new distro what should i do

ive been running slackware 11 since it came out i like it, but idont know how to burd cd dvds and stuff and sometimes when i play music it messes up my runescape(yes i play runescape) can someone help me figure out how to custumize it. but about the new distro ive been thinking about gentoo it seems more friendly even though slack is off the hook when are they gonna make 12? well my question what gentoo do i install??? alpha? x86? im not sure. please tell me as much as you can to help me. (im not really noob to linux i just dont know complex stuff yet but im tryng and google take forever to find the right answer so i came back here i havent loged for a long time)

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well my question what gentoo do i install??? alpha? x86? im not sure. please tell me as much as you can to help me. (im not really noob to linux i just dont know complex stuff yet

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Well, perhaps you should check out a bit about hardware architecture as well as messing with operating systems? "alpha" and "x86" are processor architectures :D

Alpha is 64 bit whereas x86 can be 32 or 64 bit these days. IIRC Gentoo was pretty much developed as a platform specific distro, so I would recommend looking for one that suits your hardware ;)

i got an atholon xp processor what else do i need to know?

Well,

If it is the "classic" AMD Athlon XP then it will be 32-bit. On the other hand, if it is an AMD Athlon 64 it is (as implied) a 64 bit processor.

What I cannot help you with is Gentoo :( I would advise looking at the x86 variants, as the AMD processor is x86 architecture no matter whether it is 32bit or 64bit.

I don't know if a 64 bit environment will support 32 bit processing that well........ I certainly wouldn't go Alpha, as I think that may be difficult ;) (it is pure 64 bit .............. or it was?)

Just giving you a few things to check out before you proceed.

cool cool i think ive fixed my problem on slack by changing kde to xfce but i still wanna try out gentoo or other distros not just be a monodistro person if i have a separte hard drive to recover my windoze OS and i delete my windoze os and boot slack/gen instead of slack/win and for somereason want windoze back (not likely) i could delete gen or slack and use the separte recovery hardrive to put windoze back right??

It might work just fine pal, but I don't think that it is worth the risk. You see the problem is that Billy Windoze thinks it is the only OS in town :D Make sure that it boots from your first HDD, preferably your "C:\" partition.

Then load whatever distros you like on the second drive as your bootloader in Linux should support this.

Anyways, what the hell do you want 2 distros on your primary drive for?

What I see mostly is a configuration something like:

HDD #1: Windows, Linux distro #1
HDD #2: Linux distro #2 ~ #howevermany :p

I am assuming that this is just experimentation, and that you have no pressing reason to have two Linux distros on your primary HDD?

My next alternative strategy is to burn an ISO/Mirror to a DVD.

The big problem that I see with that, and your suggestion, is that Billy Windoze gets updates every month, so you really do need it online and available for monthly updates (patch Tuesday) if you want to keep it.

Just a few more thoughts :)

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Originally Posted by k-rad

ive been running slackware 11 since it came out i like it, but idont know how to burd cd dvds and stuff

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if you want to do that from the command-line there is a program called cdrecord, just pop up the man page and look at that, i think that's not reason enough to leave slackware if you like it.

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Originally Posted by k-rad

but about the new distro ive been thinking about gentoo it seems more friendly even though slack is off the hook when are they gonna make 12?

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gentoo is -not- easier than slackware, if you're frustrated about the little issues you're experiencing in slackware,
what are you gonna say about what you're gonna face in gentoo?
If you know what you are doing, then go ahead and don't come back in a year :D j/k
I don't want to scare you off, but gentoo is for developers and such, and not for someone who wants something easy. ;)

If you used slackware and liked it, i'd say stick with it. just google for slackbook, and slackware essentials for a start.
About other distro's that are easy there are a lot of them; SuSE, fedora, mandriva, ubuntu etc.
these are easy distros that get you going, and save you time.

If you want windoze(for games), i suggest getting a separate drive for it if you afford it, because you don't know if it will mess up your MBR.

I hear Ubuntu's support for windows apps is getting pretty solid. I also herd that mandriva supports the new c&c. Hopefully I can find a distro that can play BF2142 as thats the only thing holding me back to windows.

Version 7 of Ubuntu is impressive but not free from quirks. I've discovered several along the way that I've been able to band-aide on my own but the casual user or Linux hobbyist will certainly sit there steamed over issues like these.

If you want an easy way to play with distros, load up Ubuntu, then get Automatix installed. Once you do that, DL the VMWare package and you can add in a bunch of distros (free of course) and play away.

It's quite funny having windows as a guest OS rather than the host OS. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

:)

--TH13