Re: Time to start Linuxing..some questions?
- From: General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 16:14:56 -0400
On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 12:01:36 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Background.
I used to run many unix systems including Lunix :-), years ago, mainly
servers. Then I sold that company, and gave up having much to do with
computers, apart from my aging Wn98 box which does all I *mainly* need..
Except I DO miss the ability to fiddle cleanly and easily, have things
like cron and tar to back the systems up, a C compiler, a MySQL layer...
Last distro I used was Redhat - 6 or 7 I think. No X-windows used.
Server only/command line/Telnet blah blah blah.
Now a friend has gifted me MOST of a PC - needs some form of writable
archive (DVD?) and a hard drive. Probably 110GByte or whatever is cheap
these days. Will source from friendly local PC man.
Now I need a distro. What I don;t want is one with a humongously 'it
looks and feels just like Windows' window manager on it.
I assume that the first stage is to boot something from CD that will get
me on the net to download the rest..advice on how to bootstrap a raw
installation would be much appreciated.
The distro I would prefer would be rock solid, with full support for an
average to poor graphics card, the usual sound bollocks, and so on..
The intention is to build this machine as a stable platform for SAMBA,
and appletalk (atalk) to act as a files server for the Win98 and MACOS 9
machines..printing is already networked here..and also to investigate
use of VMWARE for some PC windows apps, and Star office(?) for Excel
word compatibility, with a view to getting a laptop in 2007 and running
most of what I want under Linux with more portability than at present.
Also firefox/thunderbird etc.
What I DON'T want is 'plug and play we do everything for you just like
windows'...I'd rather edit config files by hand with vi thank you. At
least I know if it screws up where to look.
Apache and MySQL will go on there later. Want to experiment with web
forms on a database..
So a rock solid distro, with a slender graphics environment..and basic
outline of how to get raw hardware into a networked stated?
Pretty please?
You can use any distro for what you want, my personal preference is Fedora
Core (FC5 is the current version). All of the full Linux distros come with
everything, you can choose to install as much or as little as you want. On
a machine with a reasonable about of RAM (512M or more) you can use one of
the full desktops like Gnome or KDE. Having a desktop interface doesn't
stop you from doing everything with Xemacs or God forbid VI. However if
you don't want Gnome or KDE as a matter of principal then you don't have
to install it. The full distros also come with a bunch of lightweight
window managers, you can install anyone you want, or all of them if you
so choose. If you don't even want X then you can go that way also, as long
as you choose the custom install when you do the installation you can
install as little as you want. Also all of the distros use the same text
based configuration files in /etc, most of them have control panel applets
but you don't have to use them. You can also use Webmin to configure your
servers if you get tired of doing it by hand. Webmin supports just about
everything.
.
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