OK Linux Gurus - hear my plea!

[RedDeathDrinker]

Oi - Penguin Lovers! (not literally, I hope!)

I am seriously thinking about running a dual boot setup with some form of Linux, and Win98SE, but have absolutely no clue which version to get.

What do you use, and why? How successful have you been?

SuSe, Mandrake, Red Hat???????? HELP!!!!!

[David]

OK, the different distros are all good in one way and maybe lacking in another.

Mandrake - Easy to use, simple installation, most things come preconfigured. Pentium Optimised. Can be a wee bit too inflexible.

SuSE - esay to use, brill config tools and packed with features. Unfortuantely the SuSEconfig script can overwrite hand configured ones.

Red Hat - the most pouplar distro. Lots of packages, all the desktops but no Journalling File Systems yet.

Debian - The purists distro buut difficult to use and set up.

[David]

Post your hardware specs here as Linux isn't fond of GeForce cards, and this may require some work. I would recommend a COMMERCIAL version of linux - SuSE or Mandrake. Check out www.linuxemporium.co.uk for prices. Dual booting with Win98 should work but if you want a >8GB windows partition you shoul dbuy another drive or be prepared for a lot of partitioning.

[RedDeathDrinker]

Got a Hercules Prophet II MX 64 Meg card - getting a Radeon 64Meg ddr soonish. Partitioning is not a problem........

[ken257]

If you want to use Linux stick with the GF card. With the GF you will have full open gl support and Linux gaming is very good. With the Radeon support is not there yet.

What other hardware do you have? Sound card, Nic, Modem(win or hardware)....etc

[David]

ken257 is right. The GeForce is supported quite well (Im using the nvidia drivers myself) and You can get really good performance witha a GeF 2 MX in quake (even I have yet to have dropped frames even with a GeF 2MX 32Meg and a Duron @696MHz.

[mcrites]

Nvidia has the best GL drivers for linux at their site. Although there isnt much to do with this, in the future when E17 is released for mass consumption, this will be an nvidia card will be a great card to have. Evas which will be a cornerstone has built in GL routines, which should speed up the window manager real nicely. And from what I understand even using a mesa library, would be faster than using X's native xpm stuff, but I am not sure about that.

Do not fear debian, because someone says it is hard to setup. All you need to do is install the base from floppies, approx. 5, and then apt-get what else you need. If you dont know what package you need, you can use apt-cache search <term> to see what package something is located in. And if its not in there you can always check freshmeat.net to see if the site who makes the software has debs you can isntall by hand. Once you make the plunge you will never go back, and you know that this distro will not go under in the next few years since it is distributed.

Also, since the X Window System variant Xfree86 is the same for all distros, there is no real need to roll a commercial one. All you need is your info command, google and groups.google, and apt-cache search, and nothing will be feared ;)