Void's Forums

Good morning guys.

Want to get into linux and looking for a good distro to start with. I'm a web host so I need to practice doing things remotely as well.

Here's the hardware I'm going to have available to work with.

I got a pentium 133-166mhz (not sure) machine. It has a floppy and cd rom and I'll be installing a network card. I have a home network and a 24 port hub so finding a connection point to log into will be no problem. I have no extra monitor, keyboard, mouse, kvm to use with it. So once I get it loaded I'll have to lose those items which I will be 'borrowing' from my son's rig. (Listen boy, I bought that computer and you dang well will give me the friggin' keyboard, mouse and monitor on Saturday) hahahah
Teenagers....sheesh

Thanks in advance,
Webdiggity

Since I know you run Red Hat 7.3 on your server I would suggest going with Red Hat 9 on your home machine. Things at the shell level that you will be wanting to practice with will be nearly identical. The only question is how much RAM do you have in that machine? Since it's an old slow processor and depending on your RAM you might also want to try Debian. Others will tell you to try Slackware. Let me know if you need the Red Hat CDs. I carry them with me wherever I go so...

Oh, and welcome aboard! :)

The machine I'm going to be using only has a 2 gig drive. Will I be able to fit it on there and run it?

Dang, I just updated my previous post as you posted yours. How much RAM do you have in it?

well i think red hat 9 is a bit of a hog for disk space cpu time etc, and it has no low fat desktop environments to choose from (unless you count the freshrpms version of blackbox), so i am one of the people who will tell you to try slackware. you will come up against a lot of minor differences between it and red hat but i think this teaches you a lot about linux overall. either that or perhaps go for red hat 8 which is virtually identical to rh9 but it has windowmaker available in it, so you could install rh8 with windowmaker using the nice rpm based installer, miss out gnome and kde and then install apt and get blackbox also, i think that with prudent package choices this might come in under your 2 gig limit with some space to spare. I do think slack or some other smaller thinking distro might be better but as i say it depends on how much learning/frustration you want.

I'm not worried about having a gui just yet. I want to get the server up and running then practice telnet-ing (is that a word?) to it to get me up to speed working on my dedicated web server down in Texas. haha

Webdiggity wrote:then practice telnet-ing

I hope you mean ssh-ing. :)

good stuff. if no GUI then red hat is good, slack is just as good, but with red hat you get rpm and apt, and slack has a different package management system, so if you will want to be using apt to keep your system up to date then rh (8 or 9) (or debian as void said) is it, in my humble opinion.

Or better yet, since it is supposed to match your server as closely as possible I would recommend going with the same version on your machine at home (I believe you said you are running 7.3). Then get your system to the same levels of all packages so then can test things on your home box and be confident whether they will or will not work on you production server.