Helping a friend ease into Linux

Polish Fury · Oct 20, 2005

Ive been running Ubuntu on a secondary computer for about a month now and ive been really impressed. All of my talking about it has seemed have intrigued him and now he is interested in giving Linux a shot. We both have some questions about it, and i was hoping i could get some help. First off what is a good user-friendly distro that would allow me to easily set up a dual-boot. I was thinking about using fedora, is this a good choice? He needs something that is relatively easy to install and maintain. His computer is as follows:

amd 64 3200 venice
gigabyte k8ns ultra-939,
1 gig of kingston hyper x
x800 pro
Hitachi 80gb sata 150

But basically he would like to have 1 copy of windows on his primary HDD, and then on a second HDD carve a Linux partition into the existing windows one. Is this possible and easy to set up? I'm assuming you just have to configure GRUB to see all 3 OSes and it should be good to go.

MRD · Oct 20, 2005

Fedora is not a good choice. It's very hard to maintain due to its reliance on rpm. Use something debian based like debian, ubuntu, mepis, xandros, etc.

khiloa · Oct 20, 2005

I second a debian distro, they are much easier to maintain once installed.

electrorcamd · Oct 20, 2005

I would say to use Ubuntu since you are also using it. That way it would be easier to help each other if one of you ran into a problem and you can learn from each other.

WingsofGOD · Oct 20, 2005

You are allready used to Ubuntu, why not use it?

SatanSkin · Oct 21, 2005

I second that fedora sucks. I also second to go ahead and use Ubuntu or Kubuntu if you prefer KDE (evil!). Both are debian based and you already know it. Go for it!

Nathan0490 · Oct 21, 2005

SatanSkin said:
I second that fedora sucks. I also second to go ahead and use Ubuntu or Kubuntu if you prefer KDE (evil!). Both are debian based and you already know it. Go for it!

I triple that

NsOmNiA91130 · Oct 21, 2005

Ubuntu. Easy for beginners (almost), and you can set him up with the Debian repository for even more packages. Also, if you have the time....*GASP!* Linspire. It uses apt for it's CNR, so you can modify the sources.list file.

Or Kubuntu, or Debian. Whatever. It's just a really good idea to have him use a package manager like apt, aptitude, Portage. Why? Because RPM's = t3h suck.

Polish Fury · Oct 21, 2005

Thanks! I appreciate the help, ill go ahead and set him up with ubuntu, now if only i could find that disk....

fiji · Oct 21, 2005

rpms arent as bad as people make them out to be

at work i have to deal purely with red had enterprise installs

and it is, while not as simple as apt/portage, pretty easily manageable

Polish Fury · Oct 21, 2005

What exactly is so horrible about RPM? Is it picky or something? And Satanskin what is wrong with KDE? It seems fine on knoppix.

Soichiro · Oct 21, 2005

From what I know, RPMs are harder to install and keep up-to-date and stuff. Red Hat does include an update utility for its RPM packages, but it doesn't seem nearly as fast as Gentoo's emerge or Debian's apt updating systems (yes I've used all 3 of those). RPMs also have problems with dependencies. I don't konw if all RPM systems do this, but Red Hat asked you to install a dependency for all of your dependencies' dependencies! Also, there's nothing wrong with KDE. Some people just have preferences to Gnome. It's kinda like the debate between ATI and nVidia, or Intel and AMD...

SatanSkin · Oct 21, 2005

RPMs have serious issues when dealing with dependencies and such.
As for KDE, I find it to be a resource *****, usually too ugly and too "much" for my liking. I'm a fluxbox man myself. Also, I don't like how difficult and complicated they make it to run KDE apps (k3b, klibido, kopete, etc.) outside of KDE itself. They don't all depend on just one package (i.e. kdelibs) different ones require different kde **** and you end up having to pretty much just install the whole damn DE. Which in my case of not using, that's a pain to waste all that space, etc. But I'm rambling now so to sum it up, it's just personal preference.

ihrsetrdr · Oct 21, 2005

I like suse personally, but I like to drop by distrowatch every so often to see if there's a new interesting distro out that I might want to try. Ubuntu seems cool but I had trouble setting up a f@h client so I dumped it. Maybe later on I'll give it another try.

MRD · Oct 22, 2005

RPM doesn't automatically resolve dependencies like apt-get and portage do. Also, afaik, there is no central repository of all the packages that you might need as dependencies. As a result, when you try to install package a in gentoo, it realizes that you need 25 other packages and it figures out how to go get them all and in what order they need to be installed. RPM just dies, and you have to go out and find the packages in random places around the internet, download them, and install them... but then they have dependencies... and their dependencies have dependencies. The number of packages grows exponentially. This is called dependency hell, and is why people hate RPM.

RPM almost drove me away from linux. Fedora, Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, etc. are fine if you just want to install the OS and use it, but if you want to be able to install software that is not included with the base distro later on, you will be miserable with an RPM distro.

Polish Fury · Oct 22, 2005

Wow sounds pretty bad. I'm glad i asked about it before i went ahead and installled it. Thanks again for all of the great replies!

Helping a friend ease into Linux

Polish Fury

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MRD

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khiloa

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electrorcamd

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WingsofGOD

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SatanSkin

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Nathan0490

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NsOmNiA91130

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Polish Fury

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fiji

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Polish Fury

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Soichiro

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SatanSkin

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ihrsetrdr

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MRD

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Polish Fury

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