Alright today I decided was going to be the day that I tried linux, really tried it not just a live cd. Well I went to install ubuntu on one of my desktops and the install froze. I tried it 3 more times and each time it froze.
Well while inbetween trying to get ubuntu to work I was booting the computer and making partitions with puppy linux. And while doing so I realized something, screw ubuntu this does everything I want this computer to do.

I backed out on installing it on the desktop I just refurbished and instead decided to put it on a old win98 machine.(128mb ram, 900mhz amd) The thing actually is usefull again. Sure its not a full linux experience but it will get me started. So far I'm pretty impressed by how fast and how much this computer can do now(nothing of which I could say about it before when it had win98). It boots probably 3x faster and I'm truely impressed. Here is a screenshot for anyone interested to see what it looks like.(default of course, I'll try to make it cool looking later)

If you look at the pic and wonder what the 8.8g is thats how much hard drive space it has. This computer has a 30gig hard drive(so small ) but I'm only going to let it use this so I can try ubuntu again(redownloading it to see if maybe I just got a bad disc)

(just so you know it took me 10minutes to find this file after I made it. )

is that xfce or kde or gnome? that looks incredible

I have no clue...(I've only had this working for like 20minutes) Its what it looks like out of the box.
http://www.puppyos.com/

If you got trouble or questions about Ubuntu Linux, there are helpful resources.
Ubuntu documentation.
Ubuntu forums.
IRC chat
Ubuntu mailing-lists
Ubuntu wiki.

Glad you enjoy Linux.

When you save files, you usually store them in your "home directory". For you this is probably /home/rridgely/ from the shell this can be reached by "cd /home/rridgely/" or "cd ~" (quick), or even "cd" without parameters.


To everyone else, see http://www.getgnulinux.org/.



It is JWM. For more information about Puppy Linux see the Wikipedia article.

If you're interested in trying out Puppy Linux like rridgely, you can try it on a USB memory too, without even installing it.

I have had a few stability problems. Its crashed about 5-6 time in the last 2 and a half hours. I decided to quit downloading ubuntu in favor of vector linux SOHO: http://vectorlinux.com/.

I'm going to try that out and hope its a little more stable.

BTW does linux have something like the windows task manager?
What am I supposed to do when it crashes?(I've just been restarting the computer)

Normally it is very rare that Linux crashes. If a particular software becomes unresponsive, it is possible to kill/terminate/close it via the "kill" command, by supplying the PID (Process ID) of the application, which can be obtained by running "ps" with the aux paramter. "ps aux". Then it lists all running processes (like Task Manager in Windows), and their PID, then you can kill it like "kill -9 <pid>".

Vector Linux I have never tried myself, but it is based on Slackware which is the Linux distribution that I have used the most.

When it crashes, how does it crash? Does an application become unresponsive, or does evreything just freeze or does it display a "kernel panic" ?
If the whole graphical environment that is frozen, you might be able to close the X Window System (commonly called simply "X") via ctrl+shift+backspace. This should bring you back to the console, you can start X again with the "startx" command.

There are tons of software available at freshmeat.net.

All Linux distros come with "ps" which is command line utility for listing processes. There is also a utility called "top" which is similiar, but it uses "curses".

I quick search on freshmeat, and I found gPS which seems to be a graphical task manager.

When it crashes it seems like everything just freezes. I've had this happen mostly when using seamonkey(installed opera and haven't crashed but once since). ctrl+shift+back space doesn't do anything when I press it. How would I enter in those commands once it crashes?

Going to try out Ubuntu again in a day or so after reading this thread.

Last time I installed on my 40 gig spare it wouldn't boot but gonna reinstall and give it another shot.

Linux users swear by their operating system so I should really give it a decent trial to get used to it.

Hey rridgely great minds think alike.
I too took the plung at the weekend to install ubuntu dapper 6.06. After my last attempt I took my old system and tried it on that. Better safe than sorry
It's an old 466, with a 8gb hard drive.
I cleaned it up, installed a fresh copy of XP Pro, then went for a dual boot. It took about 2 hours to get it all installed, and I did have asmall panic at the end as the CD won't pop out. So I stuck a paperclip in the small hole, pulled out the CD, rebooted the PC..................I finally had a dual booting PC. First time ever.
I've also got a 20gb external HD, which I split into 2 tens. One on NTFS and one on FAT32. So 've got a bit of storage space too. Plus windows see both parts too. Good for swaping files bewteen the 2 OS.
Anyway short story long, Here's how my system looks just now, just a little tweaking.
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/40364779/

Ran Ubuntu FF off the CD for a couple of hours.Reckon I could get used to it.

Also downloaded and made a live CD of Puppy Linux which I am using right now with the Dillo browser.

Now to see if I can get it to boot off the USB.

Certainly a learning experience here as I have never played with ISO files before.

I'll be interested to hear how you get on booting from a USB. Didn't think that was possible as the USB ports don't come online until after the BIOS, but I've been known to be wrong in the past.

