Baslinux mailing list

["Martyn" <martynt AT bigpond.net.au>]

Thanks James, appreciate the suggestions.I like the idea of putting the 386
Pentiums to beytter use. I had a go at the 2 floppies, but I couldn't find a
way of executing the fdimage.exe programme to get the image onto the floppy.
It would be better if I could get it onto a CD initially. I don't know which
files to choose from the long list presented on the various download sites.
I'll go to the Linux Newbie list if this isn't the usual topic for this
list.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Miller" <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>
To: <baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2004 11:16 PM
Subject: Re: [BL] LindowsOS 4.5


> 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
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