Time to start Linuxing..some questions 2236

Douglas Mayne

Mmm. I like the philosophy..

Still, having looked at Debian, its also very well supported and you only have to pull what you want on install. I am also a bit more familiar with system V style layout these days than good old Berkeley.

The devil seems in the detail on all these distros.

I looked at the debian site and everything I want is there..and a lot I didn't know I wanted till I looked..things have moved on. Lightweight compilers for PICS etc..Yum.

Whats the lightest weight window manager then? I've seen KDE and gnome so far..

I do get the impression that actually most distros are broadly similar, and the arguments come from what is the default way of doing things. Another friend said SUSE 'because its just like windows XP' which was enough to put me straight off..

It seems that - at least on Debian - all I have to do is burn a small CD with a bootstrap installer, and suck the rest off the net. Got 576kbps download speeds, which ain't great, but is enough spread out over a few evenings.

Most packages are what - 10-20Mbytes?

Many thanks to all the helpful responders. It also looks like I can even get a digital terrestrial TV card supported under linux..ho hum. record the programs onto DVD...I take it DVD burning given sensible hardware is a standard feature..