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CrunchBang could have been the systemD-less distro

Thankfully, for that we have Slackware.

Linux is worse off now than windows 8 between Unity, GNOME 3 and the cluster fuck that is systemd

I think you must be confused, Linux requires none of the things you just mentioned, and neither does a linux-based OS.

I also went with slackware. It worked great on a Celeron 500 (admittedly significantly faster than a 486 though) with fvwm or tab wm. I think it's best to go with a real distro with up-to-date libraries. He will have to not install a large portion of the packages but that may a little hairy getting in under 720MB though.

Slackware's minimal requirements: http://www.slackware.org/install/sysreq.php

• 486 processor
• 64MB RAM (1GB+ suggested)
• About 5GB+ of hard disk space for a full install
• CD or DVD drive (if not bootable, then a bootable USB flash stick or PXE server/network card)

Try Slackware 10. Install only the base system and add packages from CD as you need them.

# cd /
# tar -xzf /mnt/cdrom/slackware/x/PACKAGE.tgz
# sh /install/doinst.sh
# rm /install/doinst.sh

Keep track of what you install and maintain a tags file to automate future installations.

I think that at this point it's getting unacceptable to have a gigabyte OS and it still doesn't do anything will out adding more software.

I know we're supposed to be used to ACs making dumb comments, but seriously. There are plenty of small or potentially bare bones FOSS operating systems available.

I can't comprehend why they'd be using anything other than NetBSD in space anywayz.

http://www.debian.org/
http://www.fedoraproject.org/
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://www.opensuse.org/
http://www.slackware.org/
http://www.gentoo.org/
http://www.freebsd.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/

That's the second best thing. I already did the first best thing and I am not looking back.

... are listed on this page:

http://www.slackware.org/getslack/torrents.php

As an 'expert' system administrator (albeit unpaid) I have four servers. One is running Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, one is running Microsoft Window Server 2003, one is running Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Server), and the other is running Apple OS X Server (10.4).

I can tell you now that when I first started my company, although I was a major advocate of Linux, I soon found that I did not have the time to maintain a then Gentoo or custom LFS distribution, Debian was far too heavy to pick up, and Slackware felt a little dated. So I took a look at Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, liked what I saw, and bought a Dell PowerEdge 400SC with an OEM install.

At first Small Business Server was a breath of fresh air. It was easy to maintain, with a full complement of features, having been bundled with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Window Sharepoint Services. I actually enjoyed - yes, enjoyed - using it.

Until backup stated to fail. Until my tape drive disappeared. Until the sharepoint website database got corrupted. Until exchange monitoring failed. Until the POP connector started to thrash the CPU. Until the Windows Update website failed to check for updates.

These things happened. I'm not saying that they wouldn't happed with another system, but that is not the point, since they happened to me, and that caused me grief, and time, and money to resolve. I ended up trying to build a new system based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, since I already had Microsoft specific data (files and tables), but this proved even more difficult to maintain.

I struggled for eighteen months, and then decided to build an Ubuntu 5.10 server. I use Ubuntu on one of my laptop, and had gently learnt the apt- way, and liked it. I set up a server with similar features to the Small Business Server, using Postfix, MySQL, and Plone, and even went some ways to transferring my sharepoint data. It works. It hasn't failed yet.

I bet the guys who took part in the survey only set up a server, installed some applications, and patched it. I bet they didn't try running a business for 18-months, just to see what it was really like.

I must say that we recently purchased an Apple PowerMac, and were so impressed we are now looking at completely switching, hence the OS X Server. It is a dream to install and configure, but we are going to run it for several months until we are satisfied that it can do the job.

picking a distro, much harder than you think for the non-initiate.

Depends what you want...different people like their Linux different ways, from what I've seen.

Purely home made:- Linux From Scratch. Here is also a guide I wrote on what you'll need to know first if you want to go down that path.

