[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
george parker wrote:
Ahh I vaguely remember those times. I started learning about hardware with a 386slc25 board along with some other bits I bought from a system builder for £50. It was basically his old junk he had lying around. My first actual trainee technician role was around the time the Pentium 75 had just been released, in fact it was a month after the release of Windows 95. Ahh those were good days, building PCs from bits and installing Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22. I actually miss messing around with base addresses, IRQ's and DMA settings.On Tuesday 22 September 2009, Rob Beard wrote:george parker wrote:I had a computer go down recently so managed to get planning permission for new bits. I got an Athlon II 3600 with DDR3 RAM, new mother board and a nice big disc. I had some minor problems (only 1 ps2 socket so had to buy a USB mouse) but then came the hard work.Sounds like a nice system, I'm contemplating upgrading to an Athlon II X4 (being an AMD reseller they've offered me a chip for 45 euros which seems like a steel).I installed my usual Mepis distro.... which didn't work! I tried PCLinuxOS, and Linux Mint, all of which didn't work, which in the end turned out to be a problem with the distros handling the Raydeon ATA graphics embedded in the motherboard. I installed a spare Nvidea graphics card and my problems were over. I guess I knew about ATA problems before but I didn't give it a thought as they hadn't been my problems. I think there is going to be support for Raydeon in version 30 of the kernel and I will give it another try then meanwhile a couple of things from this excercise may be useful.I have found in some cases that some distros may lack support for specific new hardware devices. Generally I've found that with hard disk controllers. I've also found that some of the newer ATI video cards generally need the official proprietary ATI drivers. Actually, I've found that is the case with NVidia graphics cards too.The Mepis distro is essentially a 1 man band, a guy called Warren Woodford. It has given me good service over the years but he now seems to be more interested in turning the distro into a business and with the result that service for personnal use is getting decidedly flakey. I have been contemplating a move for a while.Shame that, I've heard good things about Mepis, not tried it myself though.I couldn't get the Mint distro to find my ethernet connection. It seems to hide the basic workings in the gui and I couldn't be bothered to hunt them down. I also am not an admirer of Ubuntu as a user (but contrarily an admirer of Mark Shuttleworth). (Mint is Ubuntu derivative)Is there anything particular you don't like about Ubuntu? I think it's great, but then again I'm not keen on OpenSuSE or Fedora (although the latest Fedora looks nice). Each to their own I guess :-)I've installed PCLinuxOS for a friend and she's had it running happily for a couple of years so I went with this. Everything went smoothly and I was able to setup my network easily from the gui (fixed addresses for my 2 computers networked on NFS) so I may stick with it. I'll see how Unison and Virtual Box goes.I guess if it does the job and you like it, then stick with it :-)If I hadn't had 2 computers so that I could get info I would have been stuffed. Don't knock it when some poor sod with Windows on his only computer can't get Linux working.I don't tend to knock it, I tend to try and offer advice. Sometimes I may not be able to help, but I at least try and offer a solution.OK, OK, I could have installed Debian and closeted myself away for a month to get it working, but perhaps next week, eh?I've found Debian is pretty simple to get working. Okay maybe not as user friendly as some distros out there, but for someone who has some Linux knowledge it's not exactly that bad. I'd say maybe Gentoo with all it's tweaks would take longer to install (and compile!), but then I can also see the attraction of completely tweaking the packages to get the best performance out of them. I'd also suggest VectorLinux which is based on Slackware, I found that to be pretty good, albeit I tried it on older hardware and it just worked, and worked really well. RobI did make a living for a while servicing business PC's, a bit of hardware, a bit of software, but that was when a good PC was a 286 and a 386 was cutting edge, and pre Windows, ALL Dos command line. Unfortunately I never got into Unix so the first Linux I tried was Suse about version 6. Even though I was fairly sure what I was doing I didn't take up the challenge and throw out Windows until about 2006.
My first adventure into Linux was with Slackware which IIRC was on a PCW magazine cover CD. Didn't get too far with it, although I believe I got it installed. I didn't really start doing anything useful with Linux until I got a copy of SuSE 5.2 (at least I vaguely recall it was SuSE 5.2). I remember it cost me about £30 and had two nice thick manuals and a bunch of CDs.
I have tried Debian but never got it working to my satisfaction. I looked at red hat but not recently. I think Novell have sold out Suse. I looked very seriously at Ubuntu but I hate not having root and user and I don't like Gnome. I quite like Kubuntu and Edubuntu and I liked Mint. I have got very fond of Mepis and it is still distro of choice on one computer. I'm going to see how things go with PCLinux on one and Mepis on the other. I also always have a copy of Puppy or something similar around for troubleshooting.Technically there is a root user in Ubuntu, it just needs enabling. I used KDE for a while on SuSE but never really got on with it as well as I did with Gnome. Guess it's just personal taste :-)
I want to try Gentoo, Slackware, Debian again, Mandriva proper, Sabayon and Gobo (that is the one with the sensibly named file system isn't it?) but life is short with a million exciting things to do, even in Brixham. I've even only managed one monthly meeting. I'm off to France tomorrow for as many bottles of wine as I can cram into the car (about 300 last time) so the rest of this week may get a bit hazy. I may recover for the 3rd of October meet.I'd like to have another go with Gentoo myself, but I'm too impatient to wait for it to compile. Maybe when I rebuild my desktop I might give it another go (last time I tried I didn't have a notebook or another machine I could exclusively use and my motherboard on my desktop went pop).George
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html