What have I done so far?

My current test environment is a hub with 4 machines hanging off it. There's my internet machine, it's a 450 MHz that I put together from parts. It's got 192 Meg RAM, a Sony CD burner, Adaptec SCSI card with an external Zip drive, 80 hard drive, ethernet and modem. There's another machine like this that my son used to play his kids games. That one has a SCSI flat bed scanner connected as well.

The test machines are identical as well. They are Compaq Ipaq workstations. The processors are 733 MHz Pentium III with 128 Meg RAM. The only legacy connector is video. Everything else on them is USB, inclucing keyboard. The makes it real easy to install. Hardware detection is almost flawless. All the components are supported by almost everything.

Now for my linux track. I first picked up a Red Hat Linux for Dummies at Ollies. I love that store, the book retailed for $40, I got it for $7.99. It included a copy of Red Hat 9. It installed fine, but after using it a little, it left me wanting for something more. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something was missing.

So, I start googling for how to find the best distro. What did I find? The same answer all the time, there is no best distro, you just have to try some to find out what is right for you. So, now I need to find some distros. I came across one of the big on-line CD warehouse types of places. You know the places where you are basically paying for shipping and a relatively small fee for someone to burn some CDs for you. This worked out great for me, after all, I'm on dial-up. I ordered their package special. I ended up with about 12 distros for $29.99. This gave me 26 CDs to play around with.

OK, now it's time to play. First loaded, Mandrake 10.1. I kind of liked this one. Felt better than RH9. I didn't want to tie myself down though. I did a little reading and found that some people experience some slowness using Mandrake. Since almost all my stuff is old, I want to shop around a little more.

Next up, Mepis. All I can say is WOW!!! If Linux ever makes it to the mainstream, this will probably be the big name. This thing installed without much of anything from me. The best part is you boot it up as a live CD and you can play around with this. Then if you decide you like it, you tell it to install. I played around with it a bit and decided it seems a bit comercial. That's not a bad thing, but I want to learn linux, and this is so polished that I won't get too much here. But I can definately see myself installing this on my mother's machine.

The latest install is Vector Linux. Where Mepis was polished, this is fast. Everything you do is quick. I felt like I had a much newer machine. I've only played around a couple days with this, but I think I'll like this one. It's Slackware based, so there's a lot of stuff out there for me to read if I need help. It's also hands on enough where I'm going to learn a bit more. I do think I'll keep this one around a while.

Now for my first failure. My Internet machine runs Win98. I figured this is one to dual boot on. So I partition out the drive. I've got half of it for Windows, a 10 gig partition to share files. I then pulled off the files needed to do the install and put them in that shared partition. Next it's boot off a DOS floppy and start the install. This went well. Installed fine all the way to the LILO install. Then it's decision time. Do I write to floppy, write to the partition or to the MBR? Well, this machine is so old it won't see a 80 gig drive, I have to use WD software to trick it. This is my undoing. I can't write to the MBR or it won't boot at all. I can't go to the partition since that won't boot. My only choice is the floppy. So, I select floppy and I get errors writing the LILO. Since Vector is a bit crude, I can't even step back to the previous step, I have to continue on. So that's where I stand.

I guess the next thing is reading material. Since I'm learning linux, I have to read. I found the Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition on-line and started reading. This thing is great. I'm learning so much from this thing. So I decide that since I'm getting so much from this, I bought it on Amazon. This way, I'm giving a little something back. Then it's on to the forums at LinuxQuestions.org. There I find that many feel the book to get is A Practical Guide to Linux by Mark Sobell, so I got this one also. This is a bit dated, but I figure the info I'm trying to learn is what happens down low in Linux, so this won't change too much.

I also found the Linux From Scratch project. I figure once I have a handle on this, I'll give building my own distro a try. What better way to learn almost everything about it than to build it myself. So I bought this as well. I figure it's a good cause, and my slow connection would take forever to download.

That's it for now. Future blogs will be more on the lines of what I did with linux the previous couple days. I think I'm caught up now, so I can take off with live updates now.