Suse Or Gentoo?

Im installing my first linux distro, and I know how to install it, but which is better? Neither Kubuntu or Ubuntu work on my machine, so dont suggest them. If you have another, feel free to share it.

 

I recommend SUSE for your first install. I personally prefer Gentoo, but you will get a lot more out of SUSE if your Linux experience is limited.

These two distributions really are at the opposite ends of the spectrum, Gentoo is a very advanced distro with a very long and complicated install process, since almost every aspect of Gentoo is configurable, wheras SUSE is a very 'modern' distro and (at least compared with Gentoo) is more Windowsy in feel (not in performance obviously). If you want lots of KDE eye-candy then the new OpenSUSE is full of it by the way - I'm sure most people you talk to wouldn't believe that it's a free operating system if they looked at that desktop. (For instance, I talked to someone the other day who didn't realise that Linux had a GUI ^_^ ).

My advice would be: use SUSE for a good period of time (say half a year) and then if you find that you end up spending more time with the command line tools than graphical ones, compiling software instead of installing packages and you like editing config files by hand and that sort of stuff, then switch to Gentoo.

Also Fedora is very good and Debian (although I haven't tried it) is supposedly very convenient because of its huge package system.

 

Gentoo, I heard, is a little more advanced.

I would recommend SuSe as well.

 

Okay. I installed SuSE successfully, however, when I login, I dont get a desktop. I chose KDE, was I supposed to choose GNOME?

 

SUSE default is KDE (and it generally looks better in KDE) but you can choose either. What do you get when you login? Is there a terminal or anything?

 

Yeah, it's Konsole, I can't 'startx' because I dont have enough RAM. I thought I posted this. Once I get my new system (soon) I'll try it again.

 

In the meantime you could always try an eariler version of suse with lower systems requirements.

 

I installed slackware. I'm having a problem with slackware though, no sound.

 

Check your soundcard is linux friendly.

Then do some troubleshooting!

 

I donno, it's onboard, 8 years old, so I doubt it. It's realtek AC97.

 

Some places to start with:

It ought to work

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downlo...3&GetDown=false

and make sure you have alsamixer installed:

http://www.alsa-project.org/

 

Okay, thanks. Question, how the hell do I install them?

 

How far did you get?

Download version 4.50d (other) into /tmp, then open a terminal and type:

then open the readme.txt file with an editor and follow the instructions on that

although it should just be a matter of running the install file

If you have any more problems then you might as well PM me because this has long ceased to be a thread about SUSE or Gentoo