>The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of... Linux.
>
>Am seeking recommendations for the "best" Linux distribution to
>buy/download, from the perspective of an end user like myself, who will
>not be running a server with it: basically, I want to set up a partition,
>install some version of Linux, and start using it (as painlessly as possible)
>as an alternative GUI operating system.
>
>My head's starting to spin as I wade into all the intricacies of the
>different
>releases, and try to sort out the bickering amongst advocates of the
>various Linux flavours... it's a jungle out there :)
>
>Advice?
yee-ha!.. peer pressure strikes again! ;-)
as a strictly personal opinion, RedHat is a good place to start if you want
to get familiar with "this whole unix thing". the installers are
friendly, the documentation is pretty good overall, and there's a fairly
gentle but nonintrusive set of safety rails throughout the system.
that last comment may seem a bit over the top, considering that you can
still do a perfectly good "rm -rf /". it's a bit like the difference
between an AOL account and straight dialup, though.. the default version of
RedHat (and Linux in general) closes off a few of the highly geekish
options which are available in more industrial versions of unix, like the
BSD variants.
while you're getting your feet under yourself, that's a good thing. the
additional complexity just makes it harder to figure out what's going on.
if/when you graduate to the level of wanting specific power features, you
can either rebuild your Linux installation to your taste, or move over to a
flavor which requires more configuration from the ground up.
in general, though, the winning pattern is to pick a version that appeals
to you at first glance, then get familiar with the environment and the
standard tools (become either a vi-weenie or an emacs-bigot, a pine-ophile
or an emacs-bigot, a tin-user or an emacs-bigot.. etc. ;-). once you
think you're fairly comfortable with that flavor, start sampling all the
others you can find (go to http://www.cheapbytes.com/ for low-cost CDs of
all the major variants.. open source, she's a wonderful thing), for the
sake of comparison & contrast.
it's also a good idea to have a very simple, even minimal, box which you
can use as a scratch platform for testing purposes. it's not a place for
you to do mission-critical work, it's something you can break, scrap, and
rebuild without losing anything you care about.
you're not even faking it well as a Linux geek until you've rebuilt the
kernel a couple dozen times, but the odds of doing it perfectly on the
first try are fairly low. it's not horribly difficult, but there's a
certain amount of "what happens when i push *this* button?" to it. the
virtual equivalent of missing eyebrows and a faint smell of charcoal are
badges of honor in the unix world, and you actually get extra points for
being smart enough to blow away a toy box, rather than letting the magic
smoke out of a system that's important.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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