Ed West

...am I asking for trouble?

I've always been intrigued by Linux.

I put a PC together from some spare parts I had lying around and I wondered if I'd be asking for some headaches with drivers and what not. I suppose I'm being stupid for asking this question now as I don't remember the MB or the vid card (although I know the vid is nVidia). I can get this info when I get home tonight.

Do I stand any chance of getting this to work with Fedora?

General specs:
Pentium 4 2.4GHz
1 GIG RAM
Some flavor of nVidia video card...older. I beleive it's only 128 megs of RAM.
Plextor DVD/CD burner (don't remember the exact model)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, even if you tell me to just forget it and build from known parts that work with Linux and have good driver support. This is just an experiment.

Thanks a lot!

-Ed-

shuuhen

I don't see any issue with the parts you listed. Unless it's an extremely new part there's a good chance it will work on Linux. Broadcom based wireless chips and the Creative X-Fi are the main things I know of that have issues. Both Broadcom and Creative have not yet released drivers themselves or released the documentation the Linux community would need to write their own. Nvidia cards are great for Linux. There are both community built and proprietary drivers available (I recommend the latter).

I'd say try Ubuntu or Kubuntu first. Very popular distributions. A couple of my friends at my university have told me how they're the easiest to use. I haven't tried Fedora, but it would probably work.

You'll probably want to install the Nvidia drivers after you install Linux, but Ubuntu/Kubuntu should take care of most of the setup.

Ed West

Wow!

Thanks for the quick response! Are the distros of Linux you mentioned free?

I only mentioned Fedora because a good friend of mine has used that in the past and was familiar with it. If Ubuntu and Kubuntu are really popular, then perhaps I should try one of those because the support will be there.

Things are starting to look up with this little project!

Thanks again!

-Ed-

shuuhen

You're welcome. Most Linux distributions are free, since it's a community driven operating system. All the versions of Ubuntu are free (Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu and a few more that I've seen).

The main reason I recommend Ubuntu/Kubuntu is that several people I know and many more online have recommended it for its ease of use. I also have not heard much about Fedora and have not used it myself.

A great thing about Unix-like operating systems is they're fairly similar, so even if someone's an expert in one they can probably figure out a lot of what goes on with another. If someone's fairly good with Linux, they can probably help you with a fair amount without knowing the specific distro (although having the same one can help). This is also a benefit for later, because if you use a different Linux distribution later.

Ed West

I did some more research about the different distros and finally decided to get Kubuntu. I got Dapper Duck because it's long term distro.

AMAZING! I REALLY like it! It installed in about 10 minutes. ALL the hardware was found with no trouble. The only hitch came at the end of the install. I was expecting to see a message of some kind, telling me that, well...."Kubuntu was installed successfully. Please remove any CD's and restart the computer." (or some such notification).

Instead, the system seemed to hang there as if it were still installing. I waited over night just to see what would happen, but it was still in it's weird "installing" state when I checked it the next morning. Just for grins, I rebooted and it came up without a hitch. I'm really impressed!

Linux is still very foreign to me (I know Windows fairly well), but now that I have a working Linux-based machine, I'll play around with it some more.

Is there any reason for me to get some type of antivirus package for this? I'm pretty sure a firewall is not necessary unless I'm sharing data (and I'm not).

hal8000

There are no viruses for unix/linux.

The only time you need anti virus is if you are using a heterogeneous network (a network containing both windows and linux machines or other platforms).

In this case the linux anti virus software removes virus files from email attachments that would infect a windows client on the same network.

Ed West

Well this just keeps getting better and better!

I'm also impressed with how quickly the system boots up and is ready for me to use.

My XP system take FOREVER to finish loading all its stuff. I'm pretty sure it's Norton's fault (I'll be getting rid of it when my subscription runs out). It's quite the resource hog.

Can anyone recommend some good Linux books to read for beginners?

Thanks again!

-Ed-

shuuhen

You could start with HowToForge and The Linux Documentation Project.

Ed West

Wonderul!

