I know about it, but I get by fine with Gentoo (which I'm using less and less), so I never tried it out. Good luck though ;)

You might try Fedora (which is basically RedHat for desktops) or CentOS (whish I think is akin to RedHat for free). Both of these would have SELinux (RedHat's security extensions) built in for sure.

Most of the distros people will throw out will be pretty similar for a beginner; they'll have slightly different installers, slightly different administrative software, and very little difference in...

Hope your install goes well :icon_wink:

If it were only the coders who made money, there wouldn't be anyone to run the business.

From of very skewed perspective, perhaps it comes up short. Many of Microsoft's products are of good...

Grub is the bootloader. It should show a menu for you to select an operating system. Is it doing that?

I'd suggest taking a look at Debian (from which Ubuntu is based), but I will say that I've never used it myself.

>Is there a better compiler collection than gcc?
Subjective. VS and XCode are both good for their respective platforms. I know they're IDEs, but that's what people tend to care about.
>Is there a...

Assuming of course that it's an i686 architecture. If it's an AMD chip, it's more likely at that age to be i586.

My SATA showed up as sda back when I had Linux on it...

Yeah, arch gets rave reviews on the Gentoo forums quite often. If I were to bother installing something again, it'd either be a test run of Fedora 7 or Arch.

++ for Gentoo, haven't been to the arch forums

Debian, maybe, but Ubuntu definitely has a corporation funding it. not that there's anything wrong with that.


It's about the same on just about any distro...
<package manager name> <install...

Whether you use aptitue or apt-get, the programs are the same; boot time won't be affected. That said, isn't the difference basically a command-line vs. a GUI? (I've not used aptitude before...) ...

> if you have to ask, get ubuntu
While quite simple, that's surprisingly well put. :)

Have you ever considered that this isn't the MEPIS installation forum? I realize that there's not so much talk in this particular forum, but we're not desperate for material either...

AFAIK, apt will leave packages there too. Not positive, but almost certain.

I also recommend you look into emerge --depclean. Does what you're looking for (but not recursively I don't think... I...

I know how to burn an ISO. The installer froze each time I tried loading it.

My last words on the topic:

You run the same kernel (actually, from what I can tell, you're running the one I installed a year ago; I've updated since). You use the same packages (and likely the...

While it might be handy for some aspects to be standardized, I think you'll find that most Linux users would not like it to be unified. The locked down "unity" of Windows is actually kind of...

Most distros will offer pretty much the same packages. Sometimes one distro will have a package another doesn't but you can always install it w/o the package manager as well. The difference between...

Just so's you know -
Gentoo: emerge ntfs3g
Ubuntu: apt-get install ntfs-3g
Fedora: yum install ntfs-3g
and that's just the distros I run...

Mepis ain't that special ;)

I couldn't get the MEPIS 6 installer to run when I tried it and I didn't feel like burning another image, but it cant be that different from the other popular distros. and ntfs-3g is available for...

Most common distros will run on 256MB though they may be slow. Ubuntu is probably one of your better bets for a quick setup and easy to use system. You might want to look at Kubuntu as well, which...

yes, no, yes. User password is all sudo needs, on any system I've used. Root login is disabled by default on Ubuntu. BUT, su is not disabled. Try running sudo su. Try to su to another user's...

Funny, I've never needed it...

That sounds more like a poorly configured system. Only trusted users should be in whichever group is given sudo permissions (apparently group admin on Ubuntu). By default, only the first user is...

Why exactly is sudo so bad? It seems to me like the usual FUD people throw around with goto statements...

Some scandalous legislation I'm sure. Too lazy to wiki it.
Oops :twisted:

You aren't but he probably is.

oh... didn't realize you could make it play the DRMed ones. Got a link for how to set that up?

Sorted out the dlls? Why would you need to do that?

You'll want SMP. You might as well get bigmem, though I don't think it's needed for less than 4GB of memory. If you intend on upgrading to 4GB at some point, get it. I don't recall how...

Sounds horrible :twisted:

Gentoo isn't all that bad except for the compile times. If you just run emerge kde, it will take a while. If you've not done that yet, you might consider using the split ebuilds...