New Distro

[mairving]

I have a new computer to play with. It is a Pentium 200 with 64MB of RAM with a 8.4GB HD. I am running Mandrake on the other machines I have. I would like to put another distro on this machine to play around with. I don't want to put Mandrake on it. For one reason, the KDE desktop is such a resource hawg, it won't run well with 64MB of RAM. I know that I don't have to run X and I might not. I think in my closet I have a copy of Suse 6.2, Turbolinux, Gentus Linux, Redhat 5.2, Caldera 2. I also have a cable connection so that I can download any other. Any recommendations for flavors?

[Statica]

Hi Mairving:
You obviously seem to have a nice machine to do some fun stuff with.... Ok now that I've got over the jealousy, I'd say give Slackware a try, its very robust, but historically a pain to get up & running, a fall back of days when Linux was basically synonmous with Slackware.

How abt trying some "different" views of the same picture ..

Like say:
RealTime Linux: http://www.rtlinux.org/rtlinux/
or if u want to try out a quick set proxy/firewall/server try E-Smith: http://www.e-smith.org/

Just some suggestions

Cheers

[mairving]

What about FreeBSD? Been thinking of adding that to my toychest.

[Statica]

depends .. what do u want the PC to do for u? FreeBSD is better than any linux I have used at any point in time .. but it doesnt do the same variety of things, and its getting awhole lot better given how Linus has sold out to the $$$!

PS: OpenBSD is better in my opinion.

[Edited by Ex-Static-Cling on 01-26-2001 at 03:09 PM]

[mairving]

Well I downloaded and burned the Slack 7.1 distro. The install wasn't that bad once I figured out how to use Linux fdisk. I set up all of my partitions and installed it. Then I rebooted and it wouldn't boot off of the hard drive. I had to use a boot disk instead. Drat that 1024 cylinder rule. I have 1027. I then set up Xwindows. That worked fine except I couldn't get the mouse to work. I will play around with it some more. I am also going to try to Esmith distro. On the distrubution info here is what it says

You cannot dual-boot this software. When installed, it completely wipes and takes over any hard drives in the system.

It doesn't even try to get along with any of the others. I like that in a server operating system. It is also only a 140MB download. I guess that they have stripped some of the trash off. I might just try several more of the different flavors.