On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 04:38:15PM +1300, Andrew Errington wrote: > I'd recommend a Debian-based distro as I think the apt packaging system > (using .deb files) is most excellent.
Andrew: You know, internally the .deb files are "just a tarball" in the same way that .rpm files are "just a tarball". IIRC you can specify interdependancies in .deb metadata more easily than you can with rpm, and perhaps you get a little more support for postinstall hooks, but there's no real difference between the mechanisms. It's how the distribution itself handles the core repository that's critical in assisting installation of packages, not the mechanism. Debian and Ubuntu publically obsess about the contents and quality of their repositories, and it shows. I'm less sure (due to lack of experience) about OpenSuSE and Fedora, but no-one seems to have terrible problems with them. > Your next question will be "which desktop shall I use?", to which the > answer is, of course, "KDE". Oh, and your favourite editor is 'vi'. Half-correct. Gnome, and vim. :-) Kale: Microsoft don't have anything approaching the idea of a repository (and neither do Apple) - in their world, you are supposed to locate third-party programs by googling and other random processes, then download a program direct from the vendor. This approach is also common in the "unix" world, due to its age - but is not appropriate for a Linux distribution, *especially* for two main classes of users - beginners, and system administrators. If you want to run a program that isn't provided by your distribution's repository, going off and grabbing some pre-compiled binaries (the *only* format practically available for Microsoft and Apple systems) isn't going to be easy. Grabbing the source code and compiling up from there is the Unix way, and therefore will be possible with a Linux distro, although not directly easy, especially for a beginner. If you cared to give us an example of what you're trying to do, I'm sure we'd all love to help suggest different ways to achieve it! -jim
