Recommendations 3236

Roark

If possible, increase the memory to 256 Megabytes. You will probably not like it at all if it is less than 128 Megabytes. You can probably get by with a 6 GByte hard drive, but if you could put an additional hard drive on there (might as well keep that one), that could be a good thing if money is not much of a problem. You can get 80GByte hard drives for US$75 or so these days.

If you cannot get an additional hard drive, you will need to be very selective about what programs you install, installing only those that you think you would really need. My small system has the following file systems on it; thee hard drives:

$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted ondev-hda5 4134900 152856 3771996 4%dev-hda10 8262036 1067008 6775332 14%boincdev-hda3 101107 10984 84902 12%bootdev-sda2 5039616 39612 4744004 1%homedev-hda7 4134900 32828 3892024 1%optdev-sda1 1007880 16468 940216 2%tmpdev-sdb2 5039616 1409184 3374432 30%usrdev-hda8 4134900 1008328 2916524 26%usr-localdev-hda9 4134900 227068 368 plus 17784 6%usr-srcdev-sdb1 1007880 59580 897104 7%var

The most important thing to notice about that is that most of the file systems are nearly empty, so you would not need to make them so large. The next important thing is that I have too many parbreastions for a beginner.,opt,usr,usr-local andusr-src could all be in one file system. You will surely need less that 5 GBytes forhome, especially when you begin. And you will not needboinc at at all. So let us try that again:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted ondev-hda5 4134900 2797436 2746648 68%dev-hda3 101107 10984 84902 12%bootdev-sda2 5039616 39612 4744004 1%homedev-sda1 1007880 16468 940216 2%tmpdev-sdb1 1007880 59580 897104 7%var

You will probably want around 512Meg of disk for swap space. So this could all fit on a 6 GByte drive you already have. But this system has very little software on it.

I have experience only with Red Hat distributions, so I cannot give really comprehensive advice on distributions.

In general, though, I would expect that most recent distributions are basically good (since they include basically the same software). Some may be easier to install and configure than others, some may be easier to keep up to date, and so on.

I do seriously recommend NOT getting OBSOLETE distributions, such as Red Hat Linux 7, 8, or 9. You might do well with Fedora Core 3. If you are rich, you could consider Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but those cost around $350-year for each system you have, and is probably not a thing to start out with even if you have the money. I understand SuSE make good distributions as well. Others will surely recommend other distributions. ;-)

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 09:19:59 up 63 days, 17:38, 3 users, load average: 4.62, 4.33, 4.22