes on. They also have you boot from the live CD, so that you can "try before you buy", then in live mode they have super easy graphical installers. Plus the hardware detection from SimplyMepis and PCLinuxOS is nearly flawless. Of course, you could use a plethora of other distros, even Slackware or Gentoo or pure Debian, to be your multimedia OS. But these other distros will require that you download, install, tweak, and set up a bunch of stuff. If you prefer to "get under the hood" and "do it yourself" first, these distros are the way to go. However, SimplyMepis and PCLinuxOS will get you there right out of the box, no fuss, no muss.
It's called dual boot and you do NOT need a slave drive, depending on how much space you've got, obviously. I would suggest SuSE which is now owned by Novel. I'm typing this on Firefox under SuSE v9.3 now and it works great... AND it's a free download. Mind you, most of them are available as free downloads anyway if you care to look around. Have a look at the SuSE website to check your hardwear. As to whether it's worth changing... well, how much is it going to be worth to not have to worry about your PC constantly falling over, getting viruses, bugs, incompatible this and that. The idea that the other fella's windows PC works fine and it's just YOUR one that doesn't is an idea put about by Microsoft. It's just not true. Believe me, I know.
Actually, rather than dual booting you could get a hard drive tray and extra sled, put a hard drive in each, and then just quickly swap the hard drives when you want to change OS. We do that here at work (tho we rarely swap back to Windows), and don't have to muck around with dualbooting. http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=43
If you set-up with the CD's, (which you can download anyway for free and burn onto writeable CD's), you simply select it as an option, Then when you restart it just gives you a menu saying, 1. SuSE Linux 9.3 2. Windows, 3. Fail-Safe Linux 4. Memory Test 5, whatever... etc, This menu can be altered easily and you can even remove the installation to try another distro or to get your disk space back with things like bootitng which are, again, free. The thing is the guy can try that for nothing... won't cost him a penny. No need to purchase extra hardware OR software, assuming he's got a broadband connection and a CD writer, of course, because the ISO images are about 600Mb. Just checked, they're about about 700Mb actually. There's some screenshots here... http://www.ffnn.nl/pages/gallery/installation-overview101.php This is the one where it details if you have any existing software, (XP, whatever), on your hard disk. The guy in these pictures hasn't so it simply says MODE, New installation and the partitioning table says to use all the hard disk for Linux. If you've already got an existing partition it details that and allows you to automatically use the rest of the hard disk, (or a bit of it), for Linux. It's really simple.
I just switched my main desktop to Kanotix. Very nice distro for noobies and experienced users alike. Here's a brief review on my blog: http://pdavila.homelinux.org/blog/?p=20
Great review Patrick. I, too, like Kanotix a lot. I like pure Debian (I have Sarge installed on two machines), and Mepis, Knoppix, and Kanotix. I actually like Kanotix better than Knoppix because it adds extra functionality, is much better for hd install (sticking to pure Debian Sid), and is more current. Kanotix is not quite as polished as Mepis, but it's better for being more pure Debian, and thus is more compatibile with Debian Sid repos, and thus gives fewer problems with upgrades and installing new software from the repos. It's also more current, and faster. I have a question. When installing Kanotix to hard drive, which option did you choose? Was it the pure Debian way, the as is single user CD install, or the Kanotix install with multi user support and hd detection? And how did it go? If you chose the pure Debian way, how was hardware detection?
Great idea Foosihno. We do that at work, for different versions of Windows, and for different languages (supporting our software on Japanese windows is a PITA ). But the easy swapping of hard drives in the tray is just awesome. It costs a bit extra in hardware, but it's worth it.
Actually, I just started the hd install on one of my machines. It did not ask for an installation type. I guess that it's now standardized on a multi-user Kanotix CD install, and probably fully compatible with Debian sid. Patrick, can you verify?
That's how it worked for me. No choice. The install took about 30 minutes. The biggest strengths of Kanotix are: - it's 100% compatible with the Debian unstable repositories (unlike Ubuntu) - the nice collection of apps on the install save you a ton of time - KDE is the fastest I've ever seen it on any distro I did a dist-upgrade and everything worked fine. It even replaced xfree with xorg without any issues.
