Any Linux users here?

[Grogan]

Indeed, yes, I'm familiar with both of those, and I have fluxbox (as well as KDE 3.5.7, icewm, xfce4.0.2, AfterStep 1.8 for variety). I may give ion another try.

I've been using XFCE4 for years and it's what I mostly use. It's the tear off menus on the panel that I really like.

My Desktop:
http://www.mikeserv.org/gallery/Mike...doned.png.html

[hyper_raider]

Originally Posted by Grogan

Indeed, yes, I'm familiar with both of those, and I have fluxbox (as well as KDE 3.5.7, icewm, xfce4.0.2, AfterStep 1.8 for variety). I may give ion another try.

I've been using XFCE4 for years and it's what I mostly use. It's the tear off menus on the panel that I really like.

My Desktop:
http://www.mikeserv.org/gallery/Mike...doned.png.html

Heh after step looks like window maker if you do a lot of work with the terminal then Ion is the way to go IMO

[The_YongGrand]

What could be the best lightweight Linux for the older-spec PCs? I found DSL, but couldn't run properly so much on a Pentium 200MHz machine.

[goldfries]

Originally Posted by The_YongGrand

What could be the best lightweight Linux for the older-spec PCs? I found DSL, but couldn't run properly so much on a Pentium 200MHz machine.

were you trying to run Desktops?

i use Slax. try Slax.

[IMNOTDRPHIL]

Originally Posted by peaz

So... any linux users here so that I can ask a few things? Like which build do you like best? differences etc? I tried Ubuntu but didn't really like it. Not sure why.. perhaps I will try it out again.

I've also tried Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and like it better than SLED. However, I can't get myself a copy of RHEL at the moment. Perhaps I can try to look into IBM's internal repository of software... Hmmm...

Your choice of distro is mostly one of personal preference and a little bit to do with your hardware and intended usage. I run Gentoo 2007.0 AMD64 on my workstation at home and Ubuntu 7.04 AMD64 on my little laptop. Gentoo is a good fit on the desktop as I wanted to have a full build toolchain and everything because I do some development on that machine (although not much at the moment.) The laptop runs Ubuntu due to a pretty much everything being supported out of the box on it and it's pretty much just a note-taking machine.

Okok... fire away some tips... what to do where to look for stuff. Like.. any GAIM alternative? I don't like the fact that GAIM uses big fonts and big icons. And I didn't see any way to resize anything in the options.

GAIM 2.0 is renamed "Pidgin" due to A-O-Hell fussing yet again about the name. The font size is usually set DE-wide, so look in the Gnome "Font" control panel for that setting. If you use GAIM on KDE, then you'll probably want to install gnome-control-center to use this control panel.

Oh, and does different distros = different avaibility of software packages? Do i always need to get the source files and compile my own executables? Is there a nice graphical based tool for basic stuff like FTP and so on? Yes I know I can use the console based commands. But sometimes, managing my up/downloads using a graphical tool does help... time management vs cool-factor....

Most of the distros have the same software packages. You shouldn't need to manually get and build everything from scratch unless you want some app that's not in the distro's repositories. The only distros that require you to build stuff from scratch would be LFS and any Gentoo derivative, although Gentoo has a nice package manager that will automatically fetch the source tarballs and build them for you.

FTP functionality is built into the file managers in both Gnome and KDE. Type in ftp://username@your-server-name-or-i...ctory/you/want and it'll bring up a password prompt. If you use anonymous FTP, onit the "username@" bit. SFTP works the same way. You can also have a permanent shortcut in Gnome by going to Places -> Connect to server... and enter in your pertinent info. KDE can do that too, but I haven't used KDE in long enough to forget the exact method to do it

And I don't really like GIMP too. any other alternatives?

Hmm, you stumped me there as I use The GIMP a lot and haven't looked for anything else. I'm guessing you use Photoshop, so you could always try to run it under WINE.

[IMNOTDRPHIL]

Originally Posted by djspinnet

Er.. actually no. If you use apt-get it'll just fetch the sources, configure them, compile them and install them for you.

That's apt-build that fetches the tarballs, compiles, and installs them, not apt-get. Apt-get uses precompiled binary .deb packages.