Thanks very much!

-Ed-

Bartender

I'm trying to think of what the basic Kubuntu install does not include. I don't think it comes with Firefox, which you'll probably want. That or Opera.

Since the old Dapper Kubuntu worked fine, and you haven't invested a lot of time into it, I'd sure suggest downloading the latest version of Kubuntu and trying that. You'd like it.

The next Kubuntu, due out in a few months, will run KDE 4.0. That's the new KDE desktop, which looks pretty nice from what I've seen.
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/

Ed West

You are correct, Bartender.
It does not come with Firefox or Opera. I just printed out some instructions for how to install stuff. This is very new to me, still. I don't have the Internet working on it yet, but I know it works (I set it up at a friend's house and he had an extra connection). I've still got this PPPoE thing where I need to click an icon before I'm connected to the Internet. My buddy said I just need to call AT&T and get them to do something to my DSL modem so that I'm always connected.

I plan on moving to the next version ASAP, but I wanted to try it via the Upgrade button. Is that what that does....upgrade to the next version automatically?

-Ed-

lensman3

>>>My buddy said I just need to call AT&T and get them to do something to my DSL modem so that I'm always connected.

Your problem may just be that the link doesn't get enough traffic so AT&T "hangs up". All you may need is a root cron job that runs:

keepalive.sh
#!/bin/sh

if [ -f /var/run/dhclient-eth1.pid ] ; then
ping -c4 -l3 67.yyy.xxx.1 2>&1 | grep "0 received" > /dev/null && \
{ /sbin/ifdown eth1 > /dev/null; sleep 2; /sbin/ifup eth1; }
else
/sbin/ifdown eth1;
sleep 2;
/sbin/ifup eth1;
fi

Cron job line is:
* * * * * /usr/local/bin/keepalive.sh 2>&1 /dev/null

All this does is that once a minute it sends 4 pings to my providers default gateway (comcast dot net). If the pings don't come back, it resets the network. This script runs on my Linux firewall which has 2 network cards (eth1 is hooked to the internet). The 4 pings once a minute are enough to keep the link alive, the pings restart the internal network timers. It also test if the link is down, dhcpclient pid is gone, and restarts the network interface.

This method also keeps a dynamic ip address semi-permanent. That is the dynamic ip address doesn't change for months and for all practically the address becomes permanent.

Ed West

Thanks, Lensman3.

My problem isn't staying connected...it's getting connected in the first place. I don't know if you're familiar with Windows XP's networking, but bascially there's a wizard you run where you tell Windows what kind of connection you want. In my case, the instructions from AT&T say to create an account that requires a username and password. They give me an IP address, default gateway, etc. When I'm done with the wizard I get an icon on my desktop that I have to click before I'm connected to the Internet.

I no longer want this because my buddy has an "always on" connection. We plugged in my Kubuntu PC and WHAM! I was connected. No hassles at all. No configurations to mess with...it just worked! This is the Dapper Drake version I'm talking about. I want to upgrade to Gusty Gibbon ASAP.

Speaking of Gusty Gibbon, I noticed that the .iso has DVD as part of it's title. Do I need a DVD for this, or will a CD still work? I've been using ISO Burner, but it says it can't do DVD's unless I'm in Vista (which I won't get any time soon). Can any of you recommend a good (preferably free) .iso burner that burns DVD's?

Thanks a lot you guys.

-Ed-

lensman3

My XP/64 at work has a RW/DVD writer. I installed it because I wanted a 9Gbit double sided writer. Nero came with the DVD writer and I use it. The free, low end writer software will write an ISO image.

If you can boot Linux try:
growisofs -Z /dev/scd0=/tmp/cd_image.iso

growisofs will write a data iso image.

Ed West

HEY!

I've got a very similar situation here at work! I put in a dual layer DVD drive so I could take advantage of the extra storage capacity and I bought the full version of NERO (the drive was OEM).

Thanks, dude! I can just burn my .iso using that! I didn't even think of it 'til you mentioned it!

Thank you!

-Ed-