Giving Linux another go-round...advice appreciated!

[ST4RCUTTER]

Hopefully this will last more than 3 1/5 hours ...anyway. I'm looking to jump back into Linux after having some bad experiences with Mandrake 7.2. At that time I couldn't find drivers for many devices and the OS seemed bloated and slow...probably because I chose to install everything (big mistake)...but I think I've learned a little bit more and plan to learn more every day. That's the history, here's my situation:


I recently picked up an older Dell CPX laptop w/256MB RAM and a 500Mhz PIII with no OS. I want to run Linux exclusively on this laptop and use it to learn Linux and as well as have a flexible/free OS with apps that are basically free as well. I have downloaded and burned the three ISO's for RH 7.3. I've been reading The Linux Book by David Elboth as well as various sites such as linux.org, redhat.com, kde.org, xfree86.org etc. I have a few basic questions that I would like to throw out to you guys and recommendations are appreciated.


1. What apps do I need to install as a bare minimum? I would like to avoid the bloat I experienced with Mandrake.

2. Which Linux shell is the best? I've read that BASH is the most popular. Is this what you would recommend? Is it integrated w/RH 7.3 and if not is it easily procurable?

3. I've heard a lot of debate over using KDE or GNOME. Many of the reviews tend to favor KDE so I'm leaning that way. I like to personalize my desktop and I've been over to kde-look.org (great stuff over there). I read that KDE 3.0.3 just came out too. What's involved in upgrading from an older version to the new? Which desktop emulator would you recommend?

4. How large should my swapfile be? I'm reading twice the size of the system memory (512MB)...would more or less be better or is this just right?

5. When installing LILO, where is the better place to put it...the MBR or the first sector of the boot partition? I've read that if Linux is the only OS that it should be on the MBR. Any reasons not to do this?

6. X is a window manager correct? I've read that there is a new version. What's involved in upgrading from an older version? Will I have to recompile the software?

7. Can Samba be used with a router? I've read that it cannot...is this true?

8. Are there any networking applications that support DHCP?


Thanks for any help you can provide!

 

[Sunner]

Welcome back to the exciting world of Linux

If you want a more barebones distro, you might wanna have a look at Debian, but RH is fine as well IMO.

1: Well, what do you wanna do with the comp?
If all you wanna do is keep a diary on it, you could get away with a minimum install and vi, but OTOH if you plan to read mail and sirf and such, you'll obviously want X, and maybe Mozilla.

2: Bash is the default in pretty much every(if not every) distro, and my personal fav, mostly cause it's what I began with, though some people love csh as well(default in the BSD's).

3: I prefer KDE, IMO it has a more "professional" feel to it, and for a slower box such as your, it can be customized to be quite snappy, despite what some people say about it being bloated.

4: With 512 MB of RAM, you'll probabaly not even touch the swap too often, unless you run some mem hogging apps, I'd probabaly go with 512 MB of swap for a workstation.

5: Unless you have a good reason not to, put it in the MBR.

6: X is not a window manager, it's a server, the graphical environment is client/server based, and X is the server, window managers include WindowMaker, TWM, Black/FluxBox, KWM, etc, the latest version of X is 4.2.0, I believe that version is included in RH 7.3, and no you don't have to recompile any apps if you upgrade X.

7: I don't see why it shouldn't be useable over a router, never tried though.

8: A DHCP client is included in every distro I know of if that's what you mean.

Hope that helped a bit

 

[gentobu]

I'm also trying to learn linux, and I have found knoppix to be pretty helpfull. It is a linux distro that runs off a cd so you dont have to install it, and you can take it where ever you go. It is not bloated, and it will boot on just about any computer (it's worked on my laptop, both desktops, and various computers at school). And if you ever decide to go back to windows, it'll save you the trouble of a reformat-reinstall...

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Thanks for the input Sunner! That clarifies some things for me and hopefully I'll be able to handle the rest. So if I understand correctly, X handles the requests between the logged in user and the system's applications? KDE is the graphical interface only? Why do you need BASH if you have X? It seems to me that they handle similar aspects of the OS...or is X not like a command interpreter?

 

[Tiger]

So if I understand correctly, X handles the requests between the logged in user and the system's applications? KDE is the graphical interface only? Why do you need BASH if you have X? It seems to me that they handle similar aspects of the OS...or is X not like a command interpreter?

Think of X as being like Win 3.1 or 95. GUI interfaces built ontop of the real OS, in this case Linux instead of DOS. Think of BASH as the Linux version of DOS's command.com only more powerful.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Think of X as being like Win 3.1 or 95. GUI interfaces built ontop of the real OS, in this case Linux instead of DOS. Think of BASH as the Linux version of DOS's command.com only more powerful.