There are severall settings in my bios relating to zip or USB device as first boot device but couldn't get puppy linux to boot after trying them all.

No probs booting off CD.

May have done something wrong.Used Winrar to extract puppy linux iso to the flash drive.

USB 2 here.

Humpty,
Were these the instructions you followed ?

http://www.puppyos.com/flash-puppy.htm

(About half way down)

If the whole system crashes, I guess there is nothing you can do.
If only a application becomes unresponsibe, you open a console such as xterm/rxvt/konsole/eterm/aterm or any other console to enter those commands.



Why wouldn't it boot? Maybe some bootloader related problem?



Dillo is a light-weight minimalstic browser, good for old machines. On a good computer, you might want Firefox.
An ISO image is like an CD in a file. You can use a CD to make an ISO, then use that ISO image to burn to a CD and the CD will be a replica. It is different from just copy the files from a CD to the disk, then burn to a CD. With ISO image, if the CD is bootable, then the CD you burn the ISO to will be bootable too. ISO is the most popular file format for this, similar stuff is BIN/CUE files.



The BIOS is very very old. Though, it is possible to boot from a USB thumbdrive. If the computer isnt configured to boot from USB, then you can just change the boot order in the BIOS, this is usually done by pressing the "DEL" key after you turn the power on, when you start the computer the computer performs a procedure called POST (Power-on-self-test). Don't mess around with stuff you don't know though, changing settings can result in system instability, etc.

My PC a very old, so booting off the USB isn't a go-er for me but it's good know. I'll maybe use it sometime in the future.

I'll need to give Dillo a little run too.

As for ISO, I find them so easy to use, if you get the right software to burn them. At the moment I'm using CD XP Pro, 2 or 3 click of the mouse and it's done.

Bit off topic
While on about Linux, can anyone recommend any good free AV and firewall software, or is it the case it's not really required as much as windows?

Thanks Hazel,

Will have a look.

I hate this. What a pain in the ass.
I decided to give ubuntu another shot. Well I ran the installer again and all it does is flash. Then I rebooted and tried it again and when it runs it gives some kind of kerenal panic blah blah blah! All I want to do is freaking wipe this drive clean and start over.(which I have done over and over) but for some reason all it does is crash. Oh and BTW whatever Ubuntu did wouldn't let me install vector.

Looks like I'll be stuck with functional but not so full featured puppy.(great for an old computer but hell it keeps freezing and I should be able to run something better)

BTW
That win 98 install disc is looking awfully attractive right now.
(at least it works)

All modern computers should be able to boot from USB, even if its old, unless it really is very old.
A 5 year old computer probably can boot from USB. But maybe your computer is way past its best-before-date.

In Linux you don't need firewall and antivirus so much. Virus are almost non-existent, most people who use Linux know a thing or two about security, so viruses on Linux is really really rare. However, of course there is antivirus software for Linux, such as ClamAV (there are GUI front-ends for it such as ClamTk and KlamAV), while running Linux, I don't worry about viruses though.

On a desktop server, you don't really need any services, and you can close ALL tcp/udp ports in Linux. You could live without a firewall, however when I run Linux, I use firewall. Linux has very very powerful firewall (iptables) that makes any Windows firewall look like a silly toy. It is very configurable and it can be configured to great extent. I absolutely Love it. iptables is command-line, I write a script myself to configure it, but people might think its a little difficult if they're not used to a real firewall. There are GUI front-ends for it such as NuFW, Firewall Builder, dwall, Firestarter, Solsoft, NetfilterOne, KMyFirewall, etc.



If you got nothing on the disk, you can remove all the partitions and recreate the partitions and filesystems, maybe that would solve it. Ubuntu is also possible to run via a Live CD (though it take sometime to boot).
When there is a "kernel panic" there is nothing you can do but restart the computer. What does the kernel panic say? Often it contains useful information about the cause.

mps69_1999 , I forgot to mention, of course there are also many proprietary antivirus software on Linux. Such as;
Central Command Vexira® Antivirus for Linux®
Kaspersky
NOD32
Panda Antivirus for Linux
F-Prot Antivirus for Linux Workstations
etc, etc. I never runned any antivirus on Linux though, as I never felt it was necessary.

I've decided that linux is the devil.
After 3 days of trying to get something to install I finally got vector too off of a live cd. Cool right? WRONG! First off it won't boot because for whatever reason GRUB(something I installed with puppy) doesn't recognize it.(it did mention something about installing lilo but I don't know how to get rid of GRUB). Well I can boot to my HD from the live cd, but when I do it asks for a password, guess what? It didn't ask me to set up any passwords. This is the biggest piece of junk software I have ever seen.

Well now I can get it to boot to linux but guess what? I still cant log in!

