eriefisher wrote:

mariel77 wrote: @ eriefisher: Yes, I remember that too, but you've always known more than I have; I really appreciate all your advice here and on Mepislovers.

I think we have both done our fare share of learning. Don't sell yourself short mariel77, you do just fine.

I agree, I have seen PLENTY of good mariel77 suggestions over at MEPIS Lovers especially. We all have something worthwhile to contribute in this community, so keep doing what you are doing!

Thanks masinick and eriefisher! There are lots of great contributers!

I am Linux user since Sep 2004 when I bought HP COMPAQ Presario 2500 series Laptop which arrived with Mandrake Linux 9.1 CDs. The CDs had HP Logo and were tailor made for the Laptop, The distributor had clearly told that I can install it but should not expect any support from HP. I could install without any difficulty and started using it and everything worked out of the box.

I changed to Ubuntu since 5.04 and depended on shipit for CDs of new versions.

The Broadband became cheaper in my city in Aug 2008 and I started downloading various distributions since the mainstream distributions (with KDE or Gnome) were heavy for my machine which originally had only 128 MB and I could add another 256 MB to run Ubuntu 6.06.

I never had patience to configure IceWM or Fluxbox, therefore, I was happy when LXDE arrived.

I discovered antiX on Distrowatch and wanted to see this distribution giving IceWM by default.

Well, I am very happy and impressed with built-in IceWM configurations, antiX ControlCenter and installer.

I had installed Debian Lenny Beta 2 on one partition in Oct 08 which was not updated. Instead of applying the tons of updates I have replaced it with antiX-MB Intifada installation.

I thank the developers for such a nice distribution suitable for old (also new) hardware.

kagashe

Welcome to antiX, kagashe! Hope you enjoy it and I hope you visit the forum often and make many new friends here!

How did I get here? Why I clicked on the bookmarked link in Iceweasel on my New AntiX install. New to computers. Just your average Tattoed Outlaw Biker Linux User. Never got into Windows much. Use it for TTS software for tuning motorcycles and for SERT software. Other than that I use Linux for everything else. Wife bought me my first IBM 390 with Win 98. Got the bug and Bought me a IBM M41 Tower with Empty Hardrive. First popped my cherry with Open Suse 9. Stayed lost for awhile and it made me buy a Open Suse Book. It was cool for awhile. Then I installed Mepis 6.5 next. Liked what I saw. Been a Mepis lovers forum member ever since, but don't post much. Now a couple years later I own
1. Ibm m41--Mepis 7--40 gig hd , 1 gig ram, 1.8hgz Pentium M
2. ibm m57-- (main box now) Ubuntu 8.04--130 gig hd, 2 gig ram, 1.8 ghz dual core intel
3. Amrel Rt 686 Laptop-- (Hot swap Hardrives, 3 of them) --900 mhz, 384 mb ram
a. Puppy Dingo/Nimblex dualboot --20 gig hd
b. Xubuntu 8.10 --6 gig hd
c. WindowsXP/Windows 2000 pro/AntiX 7.5---100 gig hardrive
4. ibm t23---- Tried Zenwalk, but I'm too unsavvy for Slackware I guess. So Xubuntu 8.10/ AntiX there to. --60 gig hardrive, 256 mb ram, 1.6 ghz pentium
I'm not a programmer, or real tech savvy, but I'm self taught linux user __{{emoticon}}__ and all my boxes work like they should. (Laptops work wireless,sound,flash,java,etc.....) I registered and am typing out this post with the Amrel Laptop right now using a Dlink WNA 1330 Wireless G PCMCIA Cardbus with Atheros Chipset using AntiX 7,5.

Running Puppy has made the Icewm transition a little easier. I'm spoiled by Gnome,KDE, and XFCE. Still baby stepping mostly though. No worries cuz I'll Learn in my own sweet time.

I think Linux has made me a lot smarter when it comes to computers and now I feel comfortable taking chances on customizing my computer gear like I do my Motorcycles.
Run my own Bike shop here in Pecos Texas. And thats about it foks. So Howdy and Happy Trails to ya. __{{emoticon}}__

Good story, rokytnji, and welcome to the antiX forum and to using antiX. Thanks for telling us about your experiences.

Just came across this thread...better late than never.

Many years ago my grandparents came from Sweden to the U.S. and homesteaded in the state of Idaho...ok, ok....I will skip ahead a little __{{emoticon}}__

My first computer was a Commodore 128. After that a huge"laptop" that ran one of the first versions of windows. I've been through win95, win98, winXP. Always hated the inefficency and bloat of windows so started playing with"98lite" in the win98 days. Winlite stripped a number of features from windows and made it leaner and faster. It allowed stripping IE from windows and got me started with Firefox and other alternative browsers early on.

