OT: Windows is too expensive

[Baron Munchausen]

geoschmo said:


Para, I owe you a beer. Wireless is working great now. Thanks for all the help.

Geoschmo

OK, now that you've struggled through a Linux install maybe you can answer some questions. I am about to buy some new HDs and try to setup a dual boot system. Does Linux still need a dedicated 'swap partition'? I'd like to know before I put the install disk in whether I should have reserved a few gigs for swap. And did you need to reconfigure and recompile the kernel to make it work or is this just an option? (How much of the stuff on the disk comes with source code? Basically everything? Or just the kernel and the little Gnu utilities?)

[parabolize]

Yes you want a swap partition. How large depends on how much ram you got and how much processing power. You usually want twice your ram.
You usually don't need to recompile the kernel though adding non-free graphics modules is pretty normal (aka nvidia driver).
Almost none of a debian (ubuntu) install is source though all the packages have source available in the repositories. Other distributions are called source based and install/compile everything from source like Gentoo.

[Baron Munchausen]

Yeah, I'm still up in the air about which distro to use. Novell is in trouble with the OSS community, or I'd go with their very 'Windows friendly' package. Fedora is another possibility. I've heard both good and bad things about Ubuntu. The effort to make it 'easy' like Windows has apparently cut some corners.

[Fyron]

bah @ fedora. If you are concerned about Ubuntu, you could always go with Debian. Don't think you have to pick a distro and be stuck with it; play around for a while, see if it is for you, then decide whether to keep it or install something else. You can keep your /home partition separate so you don't lose some settings and such.

[parabolize]

Yeah, if you have the bandwidth download a few livecds and see which ones you like. Out of the ones you like do some research on their installer and package manager.

Also keep in mind what the distribution has installed by default isn't set in stone. I'm still running Ubuntu when I am using very little of gnome. If I was to reinstall I would probably do a custom net install from the Debian unstable repositories but my environment is far from user friendly or commonly preferd.

[Fyron]

And keep in mind that Fedora/Red Hat has a really lousy package management system. Not even a decent Debian-like central repository. :-\

[Baron Munchausen]

Hmm, isn't Novell using SUSE Linux? What's the difference between Novell's branded version and SUSE 10.2 (which is the latest, I believe)? Being on dialup, I'm not going to download a bunch of .ISO images. I'll be going to a good source like cheapbytes.com and ordering CDs.