Ventureing into UNIX land

[DorkRawk]

I have been tossing around the idea of trying to put a version of UNIX on my home PC just to start toying around with it and learning, because I read that a UNIX OS could be installed along side Windows so I could choose which I wanted to use on startup. I've used it a bit at school but I'm not very knowedgable at all, so I'd like to learn more. A few questions.... I have a P4 2.4GHz 512MbRAM PC at home with XP on it, would installing a UNIX operating system on this slow the machine down signifigantly??? What version of UNIX do you guys recomend and what are the diffrences between them??? Is doing something like this very hard/ risky to do??

[stolzyboy]

no running any flavor of *nix won't slow your machine down in the least, think about it, you are running only one OS at a time anyway

keep in mind if you only have one partition right now, you will have to wipe that out and create one for each OS

then install windows first, then install *nix, *nix usually does a better job of partitioning, but windows will cry when you try and install it when there is *nix already on there

if you aren't familiar with *nix and would like a decent gui bundle, i would suggest using redhat, it probably has the best support of any of the bundled flavors

and yes, if you are unfamiliar with *nix, it can be both hard and risky

keep backups of anything you have before trying to monkey with any of this stuff

at any rate, go ahead and try, the worst that can happen is you will have to reinstall windows again, and we all know that most have to do that often anyway

[ksandom]

In addition to what the last person told you:

Another option worth considering, but in the long run, probably not worth doing. I'll get to why not nearer the end of this post. Which ever way you choose to go, you should ensure that you have a backup. Also keep in mind that linux has a very different mind set to windows. (tip: avoid arguments with people over which OS is better;) )

I've heard with mandrake linux (>8 I think) you can resize fat&NTFS partitions. I haven't tried this myself, but I've heard good reviews about it. I'm pretty sure I heard of this feature being in Redht 9 as well (this is what I use predominantly), I haven't seen this feature about, although I always do the partitioning manually so it ends up exactly as I want it.

I don't know if it's essential, but I wouldn't attempt resizing a partition without the partition being fully defraged first.

The following pros and cons apply to resizing with any util under any OS.
Reasons for resizing:
If you have a lot of "stuff" you don't want to backup because there's so much of it, but you do want to keep it. Resizing could be a good option. Keep in mind though, no matter what you are doing, no matter what OS, no matter what program ... etc if it is not backed up, you should expect to loose it at some stage.
Quick and convienient.

Reasons against resizing:
Any problems created during the process, may not show up until a lot later.
It's much "cleaner" to install from scratch.
Little gain over starting from scratch.

My Opinion:
I think in the long run, you'd be better off, going with the suggestions which the other person made (installing from scratch onto fresh partitions). My reasons are for my lack of trust for utils that mess with partitions. The risk of something going wrong is (in my opinion) greater than gain you will compared to starting from scratch.

So why did I write this post?:
Because this option commonly comes up in conversation, so the chances you are going to hear about it sometime soon if you haven't already (woa! De Ja Voo... I know I can't spell ;) ).


On a different topic:
A good site to visit is:
http://linux-newbie.sunsite.dk/index.html
This site talks about when to and when not to consider linux, takes you through the various stages of getting it working and making it work well for what you want to do with it. It is a little out of date in places (about 2-3 versions in places). But there is some good info there.

[Doug G]

You might consider pulling an older computer out of mothballs and using that for your linux/unix practicing. You can get a perfectly capable development box on Ebay for twenty bucks or so, and that way you don't risk messing up your current windows unit with repartitioning, etc.

[greg252]

Doug took the words right outta my mouth!

I have RedHat 7.1 running on a P2-233 with 96megs and a 2 gig HD.
I have no reason to upgrade or change anything. The problems I ran into are many, let me try to list a few. Please keep in mind, this is an old version of Linux and hopefully bugs have been fixed.

1) RH 7.1 did not support Fujitsu 4 gig drives. Took a lot of hunting to find why it wouldn't load on my NEW drive (went back to 2 gig IBM.

2)Still cannot set up RD 7.1 as a "server". I have to do a base custom install with Developer packages and install individual additional packages (RPM's) one at a time.

3)I've been told you can run Gnome and KDE on the same box and choose which one to use at login. KDE will not load on my box.

I'm sure there are more, I just can't think of them.
Use a dedicated, now-"useless" box so you can mess it up all you want and you'll never regret the learning experience.

Best of luck.


P.S. I have since moved most of my dev to OS X. Talk about UNIX...WOW!

[stolzyboy]

OS X is a lovely new addition to the mac platform, and i love that apache/php/mysql are native since its unix, duh

i use os x all the time at home and at work, also use pc's too, but if i want to develop seriously, i will run stuff of my mac, its server is much more stable than apache on windows

[m4rk]

if ya don't really feel like playing around with a gui either you could always get cygwin (its not an emulator!) which is just a command line available at cygwin.com (http://www.cygwin.com)

and after doing a sf.net search, apparently there are KDE and GNOME gui's for cygwin...so this way you wouldn't have to bother with the partitioning crap

[TowerOfPower]

If your interested in running a server on Linux with Apache, MySQL, PHP, SSL...

http://www.devside.net

...is a good place to start. win32 instructions also.

For a Linux distro, I would recommend Red Hat for the general user, and if you really want to get into in, Gentoo Linux is the way to go.