A simple suggestion for the overwhelmed newbie

[mrrangerman43]

blackbelt_jones

This may have what you want for Fluxbox.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/fluxbox-config.xml

[TroyR]

Call me shallow but we live in a graphicly oriented world...The prettier the desktop the better I will like the Distro.

[Parcival]

Call me shallow but we live in a graphicly oriented world...The prettier the desktop the better I will like the Distro.

That's why there are so many available for Linux.

[lugoteehalt]

Call me shallow .... The prettier the desktop the better I will like the Distro.

So Microsoft is catering for the shallow and yet its desktops are deadly dull on the eye candy front. Something funny going on. You'd think eye candy would be their first design criterion.

Suggest Microsoft is dull on the eye as supermarket bread is dull on the pallet. It's social control.

[DavidMD]

Hello, everyone.

I have been using KDE since I first started using Linux four years ago.

I learned about XFCE shortly after its first stable release. I am getting ready to break free of the messy world of dual-booting Windows and Linux. (I will be upgrading SuSE to Novell 10.1.)

I am definitely going to install XFCE and give it a try. I enjoyed using it on the ZenLive CD. Perhaps I like it because it has a clean look (a comment made by many Gnome users); I also like the fact that it does not use system resources as heavily as KDE, although I have no trouble using KDE.

As several people have pointed out, many distributions come with more than one environment, and you can always install additional ones, experimenting to find the "fit" that suits your aesthetic tastes and computing resources.

I am thankful for the choices that Linux offers. The environments get better with each release, and they are integrated with your distribution. (Just think of the kludges that Windows users pay for to change the look of Windows, usually at the cost of stability and speed!)

I make this statement not to "bash" Windows, but to point out that we should be thankful for all of the developers who work to enhance not only the functionality of Linux, regardless of the distribution, but how we interact with it. (I realize, of course, that Linux is solely the kernel.)

I think we should remember that we are a community, too -- a point that I humbly suggest that we sometimes forget.

Thanks for your time!

Cordially,

David

[Emiles]

Dual booting is certainly a viable way to have Win and Linux on one machine. I've tried it but find it a bit messy for my taste. A better way is to purchase a HD caddy. It allow one to easily swap HDs with ease. Only $30 or so.

I am in the infancy stage of all this and I was wondering if instead of using a HD caddy how about using a separate HDD and have it boot from one or the other? Or what is the difficulty of using a USB Passport Drive drive like this one.

I apologize if this is covered elsewhere but I am still looking and didn't want to lose this thread.

Thanks!!

[IsaacKuo]

Booting off of USB drives is a bit iffy due to a lack of industry-wide consistency. It might work for you out-of-box...or...

It's relatively easy to set up dual booting with two hard drives. The main advantage with using two hard drives rather than one is that you don't have to resize your Windows partition. Depending on your motherboard, you may even be able to set things up so that the Windows drive isn't touched at all.

For example, if your motherboard has a setting for booting up the secondary master first rather than the primary, then you can do the following:

Primary master - pristine Windows setup
Secondary master - Linux set up for dual-boot

You tell the installer to put the GRUB bootloader on the Secondary Master, and GRUB will then give you the option to either boot up Windows or Linux.

Later on, if you want to simply remove Linux entirely, you remove the drive and reset the BIOS to boot from the Primary Master first.

Alternatively, if you want to remove Windows entirely, you can move the Secondary Master to the Primary, and edit GRUB's menu.lst and the Linux's fstab file system table to point to hda instead of hdc.

[Emiles]

How would I find out about the booting , master?

I think I am going to install it on one of my old computers that just today has had a string of MS errors. But I want to do the dual on my Main PC.

This is my Main PC:
*ASUS A8N-SLI Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard - OEM
*PNY VCG7800GXWB Geforce 7800GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail
*AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 2000MHz HT Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3500BPBOX - Retail
*CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model SAMSUNG SpinPoint *P Series SP2004C 200GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
*CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model
*NEC 16X DVD±R DVD Burner Silver IDE Model ND-3540A - OEM

Thanks again for your help.

[IsaacKuo]

The exact steps to take depend on the installer--and to do what I was suggesting depends upon if you motherboard supports changing the priority on the local hard drives.

I know the Debian 3.1/Sarge/Stable and Debian Etch installers pretty well; I'm not familiar with other installers.

[Emiles]

I bought a Seagate 160GB SATA HDD. From what I can gather from the Motherboard docs, SATA don't distinguish between master and slave for SATA drives, they just number them. I chose Mandrake and I was reading the Partition documentation and it talks about DrakX and whether to use existing partition, use custom...... but it doesn't talk about using Two hard Drives. I know you said that you don't have experience with Mandrake but I wasn't sure if you had experience with DrakX.

Thanks again.

[Parcival]

Emiles, please open up a new thread for your question in the appropriate subforum (e.g. Installation).

[ill_bill]

e17?

I love the simple simple simple look of fluxbox, but if there are no keyboard shortcuts (could find no mention of themin the fluxbox wiki) I'm not interested.

Fluxbox has a hotkey system Blackbelt.


http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/docbo...html/c290.html

[DavidMD]

Hello, 'blackbelt_jones'.

...These are only the two most popular options. I should mention that there are other, more specialized desktops that can be installed on your system, but beginners shouldn't worry about them just yet. Some are good for older systems because they don't use as many resources. Others are (to my uninformed eyes) just plain weird.....

Thank you for starting a great and trulp helpful thread!

While I do not want to "muddy the waters" by mentioning other desktop environments besides the popular Gnome and KDE environments, I thought it might be helpful to mention the XFCE desktop environment, which is growing in popularity and actually ships as the standard desktop with some live CDs, such as ZenWalk Linux.

People can visit the XFCE project site to read about XFCE, view screen shots, and even watch Flash-based demonstrations of some of the features. XFCE allows you to mix Gnome and KDE applications and has a small memory "footprint."

In addition, there is a graphical installer available for XFCE, making it very easy for Linux neophytes ("newbies") to install.

It is still probably a good idea for people new to Linux to have spent some time experimenting with Gnome and KDE, because they may decide that one of these environments suits them (and their hardware) quite well. Other people may decide to try XFCE.

Also, another way to try XFCE is to try XFLD , which is available as a live-CD ISO. The main purpose of this distribution is to demonstrate XFCE, not to offer a Linux distribution that one would want to install and use on a regular basis. (There's actually no option to install XFLD on one's hard drive.)

Finally, I am not trying to promote XFCE over Gnome or KDE. I agree with you that users should try Gnome and KDE first, but if someone is limited by their hardware (e.g., slow processor or low RAM), XFCE might offer a solution besides the "just plain weird" environments to which you refer.

Thank you!

Cordially,

David

[michux]

This should be a link on the main page.

http://eedok.voidofmind.com/linux/chooser.html

or maybe this one. just googled it.

http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

Here is another distro chooser: http://polishlinux.org/choose/quiz/

And a Linux Distribution Comparison table: http://polishlinux.org/choose/comparison/

Regards,
Borys

[dragon_harrower]

I'm trying to run Knoppix live cd on my Windows XP system, but everytime it boots it stops when looking for a floppy drive. I don't have a floppy drive on my computer. Is there a way around that? Any help from anyone would be appreciated, even if you refer me to another thread, forum, etc.