rustiguzzi wrote:Greetings. I arrived recently from Ubuntu. My Dell Dimension 2400 PC, bought new in 2004, ran Windows XP for about five years until, having retired, I decided to do what I'd wanted to do for a long time, which was try out linux. I'd picked up some Unix commands during my working years, which was a help, but choosing a distro was a problem. First choice was Mandriva, allegedly an easy one for beginners, but I found it hard to get the hang of and when it stuck in mid-upgrade I switched to Ubuntu on the advice of an expert (he has a black belt in sudo).

I found this more user-friendly, but after a while X would freeze, maybe once or twice a week calling for a restart using Alt.SysReq. This, it turns out, was a problem suffered by many users whose machines used the Intel i8xx chipsets and I must have tried every workaround, to no avail.

Nice to have you with us, rustiguzzi! I hope that antiX is behaving better for you than the other distributions. Chances are it might be possible to tweak the other systems to get them to work, but when you are"new" to something, the last thing you need is to have to become an expert when you are only just starting to become acquainted with them. Mandriva, and its previous version, Mandrake, have long been known for ease of use, and in fact, in 1998, the original Mandrake was one of the early Linux distributions that set its eye on ordinary consumers rather than developers alone, and it has been popular over the years. When Canonical introduced Ubuntu in the 2004-2005 time frame, it really affected Mandriva, which lost a lot of exposure and use to those who moved to Ubuntu.

None of that matters if it doesn't work cleanly for you.

I hope we can be helpful to you, should questions or concerns arise about antiX. We are not large in terms of the number of people who work on this, but we have one of the most civil and professional forums, and we are very interested in helping others out and making them comfortable and confident in their systems, so if we can help in any way, that's what this forum aims to do! Welcome!

Perhaps, Brian, I should have added that, apart from the excellent antiX FAQ, it was reading your Unix/Linux CV on page 1 of this thread, and the fact that you are still around and active on this forum since 2008, that convinced me to install antiX.

My own background as a service technician is mainly in hardware - software being what we tended to blame when we couldn't diagnose the problem . . .

rusti

@rusti: Thanks a lot! I really appreciate it. I did not know when I started participating in this forum. I do so some times more than others - usually more often as a release is being considered or when I have a bit more time available to drop by.

As far as how long I have used antiX - if my forum participation ONLY began in 2008, I was using antiX AT LEAST two years prior to that. I may have missed the first test build or two, but I found out about it early enough to use the first release, and I have definitely used every release... 6.5, 7.0, 7.2, 7.5, 8.0, 8.5, and 11.0, plus various base and core versions, so I can pretty much speak about any of them.

From the very beginning they have always been usable. I don't think there has been a single build (even test versions) that were not at least bootable. I can't even say that about MEPIS, although all but two of those have always booted and worked (and I helped the development team diagnose and fix the two issues when it wasn't), so we all work as a team here to make the best possible stuff get out there.

I am delighted that you have taken a look at antiX and that you like it.

I am sure that there are things in hardware that I can learn from you. Welcome not only to antiX, but to this wonderful group of people who participate in this forum. We'd be delighted to have you provide insights in the areas you are experienced in; who knows when that may benefit someone, and by all means, ask questions about stuff that is new to you. We try to be helpful and encouraging as much as we can! ---Brian

I've been trying Debian on and off since the late '90's, but needed MS-wares for practical, getting-things-done-for-work-related purposes until I noticed that Debian Lenny could actually do everything I needed around 3 years ago (including a VPN connection to my paid job site).

In August I read this intruiging comment about AntiX in the Debian forums:


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followed by this review, which made me think it's worth a try, since I was getting worried about the Debain default instalation getting to bloated and the review impied a fairly painless effort to at least get basic things like video and printing to work:


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Well, so far everything looks quite positive with AntiX, and maybe I'll eventually get all I now running on Debain Squeeze set up on AntiX the way I like to make it my primary home computing OS.

Good - I presume mostly anti-capitalist - work!

Nick

In case anyone wonders, that post above by non-existant userid"gurfler" was really by me before I temporarily had to change identity due to an inexplicable ban on gurfle.

