<br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/4/13 John Emmas <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:johne53@tiscali.co.uk">johne53@tiscali.co.uk</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Mark and Noel have already mentioned an important point but I think it<br>
should be mentioned again - hardware!!<br>
<br>
If you're new to Linux, the first thing you need to know is to ignore the<br>
myth that "Linux will run on anything". It won't. In fact, Linux is very<br>
fussy about what hardware you run it on. Not as fussy as OS-X but a lot<br>
more fussy than Windows. Before installing any version of Linux, visit the<br>
distro's forum and find out if any other users have got the same hardware as<br>
you. Find out what problems they had - or whether there are any known<br>
problems with (say) your sound card or graphics card. If you possibly can,<br>
try out a "live CD" of your chosen distro. They let you try out a distro<br>
without making any changes to your hard drive. Live CD's are often<br>
available free with Linux magazines, so take a stroll to a good newsagent<br>
and see what's available.<br>
<br>
Now for some specific tips:- If you're accessing the internet via a<br>
broadband modem, forget it. Ditch it, buy yourself a router and get it<br>
running before you go any further.<br>
<br>
And before you install Linux, BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE and expect lots of<br>
silly, frustrating problems. For example, my very first choice was Fedora<br>
(which many people are using very successfully). And yet Fedora trashed my<br>
partition table three times before I eventually gave up with it. You might<br>
also encounter problems if you've got a flat panel monitor. Many of the<br>
distros that I tried defaulted to 70Hz refresh rate (which is outside the<br>
range of most flat panel displays). I needed to install using a CRT monitor<br>
and then set the display properties to something that my flat panel could<br>
live with.<br>
<br>
And don't expect the simple hardware configuration that you might be used<br>
to with Windows or Mac. At first, you'll probably spend a lot of your time<br>
manually editing config files. Again, BACK EVERYTHING UP before<br>
and after editing these files - or you'll probably find yourself doing this<br>
over & over again.<br>
<br>
I tried a total of 9 Linux distros before settling on 64studio. However<br>
OpenSuse is also worth an honorable mention because of its sheer<br>
friendliness. It never seems to get recommended for audio use but it worked<br>
fine for me and was undoubtedly the most stable distro I've ever used.<br>
Whatever distro you choose, sooner or late you'll need to install a<br>
real-time kernel. Therefore, finding a distro that uses one out of the box<br>
might save you some hassle.<br>
<br>
Finally, consider the question of dual-booting. Will you need to dual boot<br>
between say, Linux and Windows? If so, Linux offers a handy little utility<br>
called 'grub' which displays a boot menu at start-up. OpenSuse's version is<br>
particularly attractive because it's graphical and animated (most of the<br>
others are just text based). But (and this bit's important) grub needs to<br>
run on a partition whose number WILL NOT CHANGE if you add further<br>
partitions. Things will work out better if you can install Linux on your<br>
first primary partition. If that's not available, create an extended<br>
partition and install Linux on your first logical partition. Most distros<br>
always allocate these two partitions with a permanent number, so you can add<br>
and delete other paritions without screwing up your grub partition. If you<br>
choose any other partition and then (later) you add or delete some totally<br>
unrelated partition, there's an excellent chance that you'll end up with an<br>
unbootable system.<br>
<br>
Welcome to the world of Linux. It can be a rocky road to begin with and<br>
you'll soon learn that your mistakes won't often go unpunished. It does<br>
eventually get easier though.<br>
<br>
John </blockquote><div><br>Well, everyone of us got some nightmare story to tell about linux but I think a newbie can safely install and succesfully run eg. (in my experience) k/ubuntu, 64studio, ubuntu studio and even debian lenny (stable) without particular problems.<br>
<br>The worst cases are related to newer devices (which get solved very rapidly by the kernel folks) or very (bad) older ones and they're quite well known.<br><br>Maybe you have been very unlucky with some hw mix but actually I would not say installing lenny it's not safe or that with linux in general it's very easy to get things unconfigured or broken.<br>
<br>The only thing a newbie must really know and learn to use from the beginning is how to use man & info pages, because everything to broke and/or fix your system is written there.<br><br>regards<br>r<br></div></div>
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