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Posted by: HarveyH Oct 29 2004, 06:38 AM

A few weeks ago a question was asked about the best Linux distribution for office workstations. How about the best for a home machine? 5-6 year old HP Pavilion, PI, 433 Celeron, 12 Gig HD, 192 Meg RAM. Will share a cable connection through a router with an XP Home machine and a Win2K laptop. I have zero experience with Linux/Unix, though 6-8 years ago I was the defacto Sys Admin for a 10-12 workstation NT 3.5 system, mostly user accounts and loading and updating applications. I'm a Tech Writer by profession, and am fairly competent in Word, and can usually get reasonable results in any WinTel application I've tried.
Thanks,
Harvey

Posted by: skline Oct 29 2004, 07:29 AM

For what you are running, I would just stick to an older version of RedHat or Mandrake. Both are simple to use and dont require mega proccessors.

Posted by: krk Nov 1 2004, 09:18 PM

I'm mostly with Scott on this one.

rhat 9, or Fedora Core 1 (which many think of as rhat 10) were both good and known to be pleasant within the win32 world as well.

[I'll add a plug for my company (Specifix) at http://www.specifix.com -- the distro is technically "alpha" but will be beta shortly and actually stable now -- we use it internally on our servers/etc -- if you're adventurous... ]

kim.

Posted by: McMark Nov 1 2004, 09:53 PM

You'll need to upgrade your hardware, but the best home Linux/Unix distribution is... Mac OS X. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Posted by: krk Nov 1 2004, 10:34 PM

You'll need to upgrade your hardware, but the best home Linux/Unix distribution is... Mac OS X. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Posted by: airsix Nov 1 2004, 11:44 PM

If you want to just try out Linux without making a commitment go download the current "Knoppix" iso and burn a bootable cd. This is a "live" cd distribution based on the superior Debian distribution of Linux. By "live" cd I mean you can boot the cd and in a few seconds you have a fully functioning Linux workstation up and running without doing any install - it all runs off the cd with no change to your hard-drive. Remove the cd and reboot and you're back to Windows again. Play around with it and decide if Linux is something you want to keep around - THEN do a hard-drive install. Do a google search to find the Knoppix site and instructions.

-Ben M. (Linux user since 1995)

Posted by: HarveyH Nov 2 2004, 07:41 AM

Thanks guys,
As far as I know, Linux will only go on a machine for playing around with. I have to keep the main home unit and my laptop as Windows/MS Office machines for work stuff. Unless I get a client who uses Linux... Eight or ten years ago I worked on a very large project that tried to convert the finished product (15 - 20 kpages of outline formatted text and line drawing graphics) from MAC to Office, don't ever want to try that again...
Harvey