Re: Newbie Question



Hi Pete,

that is a difficult question and it is discussed very often. There were
certainly uncountable replies and advises. I just want to add another
one, sorry ;-)

I myself was in your situation about 2 years ago. And I learned, that
you can only enjoy linux, if you really dive into it. Linux is not as
easy as you expect, or at least, it is difficult. The Microsoft
principle (userfriendlieness) is very opposite to the linux principle
(effectiveness). So you surely will find, it is different. You'll have
to get used to it, but I haven't regret switching to linux ever.

No enough of all this useless stuff, I want to give you some advice, or
better, here is the way, I got used to linux.
I read a book about Suse linux which gave an overview on the file
system, important programms and commands and an introduction to bash
(the most common shell). Having read it, I tried to use this knowledge
using Debian. To cut it short: I left Debian for several reasons and
today I'm a happy Gentoo user.
As to the Distro: look at distrowatch, as others have said, and choose
something, that fits you.
I chose a source distro (everything has to be compiled from the source),
because I'm very much interested in programming. And developing
programms using a binary distro is hard. Or at least, my selfmade
kernels ran very, very odd back in the Debian times. Binary distros
usually become hard, when you try to modify them. But I don't want to
say that generally. This doesn't necessarily apply to all of them.
Also, if you want to learn how linux works deep within the system,
Gentoo is a good place to start (if you can effort a lot of time ;-)),
because it is very well documented and has a great community. Just in
the interest of completeness: I heard similar things about Ubuntu and
Fedora, but I haven't tried them, yet.

So, everything is up to you. Choose you distro carefully. And invest in
one ore maybe two books, they help a lot.


Well one thing I'd like to add to that is this. Your path sounds absolutely
great for a programmer but...most people...aren't really going to be
interested in modifying their Kernel. They probably don't even know, or
want to know, what that is. =)

You're right though, for someone who wants to do kernel modifications and
such, a source distro makes complete sense.

For someone that just doesn't want Vista though and is just looking for an
alternative..I say just download a live CD, press the install button...and
enjoy...

--
Stephan Rose
2003 Yamaha R6

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