Ubuntu or Suse????

[HLA91]

Hi everyone
After a while I have managed to get my laptop to boot from cd but now i don't know whether to put Ubuntu on it or suse. Its an old laptop with 256 ram hope fully i will upgrade it to 256 within a few months but I want to know which one would work best on it and which one you recommend for beginners to linux.

Many thanks
HLA91

[iamthwee]

The spec of your laptop is your limitation. 256mb of ram is ok, but it is still iffy. I don't think suse would run swiftly on that.

I'd go for ubuntu, or if you want to be doubly safe go for xbuntu. It's a lighter version of the former.

[jbennet]

Yeah, 1) Suse is buggy 2)Its crippled in terms of media and 3) Runs about as slow as Vista

I recommend ubuntu. Pure Debian Stable would probably run best on 256 but ubuntu would be a safer bet as its 1cd, has a livecd mode and has easy instilaltion and maintainance

[HLA91]

I installed Ubuntu and it looks good is there anything you would recommend I should download for it any special programs please I only have 256 ram so no big programs please.

[jbennet]

umm most things will be inluded

main apps and thier windows equovilents

Internet Explorer -> Mozilla Firefox/Seamonkey
Outlook Express -> Evolution / Thunderbird
MSN Messenger -> Gaim/Pidgin
MS Office -> Openoffice.org
Photoshop -> GIMP
Media Player -> Rythmbox
Nero -> GnomeBaker

some of these apps may run slow on 256 meg so you may want to look at more lighweight versions. e.g use epiphany instead of Mozilla or use gnome-office instead of openoffice

[bvgsrs]

hi,
I recently got a ubuntu cd from a friend of mine. can I use it as a live cd to practice some C / C++ programming . would someone help me out in this as to how to go about it ?

[jbennet]

yes first thing is to connect to the internet and type into the console:

apt-get update

(wait)

apt-get install build-essential


this will install the C compiler and associated files

[HLA91]

I just found out that my wireless usb pen/dongle is not compatible with Linux. Can anybody recommend a usb wireless device for me as at the moment I cannot get any updates, it must be usb though. Is there a "package" that I can download and transfer to my laptop which I can then run and it will perform all the necessary updates until I can get a new wireless pen?

Many thanks

Harry

[HLA91]

Also I cannot install anything while I am not connected to the internet so that is quite annoying

[jbennet]

usb wireless = no-no for linux

very limited driver support.

[HLA91]

thats the only way I can connect to the web though so what else can i do?

[HLA91]

I need someway of getting the updates and installing software.

[jbennet]

plug it in using an ethernet cable or alternatively download the required .dpkg packages (and all thier dependencies) and put them on a disk

[HLA91]

Ethernet slot doesn't work and where do I get all the packages from please?

[blud]

What kind of USB wireless device do you have? You may be able to get it to work with the ndis wrapper.

[HLA91]

TP-LINK 54m Wireless USB adapter
Model No-TL-WN321G

I have no idea on how to do anything in Linux so please tell me exactly what to do

Many thanks
Harry

[jbennet]

NDISwrapper is a pice of software that enables you to use your windows wireless driver inside linux, its a bit buggy but is the only choice sometimes.

[jbennet]

Yeah, 1) Suse is buggy 2)Its crippled in terms of media and 3) Runs about as slow as Vista I recommend ubuntu. Pure Debian Stable would probably run best on 256 but ubuntu would be a safer bet as its 1cd, has a livecd mode and has easy instilaltion and maintainance

Rashkil, why did you bad rep me?
That was a sensible post, backed up by facts

1) Suse IS buggy - The updater is broken after over a year on 90% of installs and is still a little broken, even in the newest development branch.

2)Novell deliberately crippled the media players shipped with it and in the repositories so that they cannot be made to work with w32codecs or libdvdcss because they feared software patents laws

3)A suse 10.2 install uses more RAM than any distribution I have ever seen. The installer takes over an hour to transfer what other distributions do in about 15 minutes and when idle a KDE desktop uses nearly 450mb

4) A livecd of ubuntu would be a good idea so that he could test driver compatibility etc... and dont mention the Suse livecd- i ran that on my 1gb ram pc with sata DVDrom drive and it ran unbearably slow.

[HLA91]

How do I use this NDISwrapper then and what exactly do I do?

[iamthwee]

When you say the ethernet slot doesn't work, you mean...What? Getting a wireless to work is much more difficult.

*edit* I've never had a problem with opensuse 10.2, updater works fine, dvds etc work fine after adding vlc player to the repository, and with 512 ddr it handles quite nicely.