[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux Dist.

[Steve Baker]

Randall Gibson wrote:
> 
> Noo!! not a distro war. Everyone has favorite. it may take you 3 or four to find yours.
> I ended up on Debian, but I dont think it is a great choice for beginers. It sets up too
> many network services, makes your computer very vulnerable untill properly configured.
> But, so do a lot of distros.

> Best part is it is VERY easy to install stuff, it will do all dependencys for you if you
> use deb installation method. Dont think rpm's are that friendly, but I never tried very
> hard :) Bad part is, the New release isnt ready yet. they wait a very long time to call
> something stable, so you can install from internet, since there are no CD iso's yet.

Yes - the other thing about Debian is their rigorous insistance on separating out
software that doesn't fall under a strictly OpenSource license - that can be a minor
inconvenience sometime.

RPM's can be a pain - but SuSE has the 'YAST' installer that hides all that ugliness
in a simple GUI.  (RPM is a widely used file format for program distributions and YAST
is an installer tool BTW).

I started off with Slakware - then Debian, then RedHat and now SuSE.  In each case,
once it's all set up, it's "just Linux".

I like SuSE because it comes on 6 CD-ROMs and has pretty much every program of any
importance right there on the disks.

For example, I got a 'Lego Mindstorms' Robot kit for my birthday (*great* geek fun BTW!)
and all the programming tools to drive the little RCX computer from Linux were
right there on the SuSE 6.4 CD's!   You *could* download them - so any distro would
be fine - but they are multiple megabytes and spread over several different Web
sites and it's really nice to just shove in the CD and run the 'YAST' installer
to set them all up.

But I'm sure there are other distro's that are just as good.

-- 
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