For pre-cooked meat, but where you still have to add your own sides and sauce:-
Slackware with pkgsrc.

Entirely pre-cooked and delivered, but still very tasty:- Ubuntu.

...The great thing about you wanting to learn programming is that it's unlikely that you'll be CLI averse, but Slack still allows for you to install X and GNOME/KDE.

Slackware is the only distribution still in existence that I know of where you get a clean, recognisable core toolchain which hasn't been mutilated beyond recognition by package management or other crap. Although when you download the ISOs, you get binary packages, when you've installed it you end up with a base system that's more or less completely identical to what you'd get if you downloaded the sources from gnu.org/kernel.org and assembled it yourself. No apt or rpm based system can honestly claim that. They all engage in subpackaging, weird, non-standard directory locations for things, and other assorted perversions...all of which the misguided souls responsible for them view as improvements, but which without exception end up causing more problems than they solve.

What that means is that you're able to gain Linux knowledge that is largely distribution agnostic. It will also give you an appreciation of what constitutes a genuinely sane Linux system...and tragically, there are precious few examples of that still in the world these days.

If you then want a sane form of package management, you can install pkgsrc, NetBSD's portable package management which works with Slackware and numerous other platforms.

This combined will give you a much more transparent, stable, reliable, efficient, and genuinely UNIX-like system than is usually seen with Linux distributions.

There is nearly always a tradeoff between superficial user friendliness and technical excellence; there is no free lunch. As another example of what I mean here...McDonald's might provide instant gratification in terms of food, but we've all seen the studies people have done into what said food is (or at least used to be) like from a nutritional perspective. The "user friendly" distributions follow the same principle where stability, transparency, and general technical desirability are concerned...they're fast food.

In terms of Linux, where you have many options to chose, it is good and bad. Good because you have many distros and each one with some specific features and it is bad for the same reasons :)
I've been using Slackware for many years and i really love it, it is simple and in my opinion, easy to use.
But you always can try Ubuntu that looks real good and Debian because of its package manager that may make things easier for newbies.
You must keep in mind that any linux you chose, does not matter, you'll always have many similar tools for math and programming.

Before you decide take a look at the following links:

Slackware
Debian
Ubuntu
Gentoo

It is very important that you learn something about those linux distros out there and make
your own decision, pointing out what does really matter and what doesn't
Don't you have some virtualization tool for testing? You can install a couple of distros and
then make your decision based on experience.
good luck!

This answer shows why the question is nonsensical on its face. No one can tell you what distro is best for you. Everyone has a different personality. For me, Slackware is the ideal distro for a newbie. But then, I like to read up on any product before I use it. So I thought it was easy to install and now it is very easy to administrate. It has lower overhead from all of the bells and whistles that some of the other distros have included. There is no dependency hell that can be so frustrating to a newbie. If you stay away from the auto updaters and read the changelogs, you will never have a broken system. If you are like a lot of the Windows users that come over to Linux, however, you will probably be better served by one of the other distros. The majority of them want to run the installer CD and then just have everything be set up and work. Of course some of them become so frustrated the first time they run into a problem and have no idea on how to fix it, they run back to Windows. But good luck to you.

Which distro to adopt if you are a newbie really depends on what you want to achieve or learn by installing Linux. If you want an alternate desktop system you could go for Ubuntu, Linspire, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop distro where you get lots of user friendly GUI tools to solve your configuration problems. If your ambition is to become a corporate Linux admin or a developer and you want to build a server system to cut your teeth on I would recommend something like Centos because it is a free-of-charge binary 'clone' of Red Hat ES/AS which along with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the standard for anybody who runs enterprise quality software including the ubiquitous Oracle Databases. Slackware on the other hand is only for you if you are a for true nerd, developer, comp-sci/engineering student or some such eccentric who want to find out the old fashioned way how a modern *NIX system is put together. Basically I'd say that if you are a complete Linux newbie, say... an experienced Windows XP user, you should definitely start with one of the ultra user friendly Linux desktop distributions and proceed from there. If you want to become a professional Linux admin you should also get over any fear you may have of command-line interfaces and doubly so if you have any ambition to do any serious development on a Linux system.

