Taking the Plunge-- Still

[jmneedham at kc.rr.com]

Brian:

Thanks for your input... I have went ahead and began the ftp install of SuSE 8.2 and it is (so far) 
going very well... I am basically going with the defaults and now have taken out any "weird 
hardware" until I get a stable base system.

Again, I do thank everyone who gave me help and I may revisit Gentoo in a year or so when I build 
the next machine once I have become more familiar with the system and so on.  It is amazing how 
little I know even though I worked with FreeBSD and MacOS X lately, I never could get a FBSD 
install to work either, though I count my MacOS X and some of the 'admin knowledge' I gained 
working with others' systems does carry over, but I am bound and determined to learn Linux as I am 
VERY tired of Microsoft!

I have always supported Open Source, but now it is time to walk the walk, not just be theorhetical 
:-)

Thanks again,

--
J. Mike Needham
jmneedham at kc.rr.com
Kansas USA

----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Densmore <DensmoreB at ctbsonline.com>
Subject: RE: Taking the Plunge-- Still

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: jmneedham
> > Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2003 4:09 PM
> > To: Kris Bodenheimer
> > Cc: kclug at kclug.org
> > Subject: Re: Taking the Plunge-- Still
> > 
> > 
> > Hi guys:
> > 
> > Thought Gentoo would be cool,but I am obviously not seasoned 
> > enough to know what I am doing with it.  Got the X server up 
> > and still dinking... made a decision to try and download the 
> I'd be glad to help you get it up and running. But it is really
> for advanced users.
> 
> > FTP install for SuSE 8.2 because it is still not Redhat or 
> > Mandrake (no offense please to those of you who like those 
> > distros, just not had good luck with them myself)... Debian 
> > would be a good idea too, is there a P4 optimised version of 
> > it out there and it is easy to install?  Is SuSE easy to 
> > install?  I want to avoid building my own kernel for the time 
> > being because I frankly don't know what i am doing 
> > obviously... thanks for any and all help.
> You really should learn, but you should learn with one that
> that someone else has built for you and has all your hardware
> working. Reason being it is much easier to learn one compile
> at a time which setting you need to change to add functionality
> for a single piece of hardware, than it is to try to figure
> out *all* the settings you might need to tweak to get your
> system up. Hence, a prebuilt kernel distro is the way to go.
> Debian is also a bit heavy on the techie side, but getting
> much better from what I hear. That said all of the major 
> "user-friendly" distros have different drawbacks and
> strengths. I don't care for SuSE, but others do. It's generally
> an easy install, but *do* pay attention and *read* all the way
> through the install docs *before* installing and keep them
> handy while doing it. One wrong move and you could seriously
> fubar the install, in ways that are not immediately obvious.
> [Same goes for Mandrake, for different reasons]
> 
> Also on your gentoo. Missing modules is a sign you have disabled 
> or not enabled an important section in the kernel configuration.
> You really need to know what kind of hardware you have and 
> modify the kernel compile parameters accordingly. I suspect you
> left out support for a whole range of devices. If you send me 
> your kernel config file and all the devices I'll send you back
> a config that will load support for all your devices.
> 
> X has a new option to autoconfigure itself. So getting X to work 
> is relatively painless these days.
> XFree86 -configure
> should do it.
> 
> Brian
>