Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Martyn wrote:

> I can start again and install a simpler version of Linux? and which
> version would be best. Can anyone advise. Keep it simple please!

Just a couple of observations.  BL - the distribution this list is
dedicated to - is aimed at low-end hardware (386- low-end Pentium), and
your system is obviously more advanced than that.  You can run Linux -
Basiclinux included - without installing anything.  Maybe you should try
that?  BL3 can be loaded (into RAM) and run from 2 floppies - see
http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/ for downloads and docs.  Basically, you
can fiddle with the system and see how it works, and when you reboot,
you're back to whatever system you had previously, having lost any changes
you made to the system that ran in RAM.  BL is a highly simplified (read -
stripped down) form of Linux: but be sure to differentiate between
simplified and simple.  Learning a new OS that is quite different and does
things in different ways than you're used to is not going to be easy.  I
advise you to abandon any notion like that: learning to use Linux requires
alot of hard work and involves alot of frustration.  If you don't bear
that in mind, you're likely to have a bad expereince with it and just give
up at some point later.  Be prepared for alot of hard work.  There are
other, more full-blown Linuces that run in a RAMdisk that would work on
your system - Knoppix, Damnsmalllinux etc.  Many varieties run from
removable media (CD's in the case of the ones I just mentioned), allow you
to play with the system, then just disappear (along with any changes you
made to them) when you reboot.  If you're bent on installing something to
your hard drive, I'd think any of the major distro's would work for you
(e.g., Mandrake, Xandros, Slackware, Mepis).  I just noted in the news
yesterday that Xandros is being made available for free download, if you
have bittorrent ($10 to download via http).  All of these have advanced
gui's that will be fairly similar to their Window$ counterparts and so may
be "easy" in that sense.  When you want to do system administration you'll
have challenges aplenty even with these.  Note that adding a nice-looking
user interface doesn't simplify things - it makes them more complex -
certainly in terms of the number of additoinal files that get added to the
system (you're adding another layer of code between what the machine
understands and does and the user).  Hope this helps.  If you end up
installing one of those non-BL variants, I suggest you join the
linux-newbie list (look here http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html for
details) where newbie questions on these sorts of distros are a bit more
on-topic.

James