My first expensive computer lost the motherboard within a few months. The company warranted the board and sent a new one in the mail telling me it was easy to replace. Once I got started tearing computers apart I never looked back. I have no idea how many computers I've built from scratch and friends and neighbors soon started giving me their old ones when they upgraded. I would salvage parts and rebuild working computers to give away to friends & family that didn't have a computer or couldn't afford one.

Lately I've been doing the same with Shuttle computers. I like the small size and efficiency of the little buggers. This current computer is a Shuttle I bought on ebay for about $60 (P4 3.2). Just dropped in an older SATA hard drive, a stick of memory and off and running. Quiet, fast, and about the size of a toaster.

I loved the idea of linux and tried ubuntu for several years but was never able to get all the problems fixed. Tried again about a year later with Mepis and had my first working linux system. I liked it a lot but it seemed slow on my older box. Tried antiX Spartacus and never looked back. Rock On!! Efficient and fast.

The amount of knowledge in the antiX community was staggering and daunting for a newbie like me. I wanted to contribute and help with the meager skills I did have....don't like taking without giving back. Found a little niche in the graphics area where I've been able to contribute as I continue to learn.

impuwat, that is a great story. With the outstanding graphics that you, ou812 (John), and sakasa have contributed, I never would have guessed that you consider yourself in learning mode! That's one area where the three of you have me beat, hands down, and I've really valued all of the contributions that you have made!

Just to follow along the story line of those old computers like the Commodore"Pet" computers, the Tandy (Radio Shack) TRS-80, the Sinclair, etc., the first small computers that I got to use were the Heathkit H8 and the Heathkit H11. The H8 was a small microcomputer based on the Intel 8080. The H11 was a similar model based on the DEC Micro PDP-11.

Actually, I got to use an Intel 8080 based Electrical Engineering Lab system even a few years earlier, but it was larger and not PC in size. I also used the PDP-8, but it was minicomputer in size, plus the PDP-11, much bigger.

My computing days went way before that, though. The first computer I used was a timesharing minicomputer from the Macomb County Intermediate School District (on Garfield Road in Clinton Township). I accessed the system, running Dartmouth BASIC from Fraser High School in Fraser, Michigan in 1973, after visiting the GM Research Laboratories in Warren, Michigan on a field trip with my Algebra/Trigonometry class. That's what hooked me on computers in the first place. GM was my first professional employer back in 1979.

I started with Mandrake 6 but never could get it running. Mandrake 7, 8, and 9 were successful, though, but somewhere around the change to Mandriva it went to the pits. I also liked Xandros until they went commercial. Then I used Kubuntu until 8.04 which I never could get comfortable with; also, I like a distro which can run entirely from the GUI, as the best way to compete with Redmond's worst, and that argument wasn't popular on the 'buntu forums. I tried Mint 4 and really liked it. Mandriva 2008 and 2008.1 were good, but 2009 continually broke on updates. Mandriva's performance is too erratic from version to version. Foresight and Sidux were too much trouble to maintain and they kept breaking. Mint 5 is very nice on my laptop, and"soon" I'll update it to v6. On my tower, I'm looking for a good base distro in which to run virtual machines of all kinds; I need a base which doesn't eat up my RAM so I can run some of the VMs side-by-side. DSL and I didn't get along, but I keep trying it again :^>. I had tried Mepis 7, which is very nice but too big for my purpose. I got the Antix DVD in LinuxFormatMag, but it wouldn't install (GUI wouldn't work). However, I kept reading about it and finally downloaded it from the repo and burned and installed successfully.

I'm not sure yet, but I think Antix will work well as a base for my virtual experiments. Being the base version, it doesn't have some or the amenities and is clunky sometimes to configure; but the config menus are pretty easy to work with. It doesn't seem to use more than @ 96 MB Ram. I deleted Iceweasel and links2and replaced them with Opera and Dillo2. I didn't like rox-filer at first, but finally got used to it. Leafpad is too limited and I mostly use Medit (tabbed editor). And I've revised the right-click menu to better serve me as an app launcher. Fluxbox seems to be about as flexible as KDE... you just have to find out where the menus and configs are ^_^. Gotta READ patiently those wikis and forum posts!!!

My first real experiment will be to load Antix into a VM running on Antix, and see what it takes to break it :^). There are about 25 other distros I want to try side-by-side in virtual machines.

Masinick, I had a used H8 somewhen back there; I remember the Atari 400 was much easier!! The 800XL was hog heaven! And there are a bunch of 5-inch single-sided floppies still in my junkbox, all with pin holes in them.

In faith, Dave
Viva Texas
dave@christos.cjb.net" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false, dpeirce@christian.net" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false

dpeirce, aka Dave, glad to hear that you try out a lot of different systems and that you have remained with Linux software, though it is a bit disconcerting that you have run into issues with many different distributions. I've been fortunate to have many good experiences, even with some of the ones that have given you trouble. The only distro that I've found erratic from time to time has been the Mandrake releases just before the name change to Mandriva, but even for these, the issues were relatively minor; I could still do the routine browsing kind of stuff.

