Show me how to hax0r my b0x

[Duality]

Tell me what I need to get a Linux partition up and running.

I haven't touched a Linux distro since RedHat 5 in the days of dialup (a good 4-5 years, at least).

Is RH/Fedora still considered the newbie distro? Also, give me some resources on what I need to do to get it up and running for the following necessities:
Allow me to read from my NTFS partitions to access my stored files. Bonus points if I can write to the NTFS partition without risk of breaking it in my XP install.
Information on where to find codecs and media players to watch my thieved TV shows.
BitTorrent
Information on graphical interface engines (Gnome vs KDE, etc.) and where to find modified themes of them.
Any other pertinant productivity applications I may want to use in the future.
Also, what do we think of Xandros (http://www.xandros.com/products/home/products_home.html)?

Teach me!

[AcquiredTarget]

$.00000000001 (I ain't no expert) I'm sure others can offer better advice.
I'd recommend this book, Running Linux (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596002726/qid=1105411569/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-8738073-5820143?v=glance&s=books) and this website, www.justlinux.com (http://www.justlinux.com/)

Tell me what I need to get a Linux partition up and running.

I haven't touched a Linux distro since RedHat 5 in the days of dialup (a good 4-5 years, at least).

Is RH/Fedora still considered the newbie distro?Yep, Still is.
I felt it was too bloated. I prefer Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntulinux.org/), Mandrake (http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en-us/) (free/donate) and Suse (http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/) (reasonable cost). Also Knoppix (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) might be a good one to try, you can run it entirely off a Cd or do an install Also, give me some resources on what I need to do to get it up and running for the following necessities:








Allow me to read from my NTFS partitions to access my stored files. Bonus points if I can write to the NTFS partition without risk of breaking it in my XP install.You can pretty much dual-boot XP and Linux, but Windows likes (seriously likes) to be on the first partion. From what I understand, right now, reading & writing to NTFS is still a little iffy. If you have space to create a FAT16 partion, I'd go that route.
Information on where to find codecs and media players to watch my thieved TV shows.
BitTorrent
Information on graphical interface engines (Gnome vs KDE, etc.) and where to find modified themes of them. There's bittorrent clients and codecs available. You can Google 'em or check our Justlinux.com and Linuxquestions.org. Xine is a good player (I think). For themes, you can check out www.freshmeat.net (http://www.freshmeat.net). I prefer KDE, but Gnome is also fairly good. They are bloated when compared to other Desktop managers like Blackbox, Fluxbox, etc. You might want to check out this forum for better ideas Justliunx Desktop Managers (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=22)
Any other pertinant productivity applications I may want to use in the future.Openoffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) is comparable to MS Office, excluding MS Access. Runs on Windows, Linux, Macs. Has a cool little feature that lets you create .pdf files. And there's also Abiword (http://www.abisource.com/), but I haven't used it myself. KDE also comes with its own office suite, if I remember.
Also, what do we think of Xandros (http://www.xandros.com/products/home/products_home.html)? I've heard mixed reviews about Xandros, if I recall, its based on Debian, a great distro.

I really like www.justlinux.com (http://www.justlinux.com). Damn near any problem you'll run into has probably been answered, so you can use the search feature and come up with a lot of threads. There's also www.linuxquestions.org/ (http://www.linuxquestions.org/)

I'm sure others will give you better advice.

[Style]

Xandros 3 is a great newbie distro. and out of all the distros, its been the easiest to run a dual boot with.

mandrake is easy to use. suse is easy to use, but i didnt like the free version, and fedora is an alright first distro too

i used partition magic and made a linux ex2 partition and had no problems installing into that. and the bootloader on linux also recognized my windows boot.

[InnerLogic]

You can make a Linux partition in the fedora/red hat or xandros installs (in fact, many distros now adays let you do that). Xandros is a great one to make a partition, as it's very simple, and works great.\

Bad news though, you can't write to an NTFS partition in linux, you can read it though and use the files, but no writeing is possible.... at least right now. If you need to the commands on how to read an NTFS (or any other) partition, just ask me.

For codecs for videos, with xandros (or any Debian based linux distro) it's simple, all you need to do is just go into "xandros networks" (or the konsole and use apt-get). Although many should be installed right out of the box, because it comes with Xine.

For bittorrent, alot of bittorrent programs like azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net/) or bittornado will run fine. Azureus is your best bet, as it uses java and looks just like the windows version. So if you use that it won't be much different, bittornado or normal bittorrent take a little bit more effort.

for graphic interfaces, I like KDE the best (as it updateds the "start" apps folder when i install something, Gnome never does for some reason)
use http://www.kde-look.org/ if you need themes for KDE.

Between Fedora and Xandros, for ease of installing (of the OS and Apps's) xandros is the best of the two. the RPM system has a great deal of problems (dependency hell anyone? ;-) ), while apt-get and deb files work much better.

also, note that when making a partition, try and make it reiserfs or Ext3.

[AcquiredTarget]

Apt-get is one of the main reason why I love using Debian. They've ported it over for Fedora, so now you don't have to go thru dependecny Hell when updating RH/Fedora. Emerge for Gentoo is also great, but I wouldn't recommend it for a new user. Hell I tanlged with it for a week before giving up on that distro.

