Comments on: I can’t decide

by: alfons hoogervorst

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 20:14:37 +0000

G’day.
If you have CPU cycles to burn, try VMWare under Windows. Also see the recently released VMWare Player.

by: Olliver

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 15:42:37 +0000

Well, old Red Hat and recent Fedora can’t exactly be compared with each other, because since then a lot of things have improved, updated and added. Debian isn’t a bad choice either, of course and has a similiar well working hardware support as recent Fedora versions, so it’s up to your personal taste which format you prefer. I wasn’t mentioning it because I thought the focus would lie on being easy to install even for rather unexperienced people. But of course you could install fedora via command line as well, and actually that’s what I prefer to do.

In regard to your low level machine:
If the stats package takes up a whole lot of memory for parsing logfiles and it doesn’t get what it needs the machine will be forced to use the swapfile even for essential system operations, which practically means the server will hang more or less. The only alternative, if increasing memory is out of question, would be using something different which gets along with less memory. Of course, using a diffent machine with more memory should work around the issue as well.

The mainboard’s chipset may be the most limiting factor here:
Intel’s 430 FX, VX and TX are limited to a max of 64mb, but should the mainboard be a 430 HX and you happen to have a suitable TAG RAM at hand you could stock up the memory to a max of 512 mb. Via Apollo Chipsets also support up to 512 mb, so the only hindrance could be insufficient spare parts

by: Administrator

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 11:46:43 +0000

I was struggling with an old Red Hat installation recently. I couldn’t figure out the RPM. I’m sure I could learn it easily. BUT, Debian was much easier to figure out. For the time being I’ll stick with that. But I’m sure I’ll try out more distros in time. My first systems were Red Hat, including the first I installed myself. A 100 MHz with about 40 MB RAM. It wasn’t that bad back then, but I’m not sure I even used X windows on it. I remember it’s main use was to crunch my site logs. I’d installed a specific statistics package (PERL based) on my webhost, but it made the server crash so I had to find an alternative. Still love those statistics, BTW. Maybe I should install it again on a zippier machine?

by: Olliver

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:30:45 +0000

Sorry, if this should turn out to be a silly suggestion and it has already been considered by you, but Fedora has, as I recall, support for Bokmål and Nynorsk (at least both locales are available with Gnome). The installer is quite user friendly and so are the configuration tools in user space and the network configuration works quite reliable. Additionally you have a vast pool of rpm packages available by 3rd parties suitable for Fedora, so there’s a lot of choice for tailoring a system that suits your needs most. Quite helpful as well: The unofficial Fedora FAQ. You may have to trim down the installation a bit and shutdown some services but then Fedora combined with Gnome should work pretty fluent even one weaker machines.