Only one distribution has consistently been a bother to me, and it frustrates me, because I actually wish them well, and that is Novell and their SUSE distributions. Only SLED, their enterprise desktop version, has consistently worked well for me, and I only have been able to get one version of it because of the cost of the enterprise editions, but I did get one version free and it was excellent. OpenSUSE 11.0 was the biggest frustration of all for me; it was supposed to be markedly better. Instead, it has been the only distribution that did not work exceptionally well on my Lenovo 3000 Y410 laptop, my only system that I purchased new.

The sidux, antiX, and SimplyMEPIS distributions have become my trilogy of systems for cutting edge, fast and lean, and simple, stable desktop systems respectively. I have absolutely no issues with any of them. I actually use sidux as my every day base system. I use antiX quite often, and spent a lot of time with it today, fixing up my latest antiX M8.0 instance so it is similar to what I had on my most recent M7.5 version that I loved so much. Now that I've got it tailored to my specific interests, as usual it is outstanding.

I picked up an edition of Linux Pro that has a DVD for openSUSE 11.1, and I am contemplating whether I want to give it"another chance" or not. It is unlikely to become a favorite of mine, but I just want to give it a chance to"redeem itself" from my dog house.

Sidux was nice (exciting!), but it kept breaking itself on updates even using the smxi script; reinstalling so much was a pain. And I had to update sometimes 3 times in one day. They move FAST over there. But I want a bleeding edge rollling release distro, and sidux seemed very good at that. Once I get some virtual machines going, I plan to give sidux another shot. I'll always have a copy of the running system as backup, so my problem with reinstalling so often will be much less since all I have to do is rename the copy and boot it. I plan to try the same thing with Mepis and Antix, and several others. Maybe with Mandriva cooker, which I also found broke a lot.

I tried OpenSuSE briefly; it was a while back and I can't remember why I didn't like it :^) -- something about its file system, I think. But distros change and it might be fine now. That's the benefit I'm hoping for by running things in virtual machines. I can try them more easily than installing each one separately.

In faith, Dave
Viva Texas

dpeirce, I think you got a bit confused about updates, you don't update every time sid has new packages, which is every 12 hours or so, you update the system every 2 weeks or month or so.

You can wait even longer than that, 2 months is usually fine. Except for times like this, when sid is very volatile, I rarely dist-upgrade my systems more than once a month or so, there's no need.

The trick is to NOT use the kernel metapackages, since a new kernel can make old hardware that was working fail, just install one or two kernels per kernel major number cycle, 2.6.28 for example, then leave things alone.

Sid is unstable, and systems will fail, but if you were dist-upgrading several times a day, you were simply radically raising your odds of hitting a momentary failure with almost no end benefit to yourself at all.

I think you got sort of the wrong idea about how to run sidux, the devs and core users often dist-upgrade constantly, but that's not really related to anything normal users should be doing on an ongoing basis.

Personally, I think the way forward for most users is the way debian is creating, a rolling release Debian Testing, with security fixes. Sid is unstable, and will break for you one day, and then you'll have to fix it, no doubt about that at all over time. But with care and using smxi, you'd be amazed at the types of people who are able to run it, but overall, it's my belief that sid should be largely left to the people who enjoy tweaking things and Testing should be the base for a real user desktop.

Oh, I knew I didn't need to update daily in Sidux. My reason for trying it, though, was to have an absolutely bleeding edge up-to-the minute Linux. I remember reading in their forum about people who did this and tried it for meyself. But, even consulting their notifications as to when to update and when not, it broke frequently. It was fun to try, but it kept me too busy so that other interests slid.

I'm thinking like you... a rolling release system based on testing with occasional forays into unstable for special programs would be more practical and would avoid having to reinstall every 6 months. I'm thinking Antix would be a good one to try this on. I'm curious, though, if over time such a system might get loaded up with orphans or obsolete configs and need to be reinstalled just to reorganize. Dunno.

But it was fun trying for a while to be up to the very minute... if not to the very second! __{{emoticon}}__

In faith, Dave
Viva Texas

rm -r -f /usr/bin/laden

dpeirce, don't forget that antiX comes with the smxi scripts which includes the option to clean up orphans, cruft etc.
antiX is far from a perfect rolling release, but it is pretty close IMO. I still have a partition that I have upgraded from antiX-M7.01 to present using sid repos, and it works well.
In fact time to dist-upgrade it __{{emoticon}}__

i update once a day in sid. when nothing is removed i dist-upgrade. if apt-get wants to remove something i use smxi, if smxi can't handle it i leave be. and wait to things to calm down. all works for me, but from what i saw antix has some apps that brake rarely and we don't have kde or other desktop environment that has lots of dependencies to brake. also on some programs sid seams to update them very slow, like 1 month after release, so i could use more unstable __{{emoticon}}__ , sometimes i get apps from experimental. over all i like antix with sid repos.