That about sums up the situation I'm looking at. I've got Redhat/Fedora as my primary stable server, with a windows workstation (for games mostly, until I finally move on) and I want to build a third box or spare for experimental O/S's. I hope to try different Linux flavours as well as Solaris.
I'm not hardcore either, but the guy who introduced me to Linux seems to know his stuff so I lean on him quite a bit. I'll look into Knoppix too. Sounds interesting.
Doug
Niels Voll wrote:
Hi Doug,
Many of the other answers you have gotten to your question touch upon pertinent points. Here are my 2 cents:
There are several high level forks in the road, all centered around various flavors of the question, what you would like to do. And that is a bit of a multi-dimensional question. Some of those dimensions include:
A: Server Side vs. Desktop Side
B: do you like utmost control over your environment and are capably of some pretty hardcore technical work
vs. do you just want to plug it in and have it working
vs. somewhere in between
C do you have a "spare" (or semi-spare) computer where you can experiment over the longer haul
vs. you have one computer, it has to do it' s"production" job, and you need to keep your experiments very low risk
(i.e. don't impact your primary environment)
There are more considerations, but the above 3 (at least for me) are some of the more important one's. Let me start with the easiest one (point C):
If you need to keep your Linux experiments at zero risk (i.e. you can't afford to screw up the one and only computer you have), use a bootable CD based distribution to get your feet wet. My current favorite: knoppix - http://www.knoppix.org/
If you are a pretty hardcore techie (point B), who would like to have ultimate control, and you are game to face a reasonably steep learning curve (steeper for Windows or Mac users and administrators(yes!) - not too steep for experienced Unix system administrators), then look at Debian or possibly even better, look at Gentoo (source based distribution - quite cool indeed!). In this case it doesn't matter all that much, if you are more interested in a server or a desktop environment.
If both of the above paragraphs don't apply to you, it comes down to the questions in point A:
If you are more interested in running a server environment, like a web server (Apache), maybe email (sendmail, qmail, postfix, etc.), maybe a database (MySql, Postgres, etc), and some server side programming environments (PHP, Python, Perl, etc...), then my current favorites (in order) are: RedHat9/Fedora1, Mandrake, SuSE; Since so many people run RedHat based servers, it is just easier to find instructions, howto's and general help for RedHat based systems.
If you are more interested in a desktop environment, my current favorites are SuSE, followed by a tie between Mandrake and Fedora. I've found the SuSE (my last experience is with SuSE 8) desktop based administration and utilities a bit richer than the others I had tried. The online updates worked well for me, too, and I didn't even have to go through a signup procedure. That being said, Fedora's online updates are very slick, too (and no signup required). Of course, SuSE is a bit tougher to get for free.
One point of experience: I've found, that if using rather new/fancy hardware, then RedHat and SuSE are currently still the best supported. For example, I have recently set up a machine with a SATA / RAID capable motherboard, and I found drivers for some versions of RedHat and SuSE - everything else became quite difficult or even impossible. On older hardware, RedHat/Fedora, SuSE and Mandrake have all been very good to me over the last couple of years.
Disclaimer: These are my current opinions, since I had to decide this very question for myself about 3 months ago. Just in case you are curious: I am NOT totally hardcore techie (prefer working with precompiled packages), I had spare/new computer(s), and I wanted to learn/build a server environment. As a result, I ended up on RedHat 9 (because of available SATA/RAID hardware drivers), gently migrating toward Fedora.
Sorry about the lengthy post,
...Niels
Doug Boyd wrote:
Hello,
I'm new to the linux arena. I'm curious if a survey has been done to determine the most popular flavour of linux among the Calgary Linux Users Group. I'm currently using Fedora, but am thinking of giving SUSE a try.
Which flavour do Cluggers recommend for learning linux with?
Thanks,
Doug (linux newbie)
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