Thanks. My install finnished in about 25 minutes. I just did an apt-get update, and I'm currently doing an apt-get install synaptic. I follow that up with kdegames, koffice, kexi, kdevelop, qt3-designer; Quanta, and a host of others. Debian, apt-get, and the huge Debian repos are simply awesome. After having been a Red Hat and Mandrake kinda user, I'm definetely in the Debian/Debian derivatives camp. Debian represents such high quality, coupled with the most advanced, easy to use package management system on the planet.
Also Patrick, have you tried apt-getting Gnome? If so, what were the results? I tried that a few months ago with both an older version of Kanotix and SimplyMepis, and it wanted to remove KDE and all KDE apps. It had something to do with the volitality of the Sid repos, and compatibility problems. I wonder if they've solved that issue.
Honestly I'm not really into the Gnome desktop. I do like a bunch of the gtk based apps though (gimp, grip, etc..) I usually stick with KDE unless I have a slower machine then I go with one of the light weight desktops (XFCE, IceWM, Fluxbox). I'm definitely into Debian and the Debian derivative distros. It's the way to go. Apt-get is awesome. It should be the default linux package management system. Ubuntu is nice but they definitely need to merge their changes back into the main Debian repositories. They run the risk of becoming the Debian version of Mandriva (originally Red Hat derivative but now incompatible). Ian Murdock made a point of this when we interviewed him.
I go back and forth between KDE and Gnome. KDE is more fully featured and more configurable, and is slightly faster. But Gnome tends to be easier to use, for me. It's much less cluttered, and it's fewer features tend to make it ultimately easier to use, as I'm not overwhelmed with options. But I still go back to KDE, then back to Gnome, depending on my mood of the day. They're both great desktops, with their own strengths and weaknesses, and the flame wars between some of the fans of both are really stupid. I agree with you about Ubuntu. It looks like it is splitting too far from Debian. It's a nice distro, but I never actually stuck with it. I like to stick to pure Debian, or 100% Debian compatibility, as much as possible.
The funny thing is, I always assumed it was more expensive than it really is, and required special drives. Not so - I plan on adopting this capability in my home systems as I upgrade in the future.
OK. But don't forget that this guy is using a portable. Your swappable drivers would have to have USB or similar suport and their own power supply. Frankly my idea sounds easier.
Somewhat ironically, since my wife finished her MBA last weekend, the laptop was finally mine to do what I like with. It's an older model - a Dell Latitude CPi, PII 266MHz (or 366 - can't recall off the top of my head), 128MB RAM. The CDROM had died, so I bought a replacement off of Ebay, it arrived today, and I proceeded to install SuSE 9.3. It went swimmingly, except when it was done and I tried to log in - I'm not sure exactly what happened, except the entire laptop screen (slowly) went blindingly white. I'm not sure if X11 is blowing up, or KDE, or what. I'm planning on upgrading the RAM to the system max of 256MB soon, but I'm completely clueless as to what is going wrong with my system once I get past the normal bootup process.
Sounds like an error in Xwindows. Timing probably. Try and start in non-graphical mode and run yast sax. Try different, lower resolutions and colour modes and see if that sorts it out. Don't forget that you can 'Ctrl-Alt-F2' to get back to a non graphics screen, kill X and run sax from there.
Could be an error in X windows as Andy already said. But it also could be due to the fact that SuSE is a "heavy" distro, that loads tons of stuff by default, and is comparitively resource hungry. I suspect that 128 megs is not enough. I think it even says so at the Novell/SuSE website. You might want to try running a smaller distro, that doesn't load too much stuff. Also, consider one that uses the more light weight desktop environments / window managers, like Xfce or Fluxbox. Xfld, which is based on Knoppix and uses Xfce instead of KDE, might be a good choice. And being that it's based on Knoppix, it will most likely detect all of your hardware without a hitch. And it's a free single disc download. There is also SLAX popcorn edition, which is based on Slackware and uses Xfce for it's desktop. BTW - even though Xfce is lightweight, it is very attractive, full featured, and easy to use.
No, 128Mb is OK. http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/support/conditions.html '# Installation on a typical, private, standalone PC or laptop with a single-processor system with at least 128 MB RAM and 2 GB of free space on the hard disk' With 256Mb it runs pretty quickly. Actually, I run Nexuiz, (quake type thingie), and it works MUCH quicker on Linux than on Windows. The default SuSE kernel is very similiar to most of the other 2.6 ones so it's only a question of what's turned on by default. In any case it's very easy to turn stuff off using the YAST setup tool.