Windows will stop working, so you might as well install Slackware now.

Fix'd

On my system...

Hmmm, does lpr launch from rc.net1, rc.net2, or something else?

Something else. rc.M

When does nfs start relative to ssh?

After. Both in rc.inet2, lines 101 and 82 respectively.

grep is your friend - Learn it. Use it. Love it.

BSD-style scripts really aren't hard to figure out. For Slackware, check out - http://www.slackware.org/config/init.php

Read through /etc/rc.d/rc.M. That will pretty much give you an exact idea of what order the scripts are called in.

I can download the latest release of Slackware from Slackware.org for absolutely no cost (beyond normal ISP costs, etc) yet I can stroll into Microcenter and find a CD set of Slackware, (usually 1-2 versions behind) for anywhere from $10 to $20. This is the same principle. I'd be paying Microcenter (who in turn would pay Walnut Creek CDRom, the publisher) for the actual media, the label, the packaging (CD Case) and the nice little paper insert. It is a convienence charge, as well as an option for people who don't have the ability to burn their own CDs. Granted burning a CD isn't required for Firefox, but in general it's the same principle.

You could do the same with RedHat a while back. You purchase their 'box' for $80 or so, and you get the media, manuals, a subscription to the RedHat Network update site (think Windows Update) and most importantly to my manager at the time, customer support. I could personally get on their site and download the ISOs for free, and download all the RPM updates for free, yet I just had to download and install them manually. Its a convienence charge.

I've heard that about Ubuntu. Another option to try may be Slackware. I've had zero trouble getting Slackware to work on any laptop on which I've installed it.

I know it's no Acer, but I'm writing this from a Toshiba Satellite A75-S2112 running Slackware 10.1. The only "special" thing I had to do was install the madwifi from source to get the on-board Atheros wireless to work. Other than that, with Slackware, everything worked right out of the gate on this laptop, and every other laptop I've tried.

My 2 cents.

As an 'expert' system administrator (albeit unpaid) I have four servers. One is running Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, one is running Microsoft Window Server 2003, one is running Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Server), and the other is running Apple OS X Server (10.4).

I can tell you now that when I first started my company, although I was a major advocate of Linux, I soon found that I did not have the time to maintain a then Gentoo or custom LFS distribution, Debian was far too heavy to pick up, and Slackware felt a little dated. So I took a look at Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, liked what I saw, and bought a Dell PowerEdge 400SC with an OEM install.

At first Small Business Server was a breath of fresh air. It was easy to maintain, with a full complement of features, having been bundled with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Window Sharepoint Services. I actually enjoyed - yes, enjoyed - using it.

Until backup stated to fail. Until my tape drive disappeared. Until the sharepoint website database got corrupted. Until exchange monitoring failed. Until the POP connector started to thrash the CPU. Until the Windows Update website failed to check for updates.

These things happened. I'm not saying that they wouldn't happed with another system, but that is not the point, since they happened to me, and that caused me grief, and time, and money to resolve. I ended up trying to build a new system based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, since I already had Microsoft specific data (files and tables), but this proved even more difficult to maintain.

I struggled for eighteen months, and then decided to build an Ubuntu 5.10 server. I use Ubuntu on one of my laptop, and had gently learnt the apt- way, and liked it. I set up a server with similar features to the Small Business Server, using Postfix, MySQL, and Plone, and even went some ways to transferring my sharepoint data. It works. It hasn't failed yet.

I bet the guys who took part in the survey only set up a server, installed some applications, and patched it. I bet they didn't try running a business for 18-months, just to see what it was really like.

I must say that we recently purchased an Apple PowerMac, and were so impressed we are now looking at completely switching, hence the OS X Server. It is a dream to install and configure, but we are going to run it for several months until we are satisfied that it can do the job.

