Dear All,
I will reply if I may to a few of your comments:-
Richard Wrote
>
>Can you try not to use HTML to post please. Not many people do use that feature to post to discussion lists.
I don't know what you mean, I just type it into MS Outlook and press send! As far as I was concerned it was just a normal E-mail. I'm sorry if this causes problems. I'm posting this from Windows because my Linux setup seems unable to connect to the net.
Barrie J. Bremner wrote
>
> The only problem for Windows users is WinModems - not real modems at all -
>most of the work is done by Windows, and hence these 'modems' cannot be used with
>other OS, whether it be BeOS, Linux or Mac.
Yes I know about Winmodems, my modem is an external 56k serial modem. At one point I had it ringing up and connecting to the ISP they negotiated for a few seconds and then broke the connection. I managed to find a log file somewhere (I might even be able to find it again given enough time) which contained a log of the login process. It said 'Terminated by Remote Host' so I guess there was a problem with the authentification. Compuserve is not particularly Linux friendly.
Anyway after that I tried installing SuSE 7.0 from the front of a magazine and after that everything stopped working. I havent been able to get things working to the extent of being able to dial up again yet, but then I am busy and I haven't devoted much time to it yet.
>
> The painful way is to buy it. - I bought RH6.0 - and the manuals were not a great deal of use - online support,
> from http://www.linuxdoc.org/ and user groups like ShefLUG are more useful. You can most distros from
> http://www.linux-emporium.co.uk/ - prices range from £2 up.
>
> You could even download the disk images, and burn them to CD, if you have a fast enough connection.
> I got RH7 this way. Probably not the best way to start with Linux tho. If you have a friend with a CD burner
> and a copy of a distro, they can always run you off a copy.
I have no problem with buying it, I've already bought SuSE and Mandrake. Even if I were to buy every distro available just to see what they were like I would still have spent less than if I were to update to the latest MS Windows & Office & Visual C++. I've just got hold of a copy of Red Hat 6.2 maybe it will be a little better but I will not hold my breath.
Even though they are free software they still seem to be commercially driven and so there is a temptation to put as many software packages as possible on the disks. Never mind the quality feel the width, is there a non commercial distro out there which only uses proven software?
I have a CD burner in my system, it works fine under Windows but I have not yet got it to work under Linux, the main reason for this is that this (Linux) is all new to me and there is too much information to take in all at once, nothing works the same as I am used to! I'm still busy assimilating it all.
Craig wrote
>
>Anyway, rock solid distros. Basically, Debian or anything based on it. The easiest debian derivitive I have yet
>found is Storm Linux. Corel say theirs is easiest, but it crashes more times than, erm, a thing which crashes. A
>lot.
>
>Anyway, Storms yer man for Debian style stability and ease of use, and Debian for raw out and out rock solid
>dependability. I use SuSE 7.0, cos I got it fer nowt.
>
>Let me know how you get on,
>
I've not seen a Debian distro or a Storm distro in the shops. Is there anywhere local I can get it or am I going to have to send away for it?
Anyway thats enough for now.
Regards
Paul J. Miller