Linux Set to Challenge Windows on Desktop

Reuters | 1/12/2003 | Reed Stevenson

[jimt]

I would suggest anybody with an older Pentium box to give Mandrake a try. If you can install Windows you can install mandrake.

You've had much better luck than I.

I bought all the hype about how Linux doesn't need much in the way of resources, how it had better performance than Windows, yada, yada.

Five distros later, including a newly purchased Mandrake and a newly purchased Red Hat, I say baloney.

Before someone points out that I should have read more, I read four books on Linux, including Linux for Dummies. I also read (and printed) several Internet articles about Linux installations on the very same machine. I'm savvy enough to get the same computer triple booting DOS 6.2, Windows 95 (the OEM OS) and Windows NT, with nary a problem.

But Linux was another matter. Regardless of the brand or type of installation, performance was VERY slow. X-Windows NEVER installed successfully, which on a plain jane 1024 X 768 display is ridiculous. But running command line only (terminal) interface, I was still left highly unimpressed with the glacial performance and the silly unix convolutions and mindset.

This was on a 150 mhz Toshiba Pentium laptop. Toshibas are noted for ruggedness and compatibility.

Granted, I got disgusted after a day or so of playing with each distribution. But I think that any installation program that can handle 800 X 600 perfectly should be able to handle 1024 X 768. They couldn't.

[Joe Bonforte]

I'll mail you the CDs, free. And it's legal.

We're talking mainstream people here, who just get what they see in CompUSA. They don't know any better than to pay the bucks. And there's millions of them, so your offer to mail the CDs, while generous, is not very practical IMHO.

[amigatec]

I have never tried running Linux on a p150, I have it on a PPro 200 with 82meg RAM and an AMD K5-266 with 96meg RAM, both have S3 video cards. I don't have any problems running Mandrake.

I have a P150 with 48meg RAM running a Linux based firewall and it runs good.

My PPro is running as a server. I am using it mainly as a DNS server for the internet. I have found that Linux runs better remote than at the console, so I use webmin to admin it.

[martin_fierro]

Can either of you recommend a Linux distro that will install on a 1 gig hard drive?

I got the "Linux for Dummies" book with two CDs of RedHat 8 included -- but the CDs don't contain what the book says they're supposed to ("rawrite" is missing, for starters). That, and it looks like it'll require more disk space than I've got.