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I can feel your pain :-). I had a similar experience installing Debian woody on my home server. That's why that particular box is now running in console-only mode.

But there's a light of hope. For excellent GeForce support, try Gentoo. Their documentation is truly outstanding.

I use Gentoo on a daily basis on my main machine; the Windows partition has been since then relegated to games and compatibility tests.

I can feel your pain :-). I had a similar experience installing Debian woody on my home server. That's why that particular box is now running in console-only mode.

But there's a light of hope. For excellent GeForce support, try Gentoo. Their documentation is truly outstanding.

I use Gentoo on a daily basis on my main machine; the Windows partition has been since then relegated to games and compatibility tests.

First make sure that they are comfortable users, then worry about the Power User status.

The age group you are speaking of tends to be low on the wisdom scale, so I think that it may be a VERY good idea that you get the parent's permission to give them the CD, or even better, introduce them to Linux via something like Gentoo linux, where you simply need to boot off the CD and the Hard Drive isn't touched at all.

Using something like Gentoo eliminates the "Do they need to know how to install" question. I would include a few page document of "Linux options" with information on where to get different flavors, as well as cautions and howtos on installing them.

I think that understanding of the GUI would be more valuable initially.

And most importantly, teach them where to find information. Don't just say "do this, then do this". Say something like "There is a HOWTO here, read it and I'll help you if you get stuck".

Teach them what they need to know in order to teach others to be comfortable using(not administering) an alternative OS

*"programming and REALLY digging into all the really neat underbelly of the system"

may i make a recomendation of something like Gentoo ?
if you really want to get into the guts of a system it is the best distro (IMHO) for it.
you'll learn just from doing a full install.

i have never used mandrake, so i cant say much positive or negative about it. however typing 'emerge app' and having the system download and compile (based on flags already entered into /etc/make.conf) every one of the dependancies from source is pretty damn sweet.

**before anybody flames me i am well aware that there needs to be source availible before it can be built from source.

I run ClarkConnect on my firewall. Redhat, Debian, Gentoo, Lunar and Slackware on my *personal* box. Lycoris on my wife's box (no humorous responses please).
While the individual merits of each distro can be argued to no end, I do have to note that only Lycoris and ClarkConnect (Based om RH 7.2) worked perfectly out of the box. (Inasmuch as Windoze does)
Noting that, I would say that if you want to learn the differences between the distros, you should first learn how to multi-boot your machine. The greatest learning experience for me has been to have a working distro available at all times, while I'm trying to get a new (to me) distro working that I'm not familiar with. (Such as linux-from-scratch)
Anyway, I hope I haven't strayed too far from the subject, but I had to add my $.02.
In short, IMHO, if you are a complete newbie, learn how to multi-boot, install Lycoris, Mandrake and Debian. (or go to DistroWatch and pick a couple.) Graduate from one to the next while keeping your working distro intact. Then, Paraphrasing another post I read "apt-get when you finally get it together" - lol.
Happy Thanksgiving!

You could always upgrade your software.

I started using gentoo about a month ago because FreeBSD didnt have GLX drivers for nVidia cards. I changed back to FreeBSD as soon as this happened.

I find it kind of bothersome that 'gentoolkit' is not mentioned in the Portage User Guide, but there are about sixty words that discuss it at the end of the Portage Manual which is over 6000 words. I would think that there should be a good argument that this should be in the base system, if gentoo had one. And why has 'etc-update' been moved out of the 'base system' and into portage?

Maybe im just too used to the way that FreeBSD does stuff. I would hate it if FreeBSD used the ports tree for the base system. But that would be impossible because there is a lot of code that wouldnt exist if it wasnt in the FreeBSD CVS tree.

Everything that I ever wanted to know is either in the FreeBSD Handbook or the mailing list archives.

I started using gentoo about a month ago because FreeBSD didnt have GLX drivers for nVidia cards. I changed back to FreeBSD as soon as this happened.

I find it kind of bothersome that 'gentoolkit' is not mentioned in the Portage User Guide, but there are about sixty words that discuss it at the end of the Portage Manual which is over 6000 words. I would think that there should be a good argument that this should be in the base system, if gentoo had one. And why has 'etc-update' been moved out of the 'base system' and into portage?

