COMPUTER LINUX REFERENCE LINKS

There are two major desk top environments- KDE and Gnome- each has their fans, It is not such a major choice as most distributions support both. Each has its own suite of programs, but if you choose KDE you can still run almost all Gnome programs and vice versa.

As I needed narrow band dial up, and I wanted rpm package management, my choice was Suse (OpenSuse) .
Red Hat (Fedora) itself was not so easy to use with dialup.

I also used Knoppix from the start, as that was one of the easiest to use Debian packages, and at that time had a good set of programs and could use narrow band dial up. Today it is not supportive of dial up connections, and the program count has been reduced to make way for the bloat of some of the major programs. Knoppix 6.2 live CD also allows you to boot into DOS (Balder version) by typing dos at the boot prompt instead of knoppix. If you boot knoppix from the live CD, insert some USB memory, and in a console type flash-knoppix, you will create a bootable usb stick and -if your bios allows it- be able to boot from the usb stick. The default is then to use the memory stick as your home directory to keep any settings you make.

I've looked at Ubuntu and did not like it as it just felt too slow, heavy and clunky compared to the other Linux variants I have used. Set up seemed especially hard. It too has its fan base though.

Opensuse has the disadvantage of only offering security support for each release only for a year, remarkably little time, and moving on to the next release may sometimes be rather hard due to various changes and regressions. But it is possible and I have moved onwards from 9.1 to 11.1

Knoppix Live CD 6.2 does not require any hard disk partition work and can run without touching your hard disk (with a home directory in ram)- and it does have the GIMP graphics program and OpenOffice office suite and MPlayer to play audio and video files. This makes it reasonably suitable for a beginner and is probably the easiest live Linux cd. Knoppix provides an easy way to boot to a dos that supports long file names (but NOT Win 3.1).

Using most Linux distributions:-
you can safely write to any FAT or Linux partitions- writing to NTFS partitions may be hazardous.
I have loaded Word documents using OpenOffice, and played Windows 3.1 games - using WINE which allows you to use SOME Windows programs. Most of my old DOS games (including several pinballs) run very well using dosbox.

I initially got my Vn 3.4 Knoppix working on a bare system very quickly, and was on line just as fast (I have always used a manual DUN setting in Windows). Note that as Knoppix is a rare Linux build using a mixture of stable and unstable software releases, it is not recommended for a "proper" hard disk install but as mentioned you can boot from a CD image on the hard disk. Vn 6 has dropped the easier kppp narrow band dial up but still has the tools to allow those knowledgable to get on line (eg wvdial).

Although Irfanview is written for Windows, I was surprised to find many parts of Irfanview work fine in Linux using Wine - there may obviously be problems with files that use external viewers which are less receptive to Wine. After version 3.95 most Irfanview downloads were self-extracting executables which rely upon a Microsoft component distributed with XP and later. There ARE standard ZIPped packages available if you look, which unpack and run fine with Wine. I have found quite a number of 8BF filter files to add to the many image changes Irfanview can make.

A lot of folk are coming here looking for Linux/MAME- well, I created a folder with links to each mame game I like, and I use xmame and the standard mame rom zips, but you may prefer to try Knoppixmame or for another approach check out GXMame instead. Note that Linux versions of MAME just use the usual game ROM ZIP files. The sites offering ROM files for Mame tend to change a great deal- I can only suggest searching! Linux also has software which lets you play those old Infocom text adventures (frotz or xzip).

RPMSeek- or rpmfind - or rpmsearch - search for rpm and deb packages.