Redhat = eviiill

[openbox]

But a nice thing about dual boot is saving files to a common drive. I need to use Windows and Linux applications, but not concurrently, so don't mind rebooting once per day.

That's what Samba is for

[Jonathan]

Samba??

Also I finallly got XP Pro running
Except stupid MSN messeger wouldn't work for an hour

[openbox]

Samba??

Samba.org.

[ChrisTech]

My biggest complaint about multiboot machines is that I don't like rebooting everytime I want/need to switch an OS. I love SSH and my KVM

I used to do win98 and NT 4 Workstation via dual boot (off same boot partition) which was always fun. (NT 4 Workstation to learn & use for work/school/cd burning, 98 for games, had a shared FAT16 2 gig partition for shared files)

Now that I have almost a full extra box (1.63ghz amd/256 ram/30 gig hd) its time to get that kvm switch, and use the box for fun (*nix/whatever I need to learn). Also, I have an old server box (Pent. Pro 233mhz, 192 ram, 4 gig scis hd) that Im debating whether or not to load NT 4 server on, or some flavor of nix to be a gateway box for my network (ie no more router)

[openbox]

Also, I have an old server box (Pent. Pro 233mhz, 192 ram, 4 gig scis hd) that Im debating whether or not to load NT 4 server on, or some flavor of nix to be a gateway box for my network (ie no more router)

That's what my 133 Mhz, 64 MB RAM, 1.6 GB HDD, OpenBSD box does. Excellent firewall capabilities, excellent solid and secure OS, and virtually free hardware.

[rsowen]

Now that I have almost a full extra box (1.63ghz amd/256 ram/30 gig hd) its time to get that kvm switch, and use the box for fun (*nix/whatever I need to learn).

That's why I had a Linux-only box. In the late 90's, I learned to network with it, and I ran it as a mirror to the online server. I could do programming and indexing and such without having to worry about any mistakes that I made as I learned. When everything was ready, then I could just upload files to the "real" server via modem. If you're using it mostly as just a unix system and you are the only user logged into it, you don't need a machine that is very fast and you don't need more than a few megs of disk space.

But I still did most of my work on the dual boot machine. I would telnet the Linux box from either Windows or Linux on the "big" machine. For file editing, I prefer working in Linux; for some graphics needs, The Gimp is hard to beat at any price. These kinds of tasks are best done with a large screen and fast machine, so the older Linux box was't well suited for these applications. However, there are other graphics chores that were much easier to do on the Windows side with IrfanView or the old DOS version of LView. So I used to boot back and forth a few times per day on the big machine, even though I had that second machine running Linux with a 17-inch monitor. (I also always had dual-boot laptops - setting up X-Windows on LCD displays was painful in those days!)

I no longer have any Linux boxes at home and haven't missed it at all. At work I have two machines, but I think that I am beginning to use the Windows machine more and more as time goes on. Rather than progress, Linux desktop apps seem to have actually taken a step backwards, becomming slower, more uselessly bloated, and guaranteed to crash a few times per day.

Somebody mentioned using a P133. If you want to run it as a desktop machine, you will be able to bake a cake and eat it too in the amount of time that it will take for Open Office to boot. (Well, that was a few years ago. Open Office is now twice as bloated, so make that two cakes.) However, if you are running such a machine as as a personal unix server and workstation, it should be as speedy as you could need. I think that you might have to install older distributions on older processors, however -- I'm sure that someone can comment on that issue.

Have fun keeping old machines doing useful work!

[openbox]

Somebody mentioned using a P133. If you want to run it as a desktop machine, you will be able to bake a cake and eat it too in the amount of time that it will take for Open Office to boot. (Well, that was a few years ago. Open Office is now twice as bloated, so make that two cakes.) However, if you are running such a machine as as a personal unix server and workstation, it should be as speedy as you could need. I think that you might have to install older distributions on older processors, however -- I'm sure that someone can comment on that issue.

That was my comment. While I don't have Linux running on the 133 Mhz machines, I do have OpenBSD and FreeBSD running on that age of hardware. They are not workstations, and they definitely are not running GUIs (shell access only). One is my router/firewall and the others are test servers that I only use to serve http and ftp requests. They do handle SQL querries. I figure if these boxes can handle what I throw at them, then any box should be able to.

[Jonathan]

I'm about to install a 20GB hard drive I got from 'round these forums...
Say I want to put Linux on it; how do I ensure it has a desktop like look?

I.E., simular look (the desktop and stuff) to windows...
I don't want pure SSH only...I need super n00b friendly

I think this is the 'KDE'? If so, explains why I messed
up with the last install of Redhat

[rsowen]

Say I want to put Linux on it; how do I ensure it has a desktop like look? I.E., simular look (the desktop and stuff) to windows...

You should be able to find just about any look and feel you want for a desktop, including something that looks like any flavor of Windows (or Mac or BeOS or anything else) you would like. You can install both the Gnome and KDE desktops and switch between them (as well as others).

Most attractive is to have multiple screens at once, each with a different background. You can have a couple of Mozilla browser windows open on a blue one, an html editor open on a green one, gftp open on one with a spacey background, a card game going on on a white one, and nothing on the one that looks like a Windows desktop. If someone walks in the room while you're playing cards, you can press a button to switch to the screen that looks like Windows.