Maybe im just too used to the way that FreeBSD does stuff. I would hate it if FreeBSD used the ports tree for the base system. But that would be impossible because there is a lot of code that wouldnt exist if it wasnt in the FreeBSD CVS tree.

Everything that I ever wanted to know is either in the FreeBSD Handbook or the mailing list archives.

Sorry if I sound like a troll (I'm just adding my two cents), but Gentoo seems to have the best of both the FreeBSD and GNU/Linux worlds. I get the increased app compatibility of GNU/Linux with a great ports system.

Nah, you don't sound like a troll, just uninformed.

Portage isn't better. Its different. Its also smaller (2,000 ports as listed on gentoo.org vs 8,000 as listed on freebsd.org and not as up to date and other such things.

As for App compatibility; gentoo doesn't use redhat, redhat libraries/versions of libraries, or RPM that 99% of "commercial" linux apps use. FreeBSD does, FreeBSD includes RedHat 7.mumble for its linux binary compatibilty. Loki Games, before they went under, testified to this fact by saying that it was easier to support Linux running on FreeBSD than it was to support straigh Linux. Why? Because of issues like you are runing gentoo that uses X, and someone else is running Debian, etc. If you want ports, and linux compatibility, and speed, and stability.. well its called FreeBSD and its here, come and drink the kool-aid!

I too faced this dilemma when trying to make use of a batch of 486 machines donated to our computer lab. My solution required a bit of elbow grease, but ensured that my machines both ran acceptably and had the latest and most secure versions of software available to them:

• I built a Gentoo Linux system on the Athlon XP 2000+ machine in the lab, targetting all the software for 486 (gcc -O3 -m486 -march=486 -fomit-frame-pointer -s) and building a very stripped-down 2.4 kernel with only the bare necessities. I also replaced the standard GNU shell tools with BusyBox and GNU libc with uC-libc. On this fast machine, the compilation cycle didn't take long, and I was able to build and install everything into a temporary /install directory in less than four hours.
• Once that was done, i tarred up the /install directory I had built and burned it onto an ISO along with a bootimage from tomsrtbt mini-Linux distro.
• I then booted each 486 machine in turn from the CD, and used a shellscript I had written which created an ext2 partition, formatted it, and untarred the contents of my custom gentoo setup onto the disk, and set up grub to boot into it.

A distribution such as Gentoo may not be the easiest to install but you get the whole gubbins, X, Gnome or KDE and the apps compiled for your system.

Microsoft tend to distribute generic code, and if you are lucky you may get a model specific dll. What Microsoft can not do is to distribute code that can be compiled for a specific model, well not until they deliver code that gets compiled during setup. Note, this can be done with optimisable intermediate code rather than source, but it wouldn't be easy.

hmmmm....heard of Gentoo?

Before you Gentoo zealots get out here and plug your so-loved-distro, remember that even you don't have as much control as you could.

# export USE="moznomail"; emerge mozilla

reply to "(so where can I get a CVS of the -current of a Linux distro?)"
http://cvs.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ there is a cvs interface too its easier to give you the web interface.

if the sniffer is trojanized, then it could possible hide such "activities". I actually read the article and it however seems that it was not the case here... phew :-)

MD5 checks work nicely. Sure pgp in theory is better but since md5's are cached locally, and a helluva lot faster to check the chances that they will actually be used and verified are seemingly quite good.

Which is to say in practice MD5 has caught rather a lot of these problems, and in quite timely manner.

As irrelevant as various source-distributions (e.g. lunar, source-mage and Gentoo) are at present in other respects, they make a nice 'canary' in the coal mine :-).

I didn't think that:

emerge djbdns

was all that hard! But I guess you don't run Gentoo

Derek

It'd be cheaper to get another hard drive.

My company is run out of the house next to mine, and we have a cat5 cable running under the driveway to connect the two. This allows me to have a backup server at home that provides automatic offsite backup. I put together a machine that includes a 2ghz Athlon and two 120 gig 7200 RPM drives in a RAID array for backup. The box runs Gentoo Linux and uses BackupPC for automatic unattended backups.

Of course, most people don't have the extra cash for that lying around (I had the business credit card, hehehe) but it is certainly easier and more cost effective than tape.

BTW, the backup server backs up around 10 machines (mix of Linux and Windows) with around 120 gig of data. It keeps up to two weeks of backups at a time (two full backups and twelve incremental backups). Current HD usage is about 33% due to compression.