All is good now, and glad to be here as your gurfled gurfler, the gurfle!

Howdy and Welcome gurfle. We are a small but friendly group. Have fun with AntiX. I know I do. __{{emoticon}}__

gurfle wrote:In case anyone wonders, that post above by non-existant userid"gurfler" was really by me before I temporarily had to change identity due to an inexplicable ban on gurfle.

All is good now, and glad to be here as your gurfled gurfler, the gurfle!

perhaps you were mistakenly banned because your username was thought to been a spammer or something. Good you got it sorted out now so welcome to Antix __{{emoticon}}__

Welcome, gurfle! Glad you made it here and things are all taken care of! Hope you find this a warm and helpful place to visit, and that antiX becomes a favorite system - as it is with so many of us!

Hello everybody,
I just googled for a lightweight distro, and I found it, I tried it and learnt a lot of useful things. Coming, like many others, from Ubuntu, AntiX is the best way to get in touch with something a little more flexible and"real". I really appreciate AntiX since 8.2 and I'm actually banging my head against the wall to upgrade my system to the last version this very moment.
Last but not least it is a pleasure to hear that the mastermind is anticapitalista."Fight capitalism, smash racism".

sweetsuicide wrote:Hello everybody,
I just googled for a lightweight distro, and I found it, I tried it and learnt a lot of useful things. Coming, like many others, from Ubuntu, AntiX is the best way to get in touch with something a little more flexible and"real". I really appreciate AntiX since 8.2 and I'm actually banging my head against the wall to upgrade my system to the last version this very moment.
Last but not least it is a pleasure to hear that the mastermind is anticapitalista."Fight capitalism, smash racism".

Glad you found this community and this distribution. Those of us here sure like it, and I welcome you among us!

hello!
I am still using ubuntu and was looking for an OS that can bring an old PII to life!

I just wanted to give antiX a go; to try out IceWM and Fluxbox. It mostly works on my old wreck of a computer (an abused Acer 9410), but there's just a few things that don't work quite right; mind you, that seems to be the case with any Linux OS. Oh well, fixing these little nuances helps you learn a bit more about how to modify and use things just the way you like.

My history with Linux begins with Lycoris Desktop LX. I was a windows only user and in the process of teaching myself how to build computers from components. An operating system I could deploy on multiple systems free was just what the doctor ordered. I was also experimenting with setting up home networks. I heard Linux was good for networking so I tried it out. Lycoris was billed as beginner friendly and indeed it was. There was an excelent comunity of user there too. After Lycoris kicked the bucket I went with Suse for a while. Then I tried Mepis and I've been hooked on it ever since.
Now I'm teaching myself how to repair laptops. I'm refurbishing this old Toshiba Tecra that I plan to give to one of the kids for the holidays. That led me naturaly to this lovely Mepis spin off and this friendly community.

My first linux distro was Fedora 7, as recommended by my thesis supervisor in university. When I was installing it on my second machine I was watching it install masses and masses of crap I knew I would never need. The install disk was 4GB!

Went to ubuntu as recommended by Google searches. Was happy for a while, but still always had the feeling that I was getting a heck of a lot more than I was asking for. So I looked for something lighter.

That pretty much puts me where I am now. I use Arch as my primary distro, and Antix on my laptop. I also put antix on any old computers I see people throwing out, and then give them away to people who do nothing other than surf the web.

Antix is the Ultimate in Linux distros. Antix would be my"number one" if only it had a 64-bit flavour. Any chance that might come out soon?

Now I'm rambling, but just if I may conclude. When I retire, I'm gonna hang out at Future Shop (a store I particularly loathe) and find old people who say they need a"new" computer. Then I'll give them an antix cd, tell them the three-click sequence needed to install it, and ensure them that their"old" computer will work ten times better than it did the day they bought it.

Yeah, I know I could make better use of my time, but that'll be my way of giving back to antix to make up for my utter uselessness in this forum.

Edit: Maybe sending more linuxally inept people like me to this community would be more of a burden than anything?

Maybe sending more linuxally inept people like me to this community

__{{emoticon}}__ you should have seen my first posts


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