My first day as a Linux user, read how it went.

[marklawford]

I first installed linux a few months ago on an old tired laptop (seven years old with shocking processor and memory stats by today's standards).

I first tried suse but the laptop just had too little memory for it to even install. I then tried a mandrake distro and then went fine (apart from losing the touchpad and sound system). It runs too slow to be of any use to anyone but it does run.

A few weeks back I was bitten by the bug again and decided to buy a box minus OS. I installed that suse 9.1 on it and it went great. No problem. What I did find problematic was subsequently installing software. It is good that we have a choice of installing from source but that is pretty cumbersome. Installing from RPM through YAST is great however.

I can't believe that after all these years Linux isn't better supported by hardware/software companies. Personally, I'm convinced that to an extent the range of open source projects for linux acts as a deterent to commercial software companies, but there isn't much excuse for the hardware boys.

I'm now pretty confident, however, that were I to want another machine in the future, I would go for another linux box. When I need a new laptop, I'll be on the lookout for a decent distro to run on that laptop.

Mark

[genesus]

my frst experience with linux did frustrate the living hell out of my, and to this day I will not even look at redhat, oh I tried when fedora core came out, but nothing ever worked during anaconda on my comps, it was always something different, then when I finally got it installed my network card didn't work, well it worked about 1/2 of the time, and my sound was nonexistant. I ranted and rave and considered going back to windows but the live cds and open source philosophy kept me interested and working at it, once everything is installed and tweaked there are no problems...though of course I'll always stay away from the fcs.

Keep trying Nexum, its not that bad once you get it figured out, try slackware or anything other than fc.

[shalamabobbi]

I have SATA and via chipset and SUSE 9.2 works with that..
I have used FC 1 which came in the back of "Linux for non-geeks" by Rickford Grant.( I put it on an IDE drive though not SATA.)
It seemed slow on my PC compared to SUSE. After downloading stuff to my home directory it began to crawl.. shut down took forever..
couldn't shut down the net connection (or something similiar) It had froze here. I had to power down the PC. After that trying to reboot
it held the PC at the "hit the delete key to enter BIOS". I had to swap the drive out into an external USB drive case to reformat it.

Not offering this as a rant on Fedora just my experience with it..
Other distros by Red Hat have also been problematic on my hardware except the Enterprise edition which worked cleanly..

Since noticed that FC 1 formats with ext3, not reiser. Maybe a part of the problem. I tried on my last reinstall to give it a bigger swap
and I put the /home directory on a separate partition..
I also forgot about the boot floppy that I was instructed to create during the install.

This last insatll also fizzled. FC 1 worked normally, then it started taking forever to respond to mouse clicks in the browser. When I shut it down I got:

hda: drive not ready for command
ide0: reset: success
hda: status error: status= 0x10{seek complete}
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01(hda), sector XXXXXX

and it kept repeating over and over and scrolling off the screen..
The number represented by XXXXXX kept changing randomly.
When I rebooted again, everything came up apparently normal..