I see...I think. So where does that put KDE? Would that be comparable to an application running on Windows 3.1? I guess the confusion comes in when I visualize KDE as the desktop environment but it has been stated that X is the "windows manager." The distinction can sometime be perplexing...

 

[nortexoid]

X is the GUI base and KDE et al are the window managers....together they provide the GUI...or the backend and frontend of the GUI, as it were.

u can't run X without a window manager like KDE and Gnome, as far as i know.

 

[Electrode]

Originally posted by: ST4RCUTTER
I see...I think. So where does that put KDE? Would that be comparable to an application running on Windows 3.1? I guess the confusion comes in when I visualize KDE as the desktop environment but it has been stated that X is the "windows manager." The distinction can sometime be perplexing...

The closest thing I can compare KDE to in the Win3.1 analogy everyone is going with here would Program Manager, File Manager, Print Manager, Control Panel, and Internet Explorer. They are all completely seperate programs that can work together but don't have to.

AndyHui just put up my Window Manager/Desktop Environment FAQ if you want to take a look. I suggest you do.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: nortexoid
X is the GUI base and KDE et al are the window managers....together they provide the GUI...or the backend and frontend of the GUI, as it were.

pretty much. X is **THE** graphical environment, the base for all the stuff you see on the screen, it makes it all possible by interacting with your hardware (monitor, vid card, kbd, mouse, etc) and providing (an) API(s ?) for software to interact with X and draw pretty pictures on your screen and interact with your mouse and keyboard and whatnot.

u can't run X without a window manager like KDE and Gnome, as far as i know.

in practice, you probably never would, but you indeed can. (the following does not apply if you run a display manager, xdm, gdm, kdm, etc) - when you "startx", X looks in your ~/.xinitrc and checks out what it should do. it will "stop" on the line where you have "exec <program_name>". if you run blackbox or a similar small window manager, you are probably familiar with this, loading up different little programs in .xinitrc and having the exec line at the end. well, the exec line is sort of special in that X depends on whatever program is on that exec line. if you have "exec blackbox", and you kill blackbox, or exit it, or it crashes, X will also exit.

what i do is have X start up to an xterm. it starts up with that ugly grey background, a mouse, and an xterm sitting in the top corner, with no window borders or anything. i just hover over that xterm with the mouse, and start my window manager, and whatever else i want, then i iconify that xterm and its out of sight. in case the window manager dies, i can (usually) get back to that xterm and start it again, or at least attempt to do something useful, instead of X just dying and me being flabberghasted that all my stuff is gone.

of course it'd probably be annoying to manually start the window manager every time you start x if you reboot alot, or exit/start x alot, but i dont, so it works well for me, and i can switch wm's without closing all my apps and restarting x, and keep from having all my vim sessions crapped on

i'm rambling again, back to irc..

 

[Sunner]

One very handy thing with X, is that you can display applications running on a remote computer on your own X server.
This is thanks to the server/client model.

For instance, we have a backup software that's much easier to administer on a day to day basis using the GUI, however you don't want an X server running on a server, right?
So what I do is tell the backup server to use the X server on my box(if you're running bash, you'd type "export DISPLAY=X.X.X.X:0.0" where the X's are your IP address, and when I fire up the GUI, it will run on the server, but it will be displayed on my box.

Of course it can get much more complicated than this, but as a basic example, it works fine

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Hey guys, thanks a lot for the explanations. I can see that I have a lot of fiddling around and reading to do. My laptop arrived today, but unfortunately I couldn't get home before the leasing office closed. I'll pick it up tomorrow morning and begin to install Redhat 7.3. I'm sure I'll have some questions as I go along, but I'll try to find the answers myself before coming here...

 

[Armitage]

FWIW, I just installed RedHat 7.2 on a very similar laptop (HP 4150, 500MHz PIII, 256 MB ram). It's pretty snappy with KDE 2.2, so KDE 3.* should be really smooth.

Also, I was amazed how easy the install was on this laptop. I've heard some real horror stories about Linux on laptops. But this was as easy as any desktop, and everything appears to work fine!

 

[BeHeMOTH]

Well I use Suse, and I've updated to 8.0 Pro it was easy and just as fast as an XP install, of course you do need to know something to polish it up. I've also Dl the beta Mandrake 9.X it was sweet from what I've seen never used Mandrake but it was easy and looks good, Just wish Big Red would work as well.

KDE is the way to go IMHO, pick a flavor and go.

 

[RedBeard0531]

I highly suggest getting a coppy of linux compleat from sybex press. its only 20 bux and very gooworth it. it was writtenn around RH7.1, but it tries to be as universal as posable. It even helped me /w gentoo(w/o giving specific info, gentoo is too new for any books!), which is about as far from RH as u can get!