Windows 7

[pauld]

I love it, there's not many of us freedom fighters around.

Have you tried kde 4.3.2 Paul? It's sweet and kicks gnomes ass for speed, functionality and beauty. If you want to stick with the buntus then give kubuntu 9.1 a test. It's a really good qt distro now. Right up there with suse and mandriva now in my opinion.

Stop it. My missus will slay me if I do another "I'm just going to have a quick play with .... " installfest. Once I unlock that door, that way madness lies

[Melksham Red]

You aint wrong. It opens the door to rampant distro hopping and a fucked hdd. My missus got fucking sick of it too. I've promised her kubuntu is the last on her laptop. Good job i've still got my old workhorse desktop in the spare room to play with.  

[pauld]

I'm already on dangerous ground - just got the missus to accept the mythbox under the telly and now trying out the sexy new 0.22 on it. Providing hours of faffing-related entertainment for me (much more entertaining than actually watching anything on it) and sighs of "But what's wrong with the old one, it works fine?". Works fine? I ask you! Since when was THAT the point?

[Melksham Red]

Works fine doesn't matter and isn't the point. It's the getting it to work fine bit where all the fun is to be had!

Fuck I need to get out!

[jonny72]

I'd love to be able to call you both sad, but I'm in no position to do so. I've got a pile of Cisco routers and switches that make up my "home lab" and am about to add a Dell server to it so I can run VMWare, Windows Server and Exchange as well. And that's what I do for pleasure in my spare time.

Seeing as you're both Linux guru's.... I want to be able to run a number of virtual operating systems on the server to add some virtual users to my network, is there a decent small footprint Linux OS that would give me basic features like email (with Exchange support if possible) and a web browser? The lower the memory and cpu requirements the better.

[Melksham Red]

How small a footprint are you after?

[pauld]

MR's probably better placed to advise on small-footprint distros. Not really something I've got direct experience of - the usual suspects such as Puppy, DSL etc spring to mind but without having tried any of them myself, I'm loathe to make a recommendation. As MR says, a lot will depend on what you mean by "small footprint"

On the Exchange support front, Evolution is, theoretically, an "Outlook-alike" mail client for Gnome which does have Exchange support (not sure how full-featured it is) and IIRC Kontact also does for KDE. Whether either of those would fit in your definition of "small footprint" may depend on how small is small

[Melksham Red]

Compared to Windows 7 / Vista or MAC then all linux distros can be considered "small footprint"

You want something stable as well as light. I'd recommend Debian if you're up for a bit of learning.

www.debian.org

However, as Paul states there's plenty of tiny distros out there:- puppy, slitaz, tinycore, DSL, tinyme, slax to name a few.

www.distrowatch.com is probably the best resource for info on linux distros for newbies. Have a look at the distros i've mentioned.

[jonny72]

By small footprint I really mean the lower the memory requirements the better, as the memory will be limited on the server and the smaller each VM requires the better - I can run more with less paging. As I said before the aim is to be able to simulate some users on a network, with each user being an instance of the OS running under VMWare.

I really don't want to have to fuck about getting an unsupported OS running under VMWare, which would limit my choices to the following supported Linux OS's; Asianux, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, Oracle, Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu.

Though I guess if I'm just running an email client and web browser and stop everything else I don't need, then the memory usage should be pretty minimal anyway. I'm tempted to just stick to FreeBSD as it will be good to learn it more and it will double up as a web server nicely.

[Melksham Red]

A minimal debian install is light as fuck and the most stable and well supported distro there is. Perfect for a server.

[pauld]

What MR said.

As a point of note, FreeBSD is not actually a Linux OS, it's a similarly Unix-alike OS as is Linux. But that's so pedantic, even I'm embarassed by it

[jayohaitchenn]

But that's so pedantic, even I'm embarassed by it

Not the most embarrassing thing in this thread, sadly.

[Simon Pieman]

Threads like these make me realise there is still hope for me. I have no idea of what any of this is about for the last page at least.

[land_of_bo]

Something I like about Windows 7. I always leave my machine on and in the past if it decided to update and reboot I lost whatever I had been too lazy to close. With Windows 7 when I log it back in all my windows I had open previously open back up

[Peter Venkman]

Threads like these make me realise there is still hope for me. I have no idea of what any of this is about for the last page at least.

I have been working on Computers for 26 years and half of that was just gobbledegook to me too Si!