which linux distro?

[megah0]

I have a spare box sitting here beside me,

K6 333
64mb of ram (i can stick in another 128mb)
everything on board.

I fancy a play with linux.

what should i go for?

[Dorza]

You could start with Red Hat or mandrake if its your first try at linux, how ever if ur somebody that likes to get into the ddistors which are harder to set up you could try Debian, slackware. My personal favourite at the moment in gentoo, although the installation is all command driven, the instuctions are pretty striaght forward and you learn a couple of things on the way to . As i said RH or Mandrake could be a good place to start tho.

click here if u want an overview of many linux distros

[megah0]

Thanks for the reply

I am aware of the ease of use of the various distributions available and have a small amount of experience with mandrake.

what i need is some suggestions as to what would run on the hardware i have.

I also have 2x 5gb hard drives if that makes any difference

[Enverex]

Apparently SuSE is very good with compatability, but I have never used it. Another vote for Gentoo here. It's even better if you build your own kernel (using the 2.6-Alpha 8 on my laptop, works well).

I would just pick any distro to be honest though, not that much of a difference.

NS

[joshwa]

knoppix is brilliant, you don't even need to install it, it just runs off 1 cd and has loads of stuff on it. 128mb would be better but it should still run on your pc (i ran it on p2-350, 128mb and it seemed really nippy)

but if you want to install one onto the hard drive, then redhat 8, mandrake 8 should be good - the older ones probably don't require as much memory to run well.

[ingouk]

i would say it depends what u play to do with the linux box. if u just wanna play with some server stuff i would use redhat or suse. and dont install anything like X, gnome, kde. it doesn belong on a server. if you want to use it as a workstation i would use suse. u get every software you might need with it.
Or use Mandrake.

[oshta]

I am a newbie to linux

- but i what to run it on my new file server, (sff - personal FS - just for my two other PCs)

- someone sayed i should use smoothwall - which i have, is that OK?

thanks oshta

[ingouk]

got no expierence with smoothwall. just used it way back in 2000. as far as i can remember its hard to do fileserver stuff with it. its just a firewall not more. have a look at www.clarkconnect.org . their distribution has got firewall, sambafilesharing for local networks, etc. you can either use it as a gateway to the internet or as a standalone server. its easy to configure via the webinterface. and the people in the forum are very helpful.

[0iD]

Some good reference sites are:
http://www.linuxhelp.net/
http://www.justlinux.com/
http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/

Or there's FreeBSD which i personally prefer. I's unix based with low overheads, will run Linux apps...and its free.

[Enverex]

Oshta: Stop cross posting, I answered the question in the other thread.

NS