GRUB is a bootloader. LILO is a bootloader too.
When you install whatever Linux distribution you are using, it probably asks you during the installation setup something about a bootloader. You can also configure your bootsector. The LILO config file is in /etc/lilo.conf after you configure it, you run "lilo" for it to move the config to the bootsector or MBR or something. Info on configure it is in the "man lilo". GRUB I have never used (yet), but it shouldn't be difficult to configure it.
You can probably install LILO over GRUB. GRUB is like any other bootloader most likely located in the MBR (Master boot record) or the bootsector.
The Windows bootloader (NTLDR) does not auto-detect what operating systems are installed in your computer either, those have to be configured in boot.ini

If it haven't asked you for a password, then it means it haven't setup an account for you. You can easily setup an account yourself. Login in using the username "root", without any password, if it ask for password, just press enter. Now you


Login using username "root" without a password.
Now when you are inside, you probably want to change your root password, todo this, you type "passwd".
The "root" account should only be used for system administration such as creating/modifying/deleting users, installing/removing/updating software packages, etc. It should not be used for normal day-to-day activities such as listening to music, browsing the web, coding, gaming, etc. So you should setup an user account, this you do with the "adduser" command.

FINALLY!!! I posted on a linux forum and one of them helped me out. Apparently when you type in a password box to start vector it doesn't acknowldege that you typed something(nothing shows up.) They also told me the default password which is "vector". So now it boots up and is working. So far its pretty solid(not crashing like puppy) I'll post my thoughts and a screenshot about it later after I have some time to customize(I need to get a few essential programs, ect.)

Yes, the username shows up when you type it. But nothing shows up when you type in the password, not even masked stars. This is a security feature, I guess.

Didn't knew you had to login using "vector" since I never used that distribution. Maybe they could have made that a little bit clearer.

Cool! I'm really interested in you sharing your results as I'd like to have something stable that doesn't need to be constantly reinstalled on my old Win98 compatible PC. For some essential programs head on over to SourceForge.net

Or http://www.freshmeat.net/
Most distributions come with plenty of software for all kinds of various purposes.

This was the dumbest thing about the whole process. I actually installed the thing three times and each time I got to that log in screen and thought it was freezing when I typed in a username. Knowing this now just makes me even madder because no where in any documentation that I read(and yes I read wikis, forums, faqs, ect) did it say that nothing would show up in the password field. It really makes no sense.

I had a similar experience with my Endian Firewall. It does the same thing but the password is hidden. You don't see anything no stars no symbols, nothing. All you do see is the blinking curser moving to the right. Figured at first it was a problem. After the second install I figured it out.

Glad to see you got it sorted Rridgely.

Think I prefer Puppy over Ubuntu ATM running off the CD.

Actually made a bit of progress booting puppy off my usb.

First I boot off the CD and from there you can install puppy to the zip drive.

Prob is it boots so far from the usb then stalls at a certain point.

So tried a puppy usb boot floppy and still stalls at the same point.

Oh well,have given up for the time being as I have started another project with the USB drive using synchronisation,a slave hard drive and ghost images.

Will be quite good if I can achieve what I am aiming to do.

Well, that is quite funny that someone actually reinstalled the whole operating system three times over such an trivial matter that was never really a problem.
If you would have pressed "Enter" then it would have told you wrong "Access denied" and asked you to re-enter the password.

You could also ask people in some Linux channel on freenode (irc.freenode.net).

Ah but what is quite funny how many people have probably done the same thing.(even someone above me said they did the same thing.) I had so many crashes I wasn't sure the thing was even installed right.

Anyway I've given up on linux and I'm as we speak running the win 98 installer on that computer. I tried 5 different distros and on every one they either crashed while installing or crashed once installing. Most of the time I got an error from "X" which from what I can tell is what gives you the graphical interface. It seems to be used on all the distros I used(all were debian based so that might be it) it just wasn't stable on this computer.

Again I was using an older computer, so maybe there were just hardware incompatibilities. One thing I do recommend to people is keep a live cd of puppy around. It could save your data if your windows install ever becomes messed up. You could mount you hard drive and allow it to help you get your data back. I also like gparted the disk partitioner on it.

Yes, X (X Window System) is what provides the graphics interface. It is used by (pretty much) all Linux distributions that have an graphical user interface. It is also used on BSD. Mac OS X use Apple built Quartz, but also offer some kind of X implementation.

You might want to try Linux again some later time, in a year maybe after some new versions have come, or maybe in the near future a different distribution on a different computer.

Or try it as server, router or firewall instead of a desktop computer.

Ut oh.... I think I know now why the linux installs were not working. I think the HD in that computer went bad. I don't use that computer much(it is networked to my other 2 but it doesn't get turned on much). I did turn it on and make sure everything worked before trying linux so maybe the HD was on its last leg and partitioning it was the nail in the coffin.

I'm going to go get a new one tomorrow. I'm going to put windows 98 on it for sure but I'm going to partition it so that it has 40gb for windows and 40gb for linux. Ugh there goes another $60.
BTW if anyone has seen a good in store deal on hard drives let me know.

What makes this even worse is I just bought a sata HD on sale for a spare and I cant even use it on that computer.

I'd run a thorough scandisk to check the disk surface to be sure before shelling out the money for a new hdd - especially for an old system that may not get used that much.