Powertoys has something similar for Windows, but, well, it's a failed experiment. BeOs did KDE and Gnome one better by having multiple desktops that had different levels of resolution, but BeOS is now history. Older versions of KDE had a task bar on both the bottom and the top of the screen -- I miss that feature. This is the kind of thing that I really like about using Linux (well, X-windows I guess, not Linux itself) - it's nice for those of us who need to be able to move stuff between multiple applications running concurrently.

When I complained about slowness on Linux applications -- it isn't these things above that are slow. It is the applications themselves, specifically office applications. If you don't need a word processor or spreadsheet, then pretty much everything else is very good. Unfortunately, I need office applications that print nice looking documents, that boot quickly, that don't mangle documents, that don't crash the machine, and that don't suddenly disappear without warning from the screen, losing anything that hadn't been saved.

[Jonathan]

So the KDE is sort of like a visual thing?
In other words, where I don't need to do everything in SSH/Shell

[rsowen]

So the KDE is sort of like a visual thing?
In other words, where I don't need to do everything in SSH/Shell

Kinda like what Windows 3 was to DOS. I'm probably not technically correct on the following (someone can shoot me if I'm not), but probably close enough for us laymen to get the idea: Unix and Linux are operating systems. "X Windows" is an interface to command-line unix systems for a graphical environment;. XF86 is a free X Windows clone for Linux -- the drivers for video cards.

KDE is merely one of many desktops that use XF86. I believe that the two most popular right now are Gnome and KDE (and you get these shrink wrapped with the Fedora/Red Hat distribution), but there are many others. With distributions that automatically install desktops and a set of applications that most people would want, you won't have to worry about a lot of choices -- you WILL get these if you aren't experienced enough to know how to keep the distribution from installing them. (A reason that you might not want things is that the graphic desktops and associated applications are what take up zilabytes of hard drive space.)

With a distribution such as Red Hat, you will probably do an easy install that will leave you with a system that automatically boots into the KDE or Gnome desktop. But you can set it up so that you start out at a plain Jane command line terminal. You can then "start X" to launch a desktop of your choice, and there are many to choose from -- I suspect that by now people have written applications that allow you to switch more easily between desktops at will. Just as a Mac desktop is different from a Windows 3 desktop is different from an XP desktop is different from a BeOS desktop, so are the different desktops that are available for the single operating system Linux.

And within these Linux desktops, you get a lot of flexibility to change the look and feel and behaviors - more than just "skin" sorts of things. KDE has been popular perhaps because the default setup feels a lot like MS Windows, and I have to admit that this is why I now use it exclusively. (I use both Windows and Linux, so keeping the same behavior in how windows and icons look and respond makes life easier.)

Just install one of the major distributions without thinking about it for now -- and if you have an older machine that isn't completely obsolete, you are more likely to have success in getting X to work. (This part still remains a major pain with Linux - but remember that the folks who are writing the drivers for video cards are doing it on their own time as a hobby.)

Don't try to download the install disks unless you have a nice fast connection at work -- and even then, you have to set things up to download overnight. It took me two nights to download the three Fedora disks on a university connection both times that I have done it - connections to mirrors WILL stop and start and sputter for hours - and then I had to spend more time fussing around with multiple attempts at burning bootable CDs from the image files. You can get the major distributions already on disk from cheapbytes.com. Most of these now have auto-boot disks, so installation is pretty much a no-brainer if nothing goes wrong, a major pain when something does go wrong.

Have fun.

[Dewi]

As RSowen points out, KDE is a desktop layer on "top" of X. It's a multi tiered approach.

Personally I use GNOME, but it is all down to choice. I don't even have a Windows machine anymore.

I use Fedora a *lot* and also Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so if you need help, drop a message my way, happy to help you get where you are going.

[Jonathan]

time to dig up an old topic!

Talked to the lady @church who's working on my comp,
(I did somethin stupid-- installed RAM/Video on my own )
and she said I should have it back sometime round Wensday or Sunday.

Anyways, I asked her to try and install a spare 20GB I had,
but she wasn't 100% sure if it could be done (not a big PSU).

Anyways, assuming the PSU is good enough to run it,
and it works still (been packed up in the garage for awhile),
I'm probably going to want to try my hand @ *nix again.

Anyways, first some simple questions

1. I'll be using Redhat 7.2 for now; when installing,
is there anything specific I should put on? like KDE.

2. Once its started up, what do I run on the starting SSH or whatever,
to get some sort of Windows-like GUI (Graphical User Interface?) running?

3. How to do **absolutely** insure I don't accidently select the 1st hdd?
Is there any way to tell the C drive from the...D or E drive..?
(not sure if the hdd will be E, or replace the ROM on D...)

4. Will Apache, PHP, MySQL, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, etc. be auto installed?
How would I go about installing PostgreSQL? Does it work on Redhat 7.2?

5. Setup a filing sharing between the Windows & Redhat systems.
I.e., I can work on a web design in Redhat, and it'll be there when I
reboot into Windows; that sort of thing

Anyways, if anybody can help me with these n00b questions,
I'd like it alot (can't spell the word your supposed 2use for this)

[-Oz-]

Get Fedora, noob friendly.

[Buddha]

If you can't download it and burn it you can get a nice 4 CD set of Fedora at LenuxCentral or OSDisc for $8.95.