Request for advice...

[uncleubb]

I had previously set up SEQ on Mandrake 8.1 and it was working quite nicely. Unfortunately, due to my lack of Linux knowledge prior to going through the whole process, I set up Linux poorly (didn't allocate space on the HD properly).

So, long story short, I am going to start from scratch. I was hoping that some of you could give me advice on what version of Linux I should use. Some posts seem to indicate that RedHat is rather tight and that Madrake is a bit of a hog.

I'd really appreciate some input before I begin the process once again. I would appreciate it if you consider that I am not a programmer by any means, but that I am relatively sophisticated when it comes to computers.

-uu

[baelang]

debian is a good choice.

[uncleubb]

Do you use the internet installation method or download the distro CDs?

Said another way, do you know if the internet install works as advertised?

[Cryonic]

Downloaded the 3 floppies, booted a machine off them and did the rest of the install from ftp from debian. Worked as advertised for me. Of course I had the advantage of the schools 200Mb/s connection.

[fryfrog]

thats a pretty fast connection, do they run fiber to every station to get those kind of speeds? ;p

200 megabytes / second isn't actually possible on a 100mbit full duplex network. thats between 12 and 24 megabytes / second just with quick math, reality would put that somewhere around 3.5mb/sec. i'm not actually sure if normal fiber (1000mbit) can do 200mb / sec ;p

anyway, i'm just being a slut.

gentoo linux is also a good alternative. i would say its pretty similar to bsd and debian in its good package system, but its entirely source based. similar idea, 16mb iso and you get the rest off the net as you see fit/need. you actually get it all going by hand though (create partitions with fdisk, format them, mount them someplace, extract a very very basic .tar.gz file, compile some stuff, compile some more stuff...). takes a while to get setup, but i (and a LOT of other seq devs and users alike) have found it to be very nice. the install documentation is TOP notch, and you will learn more following it (maybe 3 or 4 times, i know i had to restart at least twice!) than you would have though :)

www.gentoo.org

**edit: forgot to mention, you also compile the compiler and the kernel during install. you can skip some of the stuff (stage 1 = lots and lots and lots of compiling, stage 3 = a fair amount less compiling).

[Cryonic]

I said 200Mb/s not 200MB/s. That is Mega-bit/s.

You are right that you can't quite get that at a workstation.... But it is fun to be able to hog a good piece of it for a few hours. I think I was the top ftp talker for most of that day, but the boss didn't complain when I showed him that it was all work related bandwidth and that I wasn't just messing around downloading movies/porn/music/whatever.