Why not build your own? Check out somewhere like pricewatch

You can get a 400G HD for about $190 and a P4 combo board for about $160.

Install slackware and you're ready to rock and roll.

Good luck.

Built a Hylafax http://hylafax.org/ system on top of the latest v6.1, LFS http://linuxfromscratch.org./
Details:
3GHz Intel Pentium 4 Processor, 1Gb RAM
11,878.40 BogoMIPS Total, 250Gb Hard Drive
    GCC 3.4.3
    Samba 3.0.14a
    HylaFAX 4.2.1

Gotta say it's way ahead of expectations.
I won't touch another distro now for my mission critical.
Although, Knoppix, http://www.knoppix.org/ and Ubuntoo, http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ are great "insert CD and run" distros, for workstations.
Working with SlackWare seems effortless also, http://www.slackware.org/.

Was fortunate enough to meet the fine gent who started the LFS project: Gerard Beekmans
Highly recommended support for the project, even if it's just $5 for a beer via donations :->, http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/contribute.h tml or a much needed "hints" writeup, http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/.

Strictly speaking, it's not new, but a merger of three distros,
no? Can't for the life of me see why anyone would ever use anything
other than the one true distro, mind.
Why reinvent the wheel?

Another option is to get a userfriendly linux distro

Well, that's a given, but many people don't see it that way. I run Slackware, both at home and work, and haven't had one virus, spyware attack, trojan whatever in years.

I was just thinking of those that wanted to keep their Windows machine.

>> whats my upgrade path from Mac OS X 10.4?

Slackware 10.1

Thanks for asking ;-]

Slackware has been using BitTorrent for a while now. You have the option of using that, or the normal download methods. You can visit them here.

I've seen many other legitimate uses for BitTorrent, since there are a lot of things to download that are of considerable size.

Guns are sometimes used to commit crimes, yet we do not outlaw them. Bongs are being sold at the local Waterbeds N Stuff. Knives that aren't practical for neither hunting or home protection can be purchased in lots of places. Why should software be any different?

If you like high taxes, low healthcare quality, and knowing that your country selectively applies its laws to groups of folks that it doesn't like, then you'll love Canada!

Canadian taxes are high because so many services are supplied by the government, healthcare being the most notable. The average quality of healthcare in Canada is actually quite high, but past a certain point (measured in cost), healthcare services aren't available, or they're available randomly (in order to be fair to everyone, because everyone paid for the healthcare system). If think you may have cracked your wrist, or are worried about your cholesterol, then go in for an X-ray or blood test. The doctors are required to see you. Same thing goes if you think you're coming down with a head cold. If you're having heart troubles or need serious surgery to replace an organ, forget about it: you're probably going to die as a victim of the Canadian Healthcare Low Pass Filter. Common, easily treatable illnesses are cheaply treated, and so they are quickly treated. More expensive procedures simply are not done. The system couldn't support them all, it isn't fair to support just some, so you or your child will die knowing that the doctors didn't even try doing all they could. You can't even buy top quality healthcare in Canada--it's illegal. Your best chance is to be rich and move to America or Europe, because Canada has smoothed you out.

Note that some people don't mind this system. It's equivalent to having crappy insurance in the USA. You're betting against anything serious happening, and wouldn't really have the means available to get yourself fixed anyway. The difference is that if you work hard in the USA to provide for yourself, you can buy better healthcare. In Canada, this option is denied to you. In Canada, Patrick might've been dead by now (then again, he might not've. The treatment he needed was pretty cheap, although the testing involved was not (Hey Pat, I've heard on the news at least twice about how ``some doctors believe the mist from electric toothbrushes could get into people's lungs,'' but I didn't hear any attribution).). He certainly didn't travel to Canada for treatment.

