[Nottingham] Newbie Questions

[Siddle, James]

Hi,

Thought you might be interested in how my first installation went - in the
end I decided on SuSE Linux 8.1 from PC World after reading a review in
Linux Format that gave it 9/10. Thankfully PC World had SuSE, Red Hat, and
Mandrake in stock. 

The installation was pretty good - a bit confusing at first but the default
choices were mostly OK. The only real problem I had was with my modem - I
found out that I have a Winmodem, hardware which is not supported by Linux
by default. After quite a lot of hunting around online, I managed to find a
driver for the chipset on my modem and got it configured.

On the whole I'm really impressed - within a day I managed to get virtually
all my data & apps onto Linux, and can now use it instead of Windows XP. The
only things I couldn't migrate are my MP3 player which is not supported, and
games - though I'm surprised at the number of games that are available for
Linux, hopefully the best games will be ported by die-hard fans (e.g Civ 3
which should definitely be Linux'ed). It's also interesting to note that
certain software houses are very pro-linux, e.g. iD software who are
releasing a Linux version of Doom3 at the same time as the other platforms.

On the whole a great experience, and it's great to not have to use Windows -
not a bad platform in itself, it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth . . .

Cheers,

Jim

P.S. Thanks for the advice!

James Siddle BSc(Hons) MBCS
Software Engineer
Contract Engineering

Telephone: +44 (0) 115 943 2313
Fax: +44 (0) 115 943 4969
E-mail: james.siddle@siemens.com <mailto:james.siddle@siemens.com> 

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		-----Original Message-----
		From:	Joe [mailto:joe@maedhros.org.uk]
		Sent:	28 November 2002 15:31
		To:	nottingham@mailman.lug.org.uk
		Subject:	Re: [Nottingham] Newbie Questions


		> Finally, is there anywhere in the Nottingham area that
sells the boxed
		> distros? The Red Hat ISOs (for example) seem to be
prohibitively large!

		I won't bother too much with the preferences, I would say
that any of SuSE (I 
		quite like it), Red Hat (not used it since err, something
ages ago) or Mandrake 
		(I like this too) would be good, as differences are not that
great for a newbie.

		Anyway, all of this is a very long-winded way of saying that
when I bought a 
		boxed set of SuSE 6.4 it was from Waterstones. It was in
Exeter a couple of 
		years ago, but I would think that the second biggest
waterstones in the country 
		would probably have something in stock.

		Regards,

		Joe

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