Dustin Cross wrote:
Aloha,
I have to disagree with everyone here. There is nothing wrong with using
an old version of Linux to learn. The problem you will have with an old
version of linux is hardware support. You have to use old hardware. Once
you get past that it depends on how much you already know. If you have
never used Linux or any Unix, then you will learn a lot. You will learn
about your hardware and how Linux uses it. You will learn all of the basic
user commands and the directory structure. You will learn the init system
for starting and stoping applications. You will learn the difference
between Linux, X, and window managers. There will be tons of important
things you will learn from using an old version of linux.
SNIP
If Redhat 5.2 is what you have, use it. Dealing with all the hardware
issues wil be a great lesson in itself. Having to do the extra searching
for the Redhat 5.2 or kernel 2.0 answer will be great learning.
Later,
Dusty
I wholeheartedly disagree. New users have a hard enough time with any
version of Linux. Using an older version of Linux would mean the
following problems:
* Many security holes, great effort needed to patch it.
* Red Hat 5.2 is so old that Red Hat long ago stopped releasing errata
for it. Securing the system would be fairly difficult and time
consuming even for an experienced user because every source package must
be tracked down, checked for security, rebuilt, tested, etc. In some
cases hacking would be needed because the latest source package probably
doesn't easily work on very old distros (glibc requirements?)
* Lack of auto-install tools. It simply takes 100 times as long to get
what you want installed, not to mention that most modern software wont
run on your system because of the multitudes of old libraries.
Warren Togami
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
