Linux Fans Can You Help?

Question

I'm wanting to move to over to Linux. We have both PCs running Windows and Macs running OS X but I've really enjoyed playing around with Linux and want to switch.

I know I could do a clean install of Linux on an existing machine or even dual boot but I want to buy/build a new machine as I was going to buy an new iPad but think this would be much more fun.

My optitions are to buy a laptop/netbook or buy/build a pc for Linux most likely Ubuntu but maybe Fedora. My budget would be around £1200 max if it's cheaper well that's great.

I rip a lot of CDs/DVDs (Blu-rays) so a good optical drive would be nice everything else well I'll leave that up to you.

Answer 1

Another great thing about Linux is that the hardware to run it doesn't have to be great! The specs are really low. You could have both your iPad and your Linux machine with ease under £1200. I would either build a really cheap computer or buy a second hand one. Be sure to try the different distributions of linux until you find the one for you although Ubuntu is a great start, really user-friendly which unix is infamous for not being.

Answer 2

The good news is that £1200 is much more then you would need for a linux machine, as it is very lightweight. What else would you want your computer to do? play games? or just as a ripping casual use machine?

However there is a bit of a problem with running Blu-ray on linux when I last checked, as you have to work your way round the linux version of CMD. There are plenty of tutorials around if you want to have a go.

Answer 3

Linux is free as you know, and a brilliant experimenters toolkit.

It runs on almost anything. The price you have budgeted for could buy ALL 4 of my Linux Computers and still have loads of money to spare



I run Linux on a couple of NetTops that I got for £180 (Acer Revo 3700 )http://www.ebuyer.com/279898-acer-aspire-revo-r3700-nettop-pt-semec-036 and couple of Home build PCs for work horse data/image/video processing.



BUT for a decent machine

I would go for dual core, 4GB ram, and a decent hard drive...this can be built or bought for around £300 http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Computer/cat/Desktop-PC

I would also stick to NVIDIA for the graphics card

I would have a WiFi card known to work with Linux...

This will allow for virtualisation (so you can run Winodws as a virtual device in your machine) and almost everything else you need

Answer 4

I highly recommend that you avoid AMD video cards; their drivers are awful.



It's also not a bad idea to verify (probably just by Googling) that all the hardware will work with Linux. Most stuff does, but some very new hardware may not.