Downloading Debian CDs or DVDs 172

OK, good. Not that anyone's required to be "so very 'umble" (as privatesens's Uriah Heep might say), but a little caution will keep you out of certain kinds of trouble. For:

Hey, you're welcome to flatter me any time. However, what's really gratifying to us old-timers on Usenet is seeing the cognitive lights come on, when some querent asks good, intelligent questions and is obviously learning from feedback. It makes it feel as if our time hasn't been wasted, and that we're succeeding in repaying out debt from the even older old-timers who helped us, in our day.

As you can imagine, choice of distribution is a likely flamewar topic: People with scant experience but firm views tend to advocate boldly. We geezers, by contrast, tend to hedge. We may not be smarter, but we're a bit warier. And ultimately, it's a very individual matter, anyway -- inherently debatable.

The reason I mentioned in particular Kanotix, MEPIS, and Kubuntu is that those are all novice-friendly, KDE-oriented desktop systems designed to be HD-installed and maintained thereafter. You mentioned being a veteran Windows coder; statistically, people coming from Windows tend to really, really like KDE.

Although it's not my cuppa, in many ways, nonetheless, I can see their point: It's a very polished, consistent desktop framework, is very attractive, and with its default theming tends to look and act in a very Windows-like manner to some depth from surface appearance (beyond which,

At least two are available in AMD64 EM64T x86-64 whatever-it's-called-today flavours, in addition to i386. MEPIS is the only one that's likely still i586-compilation-only. (The 386 and 486 CPU families are now so ancient that most distros' "i386" editions are actually compiler-optimised for Pentium and later, though there are a few holdouts.)

All three distributions are strongly based on Debian. Kubuntu (the KDE flavour of Ubuntu) is a direct offshoot from Debian, while Kanotix and MEPIS are descended from Debian through the intermediate ancestor of Knoppix.1 Klaus Knopper really rather opened the floodgates when he published Knoppix and the specifications thereof, since every Tom, privates, and Harry then ran with that concept and invented dozens of specialised Linux distributions closely derived from Knoppix.

All Debian-family distributions share the trait of using the "dpkg" package installation-removal tool (with other tools front-ending dpkg) to handle packages in Debian's ".deb" package format. More important, they benefit from Debian's very strongly enforced distribution policy, a formal set of guidelines for how packages must be built, how software must interact, and how upgrades must proceed.

Using package formats as a criterion, one can identify at least a couple of other major groups: (1) the ".rpm" -package-format distributions that use the rpm package manager (and sundry front-ends thereof) and (2) the various compile-from-source distributions. That conceptual (which I strongly recommend).

1 Technically, Knoppix is based largely on a mini-distribution I helped design in 1999, the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card (the "Linuxcare BBC"). The "BBC" in turn was directly derived from Debian.

-- Cheers, Rick Moen "vi is my shepherd; I shall not font."