"I have yet to see this kind of transparent updating under Linux, and I don't see that rosy a future for desktop Linux without it."

Guess you haven't used Gentoo yet. It's not exactly a desktop distribution, but if other distributions picked up its portage system, they would be a lot easier to update.

Too bad that this happened to LFS. I have no experience running an LFS machine but the idea has a certain appeal to me (I am a Gentoo convert however).

As good as Gentoo is, some of the Gentoo ebuilds needed to use hints from LFS. A clear example was How to compile Java 2 SDK Source (available from Sun) using gcc3 so that you can use it as a plugin for your shiny new gcc3 compiled mozilla.

Again, I'm very comfortable with the amount of flexibility and ease of use that Gentoo provides me.

Too bad that this happened to LFS. I have no experience running an LFS machine but the idea has a certain appeal to me (I am a Gentoo convert however).

As good as Gentoo is, some of the Gentoo ebuilds needed to use hints from LFS. A clear example was How to compile Java 2 SDK Source (available from Sun) using gcc3 so that you can use it as a plugin for your shiny new gcc3 compiled mozilla.

Again, I'm very comfortable with the amount of flexibility and ease of use that Gentoo provides me.

Like I said, we have not had any worms get through our mail server. However we did have one person download an attachment from an AOL webmail system. She infected herself and some customers but all her attachments were removed before getting back in to our users. ;-) This too can be stopped by using Squid and some rules about downloadable files. There is a simple explanation of this within this nice little security manual from Gentoo

Like I said, we have not had any worms get through our mail server. However we did have one person download an attachment from an AOL webmail system. She infected herself and some customers but all her attachments were removed before getting back in to our users. ;-) This too can be stopped by using Squid and some rules about downloadable files. There is a simple explanation of this within this nice little security manual from Gentoo

I was looking for the UT2K3 Demo LiveCD from Gentoo. I fired it up and ran it on my system. VERY impressive. Runs like a dream, and more importantly, it does what what Windows has done all along - it detected and used everything I had. I was online with DHCP, it knew my video card, everything.

Maybe I'm just a 'tard who didn't think of this earlier, but what a boon for game developers! "HERE you go! Just like your PS2, dump this CD (with live Linux filesystem & game of the week) in your PC and hit the power button..." Now, a REAL reason for game developers to develop for Linux! Control of the *PC* platform - no DLLs, MSIs, or DX crap to work with - THIS is the environment that your customer gets, every PC an Idrema with a live filesystem + app on CD. On the surface, it seems like a great leap back, but it appears that the benefits outweigh the fs overhead on each CD.

What a fsking GREAT idea! (Or am I missing something? Besides hardware, I mean, this is supposed to be somewhat tolerant in that regard, anyway.) It seems to work for Gentoo and Epic Games, anyway.

gentoo looks like it's trying to hit in to the mainstream vein, as in trying to be the desktop of choice for newbies and guru's alike.

I think you completly missed it on this one. Gentoo is not for newbies, nor do they try to sell themselves as such. To quote them directly;

Gentoo Linux is a versatile and fast, completely free Linux distribution for x86, PowerPC, UltraSparc and Alpha systems that's geared towards Linux power users.

If your interested in the init scripts, you could just read the Gentoo Init System documentation.

Gentoo Linux has had a similar guide for months, without coverage on the front page of Slashdot. (And, if I may say so, the Gentoo way is cleaner.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but why/how is this news?

Mmmm... I use Gentoo and am pretty happy with it. I frequently read their forums, and judging by their answers, the vast majority of developers and package maintainers are very helpful and collaborative.

Also, their documentation is by far the best I've found for any distro I've tried.

If you really have an issue with a package maintainer, try emailing him in private, and politely advise him that a "RTFM, you LUSER!" attitude is pointless.

Anonymously posting your complaints, calling someone a jerk, and dissing a whole distro because of a personal issue doesn't help anyone.

Just MHO.

I'm building a heartbeat cluster to serve WebGUI pages and files via samba.

This going to be presented at a congress for the Netherlands Network User Group November 13th (a mostly Novell and Microsoft NT association).

I have been looking for a solution to mirror files between the two cluster nodes. SCSI is just too expensive for this, since low cost is one of the requirements. I've been trying to compile DRDB on my gentoo 1.3 systems but the 2.4 kernel isn't supported by the default DRDB distibution yet.

