[thelist] Red Hat

abbey abbey at abbeyink.com
Fri Mar 7 10:00:37 CST 2003


On Fri March 7 2003 5:16 am, Andrew wrote:
> I am going to download and install Red Hat onto an old W98 OS can anyone
> give me any personal bewares before do this... please don't search google
> for me, I want to know personal experience from the list
>
> Andrew

My first few attempts at Linux were not very successful, but RedHat 7.2 went
smoothly -- I put the disc in and it asked me for partition information and
so forth. When I tried SuSE, it didn't recognize my monitor or video card and
I had a real mess. My machine has a winmodem, so even RH couldn't handle
that. I bypassed the problem by hooking up an external modem and I use that
when dialing out (yeah, I'm still on dial-up).

Since you're downloading it, are you going to burn it to disc(s) and then boot
off the disc? If so, be careful about burning the iso image -- I've read
where people have had some problems with that.

I've since installed 8.0 (I didn't upgrade, just started over), and the
install went fine. 8.0 even went on the old 233 laptop I have and I had tried
Debian several times.

Definitely try to know what's in your box before installing. If you have
enough hard drive, try going with partitioning and dual-booting just in case.
I know I was glad to have the Windows side a few times when I was trying to
get to the 'net for info.

Depending on how old the machine is, go with one desktop -- I prefer KDE, but
others prefer Gnome. For me, KDE was a little easier for my transition from
windows. I'm even doing some things from the command line, but after years of
point-n-click, well, I'm not about to go totally nuts 8-)

linuxnewbie.org was also very helpful at first, I see they're now
justlinux.com

One other thing -- the rpm system makes me nuts when trying to install/upgrade
software. apt-get for rpm is at http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/ -- there's also
Synaptic (a gui) for apt-get on redhat, but opening a terminal window and
typing apt-get install {program} just makes my life easy.

It's been about a year and other than doing things like buying the wrong jet
printer (google for linux printers since there are lists of linux-compatible
hardware out there), RedHat has been great. I lost xmms for my internet
radio, but RealPlayer (yes, well, I like my radio) is now available in rpm. I
can burn cd's, download images from that crappy little camera that won't work
on the family's XP machine, play dvd's (but they are a little skippy), read
word docs and open pdfs as well as zipped files. I'm not wild about the gimp,
but that's o.k., I do keep a Win machine around just in case. Bluefish is
_not_ HKit, but oh well. The Win machine is networked into the Linux box so
we share the connection and files sometimes (I don't have Samba working
right, so I use Win SCP to get files back and forth). One of my Windows
friends finds it funny that I have the windows partition mounted on the Linux
side and use it for some of my back-ups.



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