linux cluless

okay hears the deal i have a compaq presario 1626 laptop yes i know it sucks ... it happends to hate windows it has 93 megs of ram an original amd k6 10 gig hard drive no usb and a 3 com ethernet pcmcia card i whant to listen to music in mp3 format as well as several types of videos and i need a linux that will do this and run smothly

Ok, this is a really old question to be asked.

Standard answer: Check out distrowatch and try a few of the top 10 distros.

Personal answer: Try Suse, Ubuntu or Mandriva and see which one you like. Personally I prefer SUSE, but it is finally your choice to decide which distro to use.


And with specs like that, try having ~300 - 500 MB swap space if you plan to use KDE or Gnome regardless of which distro you end up choosing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AlexK

Try Suse, Ubuntu or Mandriva and see which one you like. Personally I prefer SUSE, but it is finally your choice to decide which distro to use.

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Yeah, it seems that lots of folks have problems with Linux and laptops, but I've heard lots of success stories with SUSE being installed on laptops.

I run SuSE 9.1 on my laptop. Everything works except the winmodem. :)

k i know this is a masivly stupid question but whats swap space

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kamisu

k i know this is a masivly stupid question but whats swap space

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It's just a bit of hard drive space that's used as virtual memory in case you don't have enough physical memory. I keep a 512 MB swap file, but it never gets used.

okay im almost done dling suse how do you make a swap space

When you go to install SUSE, it will give you an option to create the swap partition and any other partitions you might need.

mind giveing me a step by step for creating a swap and just a regular partition for the os
and setting it up

Just use SUSE's default proposal. Or if you want complete control over partitions, Select "Advanced Partitioning -> Expert mode" in yast's partitioning menu.

Now, it will show all present partitions on your drive, highlight each one and select delete. Note, do not attempt to delete the partition which appears /dev/hda, but delete things like /dev/hda1 eetc....

Now once all partitions are deleted, tell it to create a new partition. This will be your main partition, tell it to format as Reiser and give it say ~9.5GB size. Now again highlight /dev/hda and tell it to create a new partition, this time tell it to create a SWAP partition and give it the rest of the space.

Then click Ok till you get back to main menu.