Worse than a noob..

W

Waterboy

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.. I was a Unix Sys-Adm 30+ years ago... meaning I know enough about Linux to be less than useless.. and am too old to become a Guru..

My daring venture here, is part of new hobby (model railroading), and some wonderful software (JMRI)..

I have an old laptop (Gateway using a CoreDuo 1.97mghz), that I'd like to use only to run JMRI. The original O/S (Vista) is corrupt, and rather than try yo recover via the hidden partition; I'd like try Linux.

JMRI requires JAVA and the use of USB interface. Is there a Linux distribution most likely to work well with this laptop, and support JMRI use ? I know there's more to it than that, but I'd like to get pointed in the right direction..

Many thanks in advance,
Bob Boucher
 


Thank you for the prompt replies ..

It's a Gateway W340UI... Yes, I've perused the JMRI/Linux information.. but didn't want to get ahead of myself.. I figured step one would be to install Linux to see if it works on my laptop.. then move forward..

The 'Mint' install link looks promising.. I'll look into that.. just worried about laptop issues, from past experiences..

Bob
 
Waterboy said:
Thank you for the prompt replies ..

It's a Gateway W340UI... Yes, I've perused the JMRI/Linux information.. but didn't want to get ahead of myself.. I figured step one would be to install Linux to see if it works on my laptop.. then move forward..

The 'Mint' install link looks promising.. I'll look into that.. just worried about laptop issues, from past experiences..

Bob
Click to expand...

I'm using the Gateway MT 6457 laptop which has Shitsa on it. I'm using Linux Mint 17 Qiana on it and it runs fabulous. Make sure you just run Mint off of the CD first to make sure your wifi and sound work. If they do, go for it. I've never looked back.

Regards
Jim
 
Ok.. I downloaded Mint 17 (32bit Qiana).. made a bootable USB drive, and am installing now.. so far so good..

Thank you..
 
Mint 17 is fantastic, I got it on a bootable disk from a Linux mag in the UK and had great fun playing with it yesterday! Hardware willing you will love it, Mint has come a long way!
 
Yeah I'm very happy with it. Another distro has picked up my interest and that's Kali Linux. Going to check it out.
 
Kali is cool, reeeeeal cool. Pentesting is a massive interest of mine. I would recommend buying a book such as a CeH v8 guide to read alongside so you can learn how to play with it (wpa2 cracking, packet tracing etc etc)
 
I sometimes think that Kali Linux is more a product of greater marketing. There are many more penetration testing distros, but has anyone heard of Blackbuntu, Weakerthan or Matruix. Being better known does not mean that the product is best.
 
OK... I'm reporting in FROM the newly "Linuxed" laptop...

Thank you all for giving me the right nudge... now I'm worried if I have enough time for both model-railroading AND Linux...

Gotta play with this for a while.. I'll check back in under a more appropriate thread.

Thanks again,

Bob
 
arochester said:
I sometimes think that Kali Linux is more a product of greater marketing. There are many more penetration testing distros, but has anyone heard of Blackbuntu, Weakerthan or Matruix. Being better known does not mean that the product is best.
Click to expand...

Your quite right, but I find that with those distros Kali does the stuff you need it to do, as it comes with all the right tools required and aside from that the OS does not matter too much. I was watching an infosec hackathon where every user was on OS X, because you can download so many of the tools onto a Mac and it uses Bash. I'm sure the other distros will work just as good, but I also find the support base for pentesting is quite biased too Kali so that helps too.
 
Quick question... Having experimented a bit, and re-installing.. I chose to skip the language packs... was this a mistake (before I install all the updates)?
 
If you only want to have just one language installed (I imagine it's English), I see no reason to install other languages.
 
Check the menu preferences/languages. It will show what's install and provides for additional language packs.

Code: 
dpkg -l|grep language\-pack
will also show what languages are installed.
 
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