Canadian healthcare is like a front-line MASH hospital in a war. If they can fix you, they will. If it's too hard or too expensive, they'll fix two other guys with less expensive ailments. Your life depends on government-spun fate. You'd have been just as well off being a wine-o as a teacher for all the good it does you in Canada's eyes.

As opposed to Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, Trustix, Tiny Sofa etc. These are designed for making toast. Why they have everything required for an out-of-the-box LAMP installation is beyond me, I've never had to use PHP to make toast before. Maybe my toaster just has it integrated in firmware?

Well, not exactly. I don't go to Loki or any other Torrent site for linux, I go straight to the source. When I wanted Slackware ISOs the other day, I went here,
Slackware Torrents Page.
Not loki.

I am a user of Slackware and I have paid for the 4-CD set of Slackware 10.0 although I could download it - it is a very good distro and I reccomend it for *nix veterans and servers. I paid for it because I wanted to support the project and thank Patrick for this great software. Now I learn that Patrick is ill and I feel too nervous. If I was a doctor I would be willing to treat him for free but unfortunately I am just a Computer Science student. I am sure that the libre software community appreciates Slackware and, together with me, we all wish the best for Patrick.

Why should I donate raw hardware to a dying cause of an operating system? Slackware OWNS! Slackware > *BSD!

Slackware owns you *BSD bitches. Your SMP is subpar, your TCP stack is overrated, and you can't even support things like S-ATA and USB properly! YOUR PLATFORM IS DEAD!

Apart from some very minor, rare setups *BSD is WORTHLESS! Linux owns you on every single front these days. Install Slackware and move on with your life. Your dedication to the rotting corpses that are the *BSD variants is noble but futile. Bury the decaying past and join the Slackware revolution.

How about tiny linux

... a small Linux Distribution for i386 derived from SuSE 6.4. In the base version it just contains the things which are necessary to run Linux. Therefore the base package is rather small and requires approx. 7MB./SNIP

or DSL

.. a nearly complete desktop, including XMMS (MP3, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo web browser, links-hacked web browser, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US Engli /SNIP

Or go with my favourite and install just what you require...

What about Slackware? It's truly American and one of the more secure and responsive distributions out there.

If it's not commercially viable, don't tell my boss. We are running around 30 Slack servers both internally and externally.

2. A consistent filesystem hierarchy is followed from distribution to distribution...

Actually all distributions should be following the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

If yours isn't, then you need to get them to follow it, or find another distribution that does.

I've been a Windows admin the last 5 years and have been asked to learn Linux. [...] I'd like to take my time and really learn it.

aside from whatever training you decide to take, try more than one distro on your own. Even if your company has specified that you will use a particular distro, I think you'll find it worth your time.

gentoo has been mentioned here lots. If you try it, don't make it your first distro. a recent version of Slackware is a good first install I think

most important IMO: don't be the only guy in the department that knows Linux (or any technology that your business depends on...) get someone else trained as well

Installing X is already covered in the guide. Slackware was my first distro, I don't remember having any trouble getting X to run :D

That's not pot, that's frop from the pipe of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs.

How is any normal person supposed to cope with a distribution that doesn't even bootload all the time?

That's just it, normal people aren't supposed to cope with the distribution at all. I don't know how so many could miss it, but if you even just skim through the obvious pre-install sections of fedora.redhat.com you'll see plenty that makes it clear that Fedora is not meant for everyone. It's meant for people who like working or playing with bleeding-edge components. If you want to work or play with a distribution that doesn't ever bite you and you wound up on fedora.redhat.com, you made a wrong turn somewhere. Try redhat.com, debian.org, slackware.org, suse.com, mandrakesoft.com or any of a number of other sites for which I'll probably get blasted for having failed to include them here. When you land at one go to their download section or on-line store and look for the phrase 'latest stable release'. What you'll find there is meant for everyone and will, generally, work right out of the box

And here's the link to prove it.

http://www.slackware.org/pb/?vers=slackware-9.1&se t=d&package=j2sdk-1_4_2_01-i586-1

Show me even a Slackware 5, and I'll believe that.