Does anyone know about any other projects like these that actually work?

People using Gentoo should check this link, it works great on my computer after I created a link to the 'missing' libc6-library.

As for memory footprint and speed: Yes, Phoenix *definitely* is a lot better, even compared to optimized builds (i.e. homecompiled with optimalisations, as Gentoo does)

One word:

Gentoo

I actually have a friend that switched from FreeBSD last year to Gentoo Linux.

It is a complete ports system (compiling everything from source, with auto-dependency resolving). It also has a very cool init system (with dependency checkin and resolving) along with other cool features.

Give it a try - it is GREAT, I simply can't use anything else now.

To install KDE X and everything they depend on you just do:

emerge kde

It then downloads the source for KDE, X and everything they depend on, compiles them for your hardware (mine are all athlon-tbird optimized), then installs them.

All very nice and tidy.

Check it out - you will be amazed.

Derek

I haven't used Debian for quite some time since using Gentoo, I still think Gentoo's installation page is incredibly long. Or maybe it just seems that way because I'm waiting a really long, long time in between instructions that require compiling something.

Ever think of or hear of Gentoo ?

"Debian is so great because..."

"Debian is just fantastic because..."

"Debian does this right: ..."

Gentoo

-Todd

Since I do 95% of my banking online, and use Gentoo Linux on the desktop, it is an essential that my bank in Mozilla compatible. When I was a Bank One they changed some stuff which made their site non Mozilla compatible. I politely sent them an email and asked them to fix it. They did not. So I switched to Wells Fargo where now I enjoy Mozilla compatible online banking. Way to go Wells Fargo! (BTW: Bank One might have fixed this, since it was about 1 year ago.)

You're being very selective with your "everything" description.

Does Windows have a net-based install that only requires a couple of floppies to get going? Does Windows have a unified scheme where you can pull down whole libraries of software from either a command line, text-based, or full GUI interface? Does Windows have the ability to customize its kernel? Does Windows have tab-based, minimal, and even mouseless GUIs?

Linux offers choice. People are choosing to make programs that are similarly functional to those offered by Microsoft, but that doesn't mean that Windows is setting the standard for everything.

Besides that, there's a lot of crossover. A lot of programs run on both Windows and Linux. Emacs. Vim. Mozilla. Perl. Python. Ruby. Nethack. Windows doesn't set these standards either.

If you still don't believe that Linux is different than Windows, try doing a LFS or Gentoo install. Then come back here and tell me that Windows is setting the standards for everything.

Ever try this distro?

http://www.gentoo.org

From the sounds of it, you might like this. You get maximum control with its install. ;-)

Building a computer, to tell you how to build another, larger, more complex computer. Hrmmm..

Uh, that's how it works in general. Or did you think modern CPUs were laid out by hand?

Naturally I laid out my own CPU by hand. I run Gentoo on it too. We all do. What are you, some kind of Mandrake wussy?

Install Gentoo Linux. :-)

Certainly, you'd better have broadband at home to install Gentoo...

...or you can try an alternative strategy.

From the Gentoo FAQ:

I have only slow modem connection at home. Can I download sources somewhere else and add them to my system?

Definitely. You can run emerge --pretend package to see what programs are going to be installed. Download sources and bring them on any media home. Put the sources into /usr/portage/distfiles and run emerge package to see it picking up the sources you just brought in!

So, I thought, all I need is to get the right sources copied into /usr/portage/distfiles before emerge'ing.

With this in mind, I downloaded 6GB of sources from the Gentoo site using wget. I did this at work (where they have xDSL), scheduling wget to run late at night using 'at' (yes, Win2K DOES have an 'at' command :-). Later, I burned all that stuff into a bunch of CD-Rs and brought them home.

At home, I ls'd the contents of the CD-Rs and created a small set of 'Table of Contents' files, then wrote a small Ruby script to tell me in what CD-R was any particular tarball I needed. I eventually improved the script to the point where I can pipe the output from emerge --pretend through my script, and it will create a series of bash scripts to copy only the necessary tarballs from the right CDs. So I can run, for instance,

emerge --pretend app-office/koffice | my-script.rb

And automagically I get a bunch of bash scripts like these,

cp-from-cd-X.sh

Which I can run to get only the necessary tarballs for KOffice copied from the right CD-Rs. Once the source tarballs are copied, you can emerge your package and Portage won't try to download anything since the sources are already in /usr/portage/distfiles.