[Duality]

Also Knoppix (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) might be a good one to try, you can run it entirely off a Cd or do an install
I've actually tried Knoppix on a couple machines with mixed success. On my machine, it didn't even properly configure the graphics (using a GF3). And had it lock up on bootup on another machine (a Dell). I had wanted to do this a while ago, just to get a better feel of it, but didn't feel like trying to figure out if there was a fix (which seems nigh impossible when you're booting from the CD).
You can pretty much dual-boot XP and Linux, but Windows likes (seriously likes) to be on the first partion. From what I understand, right now, reading & writing to NTFS is still a little iffy. If you have space to create a FAT16 partion, I'd go that route.
Doing a little bit of searching, I found that you can pretty much get around this by getting an ext2/ext3 read-supported driver for Windows. Not ideal to have to boot into Windows to copy any files I may nab, but it could work.

I really like www.justlinux.com (http://www.justlinux.com). Damn near any problem you'll run into has probably been answered, so you can use the search feature and come up with a lot of threads. There's also www.linuxquestions.org/ (http://www.linuxquestions.org/)

I'm sure others will give you better advice.
This exactly the sort of stuff I need to know. Last time I tried to run Linux, I got lost in a sea of man pages and sites answering only the most obscure and foriegn questions.

i used partition magic and made a linux ex2 partition and had no problems installing into that. and the bootloader on linux also recognized my windows boot.
Don't the partition managers included in the installers allow you to make changes to the drives without wiping out all of your data? I'd rather not have to dig up a copy of Partition Magic for this if I don't need to.

What I may just wind up doing, and I know it'll be easier in the long run, is to just take down my Win2k server (serves as a web, ftp and WASTE server). The issue with that is that I'm looking to learn Linux as an eventual substitute for Windows as the primary OS and don't want to be stuck using an old 400MHz with 392MB of RAM.

Thank you, both, for your responses.

[InnerLogic]

Don't the partition managers included in the installers allow you to make changes to the drives without wiping out all of your data? I'd rather not have to dig up a copy of Partition Magic for this if I don't need to.

You can make a Linux partition in the fedora/red hat or xandros installers (in fact, many distros now adays let you do that). Xandros is a great one to make a partition, as it's very simple, and works great.
question answered :-)

[AcquiredTarget]

I've actually tried Knoppix on a couple machines with mixed success. On my machine, it didn't even properly configure the graphics (using a GF3). And had it lock up on bootup on another machine (a Dell). I had wanted to do this a while ago, just to get a better feel of it, but didn't feel like trying to figure out if there was a fix (which seems nigh impossible when you're booting from the CD). Maybe I just got lucky. I know I ain't that good :D

Doing a little bit of searching, I found that you can pretty much get around this by getting an ext2/ext3 read-supported driver for Windows. Not ideal to have to boot into Windows to copy any files I may nab, but it could work.Huh, that's new a new one. I've usually just left a FAT partition. Thanks for the tip.

This exactly the sort of stuff I need to know. Last time I tried to run Linux, I got lost in a sea of man pages and sites answering only the most obscure and foriegn questions. Seriously, search the justlinux.com first (or post your question and then search site ) because the majority of problems will have been answered.


Don't the partition managers included in the installers allow you to make changes to the drives without wiping out all of your data? I'd rather not have to dig up a copy of Partition Magic for this if I don't need to.

What I may just wind up doing, and I know it'll be easier in the long run, is to just take down my Win2k server (serves as a web, ftp and WASTE server). The issue with that is that I'm looking to learn Linux as an eventual substitute for Windows as the primary OS and don't want to be stuck using an old 400MHz with 392MB of RAM.

Thank you, both, for your responses.That's one of the kewl things about Linux. There are plenty of distros out there that will run perfectly fine on a 400Mhz box. I'm running a 500Mhz as a dual boot W2K and Ubuntu Linux (also Debian based) and Ubuntu runs faster than W2k. Eventually you'll want to check out Debian (my fave), Slackware, Gentoo, etc. So don't throw out that 400Mhz just yet.

[Duality]

And do you use that for general purpose stuff?

I'm talking about watching, as well as ripping and reencoding video? I have enough trouble with that stuff on my main Windows machine as it is, I don't really know what kind of performance and quality output I'll get with a 400MHz P2.

[Emptythought]

I would also like to thank everyone here for there help, ive always wanted to mess arround with linux.. and i have a whole nother pc to do it on(emot-lucky.gif)

But its only a 400mhz p2 :(

[AcquiredTarget]

And do you use that for general purpose stuff?

I'm talking about watching, as well as ripping and reencoding video? I have enough trouble with that stuff on my main Windows machine as it is, I don't really know what kind of performance and quality output I'll get with a 400MHz P2.While I haven't completely crossed over to using Linux 100%, I am increasingly using it. I do more and more email, surfing, woid processing/spreadsheets, I don't do any video work except for watching mpegs. I've even managed to get MySQL working. Maybe over at the linux forums I posted, you can post a question about that requirement.

Since both you and Emptythought have 400Mhz boxes I'd stay away from Mandrake and Red Hat. Prolly go with Xandros.
HTH

[InnerLogic]

I'm talking about watching, as well as ripping and reencoding video? I have enough trouble with that stuff on my main Windows machine as it is, I don't really know what kind of performance and quality output I'll get with a 400MHz P2.
For slower PC's Linux is great. Where the newer version's of windows don't play well with slower computers, linux does. I've had old 300 MHz 64 meg ram machines run red hat and ubuntu linux just fine. Just watch out for the video card, if it's some weird old brand that has not been around for awile, there "may" not be drivers for it. For course many linux distros have a vesa or vga driver in case that happens.

Also, if you want to use 3d games in linux, if you have an ATI card, forget it. ATI's drivers are THE WORSE FUCKEN DRIVERS OUT THERE. There are a bitch to install (they don't even work with the new x.org version), and don't work as well as nvidia's. If you have an nvidia card, then it's all good. I'm not sure about other card makers in the newer distros.