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Venturing into the land of Linux


Tarun

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Over the past few days I've been messing with my home server and trying different Linux distros.

I've gone from:
Ubuntu > Xubuntu > Arch (trying to set it up but realizing I'm not ready for it yet) > Xubuntu > Manjaro

So far, Manjaro XFCE has been to my liking. Fewer issues and things have been much easier to set up on that old machine. Just a shame the hardware is so old. P4 3.4GHz, 3GB RAM, and recently had to downgrade the PSU and graphics card (128MB card because the one before - a 512MB - had the fan go bad and make a lot of noise despite trying to fix it) in order to have a working, silent server PC once more.

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For the most part, everything has been very smooth. The only hiccups I'm having (aside from learning all the new commands) is some packages aren't necessarily working that well.

 

Example: I went to install an IRC server, Inspircd. Unfortunately it had some issues and upon the suggestion from cluberti, I decided to try another IRC server. Time to see how that goes over the next few days.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Just my luck. A short while after starting this... My home server computer no longer boots.

  • Processor Intel® Pentium® 4 CPU 3.40GHz (2 CPUs), ~3.4GHz
  • Memory 3072MB RAM
  • Hard Drive 320 GB Western Digital
  • Motherboard Intel
  • Video Card ATI x600 128 MB
  • Sound Card Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS

I stripped everything out except for two fans, power button, motherboard and cpu power and it did not boot. :

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  • 3 weeks later...

Did you ever get this to boot again?

 

Looking at your stripped-down list I've previously had motherboards fail to boot without a HD attached. I've also had motherboards fail to boot without a video card attached.

 

What put you off Ubuntu and on to Manjaro?

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I'll have to try it with a graphics card in (it has onboard yet that was disabled on the BIOS, shouldn't matter though) but it wouldn't POST. No beeps or anything. A little red light stayed on the entire time on the motherboard.

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Red light? A number of motherboards (as you may already know) have a small LED which glows to show that standby power is applied (i.e. that the power supply is plugged-in to the mains, basically) but all the ones I've seen to-date have been green, not red.

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  • 2 years later...
  • 5 months later...
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I actually just burned the last Antergos x86 distro last night, and also the 2016-11-01 Arch dual (x64 and x86 in one ISO) distro. @Synapse has both Arch and Windows 10 on his system as dual boot. So this will be something I'll try in the future.

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16 hours ago, Tarun said:

I actually just burned the last Antergos x86 distro last night, and also the 2016-11-01 Arch dual (x64 and x86 in one ISO) distro. @Synapse has both Arch and Windows 10 on his system as dual boot. So this will be something I'll try in the future.

Thats interesting, dual boot would be decent. What gives Antergos the edge over more traditional ubuntu-type options? And can you recommend any lightweight alternatives to Lubuntu?

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Honestly, I tried a few Ubuntu flavors and found them to be trash.

I dropped Manjaro for Antergos because Manjaro had some poor security practices (I'll have to find the links) which was enough to turn me away.

Antergos is based on Arch, but with a UI to help you get started. For someone who is learning, a UI can be useful when you want to try and get somewhere until you begin learning terminal commands.

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Linux Mint also has an Xfce edition, for one lightweight alternative.

Antergos does look interesting. I looked at Arch, decided it was too much effort, but it sounds like Antergos overcomes that. Might try that out, too. Nice thing about Linux, you don't have to install it to try it out.

A big advantage for Arch and its variants is that it's rolling release, it updates continuously. You never have to install a new version to be up to date, which saves a lot of time and effort.

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