I'll throw my hat in: I'd love to use Gentoo. Except they have a fairly spotty upgrade path. It's like a couple scripts written by a few guys who felt like doing something constructive one day. Might be integrated somehow at some point. Install the soon-to-be old version at your peril. Super.

I want to use Gentoo and Portage (both at home and at work). I really do, believe me. As a concept it sounds like a godsend. But I can't use Gentoo, at least not at work. Portage sounds great, until something which isn't included get installed, or someone needs the new version of the OS, or whatever.

I don't have time to mess with it at home. The days of tweaking an OS, as oppposed to actually using an OS, are long since past for me. I still have 13 floppies with Slack on them if want to spend time configuring instead of doing...

-B

Check out Gentoo Linux. It uses a package system called Portage that is similar to FreeBSD's "Ports" system. Basically, you run "emerge apps-editors/vim" to automatically build Vim for you, it will also download and build any dependancies required too! The only downside is it will take a while to build X, or any other large package(Gnome, KDE, etc).

Just so you know, apparently KDE runs faster on Mandrake 9.0 than on Gentoo. Check out this thread at Gentoo's forum.

There are no hacker-made Linux anymore: everybody use well-supported distros like Red Hat, Mandrake, Conectiva.

I guess that makes me nobody, then. I suppose there are more nobodies out there as well.

The Gentoo Linux alternative installation method HOWTO

If netboot or installing from another distro won't help either (yipes), there's plenty of info in the forums and in the docs on how to bootstrap/compile on one PC for another.

The Gentoo Linux alternative installation method HOWTO

If netboot or installing from another distro won't help either (yipes), there's plenty of info in the forums and in the docs on how to bootstrap/compile on one PC for another.

Here's the Gentoo Forums link w/ instructions.

BTW, Tom's Root Boot is "muy bueno", it's got scads of NIC drivers (I've tried it on Intel Pro100, Intel EXP16 (!), 3Com 3c9xx, 3c509b, and an eight dollar Linksys 10/100 card. Wget is on there. It can create/mount ext2/3 and FAT16/32 partitions. I'm now using this at work to build up old PCs that need (spit) Windows 95 on them but have no CD-ROM. I just tarred up the CABs and threw them on a web server. Now I boot them w/ Tom's, fdisk, format FAT32, wget the CABs, reboot, build, ?????, Profit!!!. Huzzah!

On a personal note, please help out Daniel Robbins, if you can. No affiliations. However, until a few weeks ago he was in need of alternate sources of income. A posting on slashdot should do the trick.

Here's the actual email sent to the gentoo-announce mailing list. A personal request from Daniel Robbins

Do help out the guy, if you can.

Disclaimer, I have never met the guy, or contacted him via electronic or any other media.

First a caveat. The Gentoo install is not for the faint of heart. In most cases, right off the bat you've to compile a kernel. Most large compiles take a day. kde can take a day to compile. mozilla takes the usual hour or so. If you can look past all that, it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Here are the promised helpful links.
Gentoo Home Page
Gentoo x86 install instructions
Gentoo FAQ
Gentoo Desktop Guide
Gentoo Forums
Gentoo Bugzilla

That should keep you busy for a week, at least. :-)

First a caveat. The Gentoo install is not for the faint of heart. In most cases, right off the bat you've to compile a kernel. Most large compiles take a day. kde can take a day to compile. mozilla takes the usual hour or so. If you can look past all that, it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Here are the promised helpful links.
Gentoo Home Page
Gentoo x86 install instructions
Gentoo FAQ
Gentoo Desktop Guide
Gentoo Forums
Gentoo Bugzilla

That should keep you busy for a week, at least. :-)

First a caveat. The Gentoo install is not for the faint of heart. In most cases, right off the bat you've to compile a kernel. Most large compiles take a day. kde can take a day to compile. mozilla takes the usual hour or so. If you can look past all that, it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Here are the promised helpful links.
Gentoo Home Page
Gentoo x86 install instructions
Gentoo FAQ
Gentoo Desktop Guide
Gentoo Forums
Gentoo Bugzilla

That should keep you busy for a week, at least. :-)