Time to start Linuxing..some questions 2234

The Natural Philosopher

I have my own favorites. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its relations (e.g., CentOS). These are not bleeding edge software. The emphasis with these distributions is stability. So while they are updated with the latest security enhancements and bug fixes, they add no new features. I find this nice because I do not have to upgrade every year. This machine, for example, is still running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 which is around 3 years old now (RHEL4 has been out around a year, I think, and RHEL5 may become available late this year; new releases come out about every year and a half) as Red Hat supports these distributions for 7 years, I think. If you get it from Red Hat, it will cost you about $365-year so you probably would want a clone, Such as CentOS 4.3. CentOs is free, but they do accept contributions.

Now all distributions that I know of (and that is not many) have lots of features, windowing stuff, etc., servers for everything and its brother.

But Red Hat, and I buttume the rest, allow you to install less than everything on the system. So I have GNOME, but not KDE. You do not actually need either. You will find one or the other to be convenient.

So I do not install Apache, Samba, most of the other servers, though I do run bind and sendmail and ssh. I never installed the games, though I have NetHack on this machine.

But before this turns into a commercial for Red Hat, I suggest you find whatever one is most popular where you are so you can be part of a mutual buttistance community. With your prior experience, you may not need it much, but is nice of it is there.

As far as getting a machine started on Linux, buttuming it has no OS in it now, you can either buy the CD-ROMs or download them to another machine and burn them. If you want to download them, you sure want a high speed connection: we are talking of 4 CD-ROMs or more.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 08:40:01 up 4 days, 15:18, 3 users, load average: 4.25, 4.14, 4.07