Playing with Linux Operating Systems

Because I have been a bit restricted in what I can do lately, I dug out my play computer and tried a few Linux OS's on it. Here is a bit of a report.

The computer is an ASUS P5K with 4GB of RAM, 153GB IDE hard disk with an IDE-SATA converter and a 15 inch monitor. It has a Wifi card that sits on the motherboard.

Initially the computer had a SATA hard disk with Zorin 11 on it. This had installed easily and worked fine. It is a 'simple' OS that is sort of an XP replacement.

I overwrote this with Parrot linux 3.7 as it was in one of the recommended lists. It had the old text based installer and went in without problems, and updated easily over the wifi.

I then changed this disk for the IDE with converter and installed KDE Neon 5.8.5 that I had downloaded back in January. This installed easily enough but I had a bit of trouble getting it to stay connected to the wifi. It wanted about 270 updates, and when you  hit the 'update all' button it overlayed a screen of all the files that were going to be updated, but it was a long list and you couldn't scroll down or see any way of removing it. Hitting the enter key did it. I had to try and update about 4 times over the wifi, because it kept stopping when the wifi failed and I was unable to restart it.  In the end I carted it indoors and wired the Ethernet in. It eventually updated. One of the features was that the machine refused to respond to the power down instructions. The only way I found to stop it was the power button.

Not happy so I installed Kali Linux 2016-1 over it. Once again a text based installer, it took it's time installing, but got there. It didn't mind that I went out for coffee, just kept working, not like the Neon.  it's quite fast, but the only login on it is root. I haven't found an office suite on it yet, but it is a dedicated security toolkit distro based on Backtrack and Helix.

Ah, well, if you're bored then you might be interested in trying
https://manjaro.org/  I haven't, but it's an Arch Linux derivative
with... a GUI installer!  The download page looks to have KDE flavour. -Ralph

That kept me from being bored. I downloaded the KDE version, and every time I booted it, my screen displayed a message " out of range " which implies that it cannot adjust the resolution to that of this ancient Toshiba 15".  This is a condition that I have seen years ago when a computer could not set the screen size. I  think that it is 'working' because every time I hit a key the CD runs up.  I booted into SolyDK and that worked OK, as does everything else.

I have a cheep IDE-to-SATA converter on the hard disk drive and it is giving me grief too as I keep swapping drives.

I used to be a great fan of Mandrake about 12-15 years ago, but didn't like Mandriva. I'll have to give the latest incarnation another try.

I tried Mageia, but could only find the XFCE version. I liked it because of the ease of installation and guidance, but on booting it always brought up a terminal window and needed a root login before proceeding to the GUI login. And it was dreadfully slow.  It says my screen is a 15"  Toshiba  with 1024x768 resolution.  I think someday I'll have to try it again as it doesn't seem right.

And at the end of it I decided that my IDE-toSata converter had a poor solder connection on the SATA connector so have had a go at fixing that.

Have given up/finished. Have now four HD's with PArrot, Kali, Mageia and Zorin that I can plug and play via the SATA cable.