Linux Install Fest
When: Saturday, November 1, 2008 10:00AM - 4:00PM
Where: Micrecycle, 98 College Ave. (off Goodman Ave. across from Village Gate)
We will supply Linux install CDs and instructions. You will supply a *working* PC with at least a 10GB disk partition that can be reformatted, 256MB RAM and a CD drive. An ethernet card will be needed if you want the latest updates. We will not have time to debug hardware problems or repartition disks with valuable data on them.
We will have install disks available for Fedora and Ubuntu Linux. Others may be bringing install disks for other distros as well. Please review the release notes and supported hardware for these distros to determine if your hardware is suitable. Old slow hardware will be slow for the install and for running after the install. Oddball hardware might not be supported. Over the years many manufacturers have made cheap hardware that is not quite standard and "fixed" it by writing a custom device driver for Windows only. Other hardware manufacturers keep the details of their cards a closely guarded secret making it very difficult to write good drivers. So check the video and ethernet cards you are going to use against the supported hardware lists.
We recommend at least a 1GHz Intel processor, 256MB RAM, and 10GB of disk space. You can partition the disk and do a dual boot system but a better solution is to use virtual machines, expecially if you are just experimenting with a new OS and aren't sure you want to keep it. On Windows XP or Vista you can get VirtualPC from Microsoft. On Linux you can use several different virtual system packages. I personall have had good luck running VirtualBox from Sun.
Here are links to the distributions where you can find information about supported hardware:
And here is an interesting article comparing the latest Ubuntu Linux with the latest Mac OS X
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon vs Mac OSX Leopard
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