Backup of my old LiveJournal blog
בקטגוריות: Uncategorized
11 Oct 2003Let’s say I’m bored and want to install linux on my home box to play around with it a bit, which distribution is recommended?
My Unix know-how is limited and outdated, and what I mainly want from this is to get a feel for it, get some stuff running, connect to the ‘net and so on. I might be running it inside a VirtualPC, so if there are any issues with that, it’d be good to know.
פעם היה לי לייבג'ורנל. עכשיו הוא כאן, מגובה.
10 תגובות על To all you Linux users out there.
passacaglio
11 בOctober, 2003 בשעה 03:56
I liked RedHat (but when run on a SUN Station).
wickedbar
11 בOctober, 2003 בשעה 04:21
Mandrake
Easy to install, excellent Hebrew, good for beginners.
yggdrasil
11 בOctober, 2003 בשעה 05:38
Re: Mandrake
I checked out their site, though not very thoroughly, and they seem quite insistent on asking for money for their distribution. Do they have a free copy available, or do I go for a less expensive distribution?
wickedbar
11 בOctober, 2003 בשעה 10:51
Re: Mandrake
Mandrake is 100% free. They charge money for their club and stuff.
You can download the ISO images here, just choose a mirror site.
Good luck, and let me know if you need any help.
mux2000
17 בOctober, 2003 בשעה 01:03
Re: Mandrake
I agree that mandrake is best for beginners, and I used it too as my first installation, but I must say that you must change distro afterwards, as their packaging and dependency management is way worse than anything apt-get based, and it gives you a bit of a headache after a while.
Anonymous
11 בOctober, 2003 בשעה 04:43
Which Linux Distribution
Any modern Linux distribution will do. I have experience only with Red Hat (current version is 9.0) and it install very easily. I just download the installation ISO images, burn them and install from CD. From what I read in my LUG mailing list, all the other distributions (Debian, Mandrake, Knoppix, Gentoo)
also work well. Debian (with its aptget) is preferred by the GPL purists. From what I here they all work under VMware too.
Ehud.
Anonymous
11 בOctober, 2003 בשעה 04:56
Re: Which Linux Distribution
some URLS:
Israel Linux User Group – http://www.iglu.org.il
ftp of distributions mirrored on IGLU – ftp://iglu.org.il/pub/distributions/
פנגווין ישראלי גאה – http://www.whatsup.org.il/
Ehud.
gaal
11 בOctober, 2003 בשעה 06:14
The least intrusive way to do it would be to grab an iso of Knoppix and work with that. You then have a full system with, well, everything, without installing, um, anything.
Knoppix boots from a CD and doesn’t touch your hard disk. If you want some persistence (say, a user’s home directory) you can put that only on your disk, or even on one of those small USB disks. If you do the latter you get your system anywhere there’s a computer by just carrying a CD and a keyring.
Knoppix is debian based. I’m no purist but I’ve been using debian for years now (previously I was a redhat fan), and ideology aside, it just does what I want it to most of the time.
ijon
11 בOctober, 2003 בשעה 07:10
I like Debian too. Red Hat’s fine, but Debian’s packaging is much more hassle-free. I hear good things about Knoppix and Gentoo as well, but haven’t tried ’em.
I’ve recently installed the latest Debian on my laptop using VMWare, and it worked nicely. You want the “testing” distribution. The “stable” set is really old (as in Mozilla 1.0 etc.)
Anonymous
15 בOctober, 2003 בשעה 10:12
Gentoo – the Meta Distro
Only one way to go, really.
First, a confession: I do not like Linux that much, and have always reckoned myself a FreeBSDer; till recently, when a good friend nudged me towards Gentoo.
You see, Linux has become rather icky. More and more cumbersome, useless, and badly written code, and still a lot of rather primitive stuff. On a side note – I wonder how I would react if anyone were to tell me a decade ago that in 2003 the sane alternative, the promised land of OS, would be the same old Unix people have been using around me for so long… Anyway, while Linux is far better than windows, it still has its weak points, and most distributions are just semi-identical clusters of what someone else thought to be good for as many people as possible.
Gentoo – OTOH – uses a technology called Portage, which should be quite familiar to anyone who ever used BSD ports, and which allows you to install a very bare-bone OS, decide which packages are to your liking, download the SOURCES from the Net, and I think you can figure the rest out for yourself.
I almost feel like a traitor to FreeBSD by installing Linux (even more so than by using XP to write these lines), but even I have to admit that FreeBSD is a server OS. Besides, how can any self-respecting geek resist the temptation of using an OS that was entirely (every single bit!) compiled and optimized on his own machine?
Good luck, and see you soon.