Obviously, the one true religion is slackware .

Sure it is not the "easiest", but easy is not always good. (remember Corel Linux?)

get slackware

is here ;)

go ahead! mod me offtopic, but we'll see who laughs la&^&!71&$@*[NO CARRIER]

• www.redhat.com
• www.debian.org
• www.slackware.org
• www.freebsd.org
• www.openbsd.org

Rock solid stability, clean BSD style configuration and easily kept up to date packaging system via pkgtool and swaret - Slackware is what will lead the true geek into the 21st century.

Slackware

Like Gentoo, LFS doesn't do much to teach you what's going on -- it's a set of instructions to follow, while Gentoo is a ... well, set of instructions to follow. How many people actually step beyond these directions when something breaks? Not a good lot of them if the Gentoo/LFS forums and IRC channels are any indication. "Wuhh x broke, what do I do now?" is all too common, much like Ask Slashdot postings where the answer is found by plugging the question into Google.

I've always seen an inherent problem with source-based distros that don't actually make you get down in the muck and bugger with the source -- They give you a little more insight but really it's just a package-based distro which happens to use the source tarballs and prefab patches and Makefiles to make the build tool happy and consistent. You're really no further ahead with Gentoo or LFS than you are with Mandrake or Debian or SuSE.

If you want to learn the internals stop using a hand-holding distro, grab Slack, cut your teeth building stuff that wasn't on the CD (or try remaking something from the CD!)... Then realize that it's a royal waste of time and a security risk requiring a compiler on every system and making your first few packages... Learn the intracasies of trying to make Perl module packages or Apache shared libs that can be used on several systems. Now grab something like CheckInstall to make your life just a tad easier and learn all its weirdnesses. Break things and try to fix them, and then realize that you now have some really solid foundations to truly learn how Linux works.

Now that the foundations are laid, go build some small i386-based systems using nothing more than a dev environment and chroot. Don't cheat by grabbing a buildroot. LFS helps give some direction here, as do the busybox and uclibc mailing lists. When you can build these and understand what's going on, you've actually learned how Linux works and how the pieces fit together. Go tweak a kernel or write a driver for some nifty piece of hardware to round out your knowlege. You've now got enough of an education to get a decently-paying job in the embedded systems industry. Round it out with some good networking experience from packet dumps and screwing around with raw sockets and such and you have got a really solid technical background for practically anything Linux.

Now I didn't say the process was for everyone, and I certainly didn't say that this is how everyone should learn it. I'm just getting sick to the teeth of people claiming they know how Linux works and how to build programs when all they've learned how to do was run "emerge someprogram" and give dumb looks if it doesn't go right.

...10 years ago.

Not that I care but looks like Slackware is sticking with XFree86 4.4.0.

Slack rules. It was the first distro I ever used...3.0 from memory. Gives you the best of a lot of different worlds though...a package system based on tarballs. It also had a perfectly good menu system (albeit tty based) very early on.

I think the fact that Slackware was my first distro was one of the main reasons why I was so disenchanted with many of the later, glitzier distributions. If Slack proved anything, it's that a distro doesn't need tinsel and extraneous crap to still be usable and good.
Proving his common sense and general skill once again also, Patrick has opted for GNOME as the wm of choice out of the Big Two, as opposed to the bloated abbheration which is KDE. If I had broadband, and thus wasn't installing my LFS, I already would have got Slack 9.3.
(End shameless pimpage ;-))

It seems to be Gentoo to me, it's always suggested when someone asks for a new distro(I won't say where though as I'm afraid of being laughed upon ;)), and everyone seem to be using it. I'm happy with Slackware and FreeBSD. I really should check our Gentoo, it might just work on my crappy 5 year old Wintel machine...

And BSD is not dying!!