Beginner's Guide to Linux Distros

Martin writes "TipMonkies has a nice overview of various Linux distros for those of you with little time to research each distro yourself. The article also discusses some of the advantages/disadvantages of each distro." From the article: "SUSE- The 'U' is hard and the 'E' is soft. Almost like the word sue with an S on the end. SUSE is the other big commercial distro. It was when it was still it's own company in Germany, and now even bigger since being purchased by Novell."

Comments

Slackware

[big_groo]

Learn to do things without pretty GUIs. That's the best way to learn. Learn how your system works. LFS is good, but overkill, IMHO.

Re:Slackware

[Pros_n_Cons]

Learn to do things without pretty GUIs . That's the best way to learn

I'm still learning when using a GUI, I'm just learning how to do a task without reading a manpage.

Re:Slackware

[JabberWokky]

In Konqueror, you can use man:ls style URLs. Or simply a url of the form '#command'. For KDE commands, you can also open a tutorial by using a URL like help:knotes. Like all KDE extended URLs, they can be used virtually everywhere in KDE - try hitting alt-F2, and then type "man:ls". No need to ever use the mouse.

--
Evan

Re:Slackware

[Pros_n_Cons]

Fedora is a "GUI distro" why do people think if there is a GUI scripting or CLI commands are not allowed? For every system-config* tool Fedora has there is an ncurses app, or file you can edit with VI that is compatible.
When someone says CLI is more powerfull what they are really saying is, my favorite distro doesn't have a GUI for everything yet. Look guys, we all use the same apps, just some of us have the _OPTION_ of using a GUI to configure it. It doesn't make us less intelligent than you.

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

"Learn to do things without pretty GUIs."

In Linux using pretty GUIs isn't just a bad idea, it's impossible.

Re:Slackware

[rampant mac]

"Learn to do things without pretty GUIs. That's the best way to learn."

Why?

I can't wait for your reply...

Re:Slackware

[big_groo]

"Learn to do things without pretty GUIs. That's the best way to learn."
Why?
I can't wait for your reply...

What if there is no GUI? Not all servers have a 'Start' button...

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

This guide is for beginners. How many beginners do you know that are going to be setting up servers?

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn to do things without pretty keyboards and monitors: use punch cards. That's the best way to learn. Learn how your system works. LFS is good, but overkill, IMNSHO.

Re:Slackware

[kbranch]

Because sometimes it's just the best way to do something. I always keep at least one terminal window open, so if I want to find a file I just switch to it and type 'locate file'. In Windows, you'd have to click Start->Find->Files, then beat the clippy equivalent into submission, and then type in your search term.

The same is true of most Start Button based things. If I want to install a new program, I just type 'emerge package'. Want to start an app? Just type the name. Check for wireless? 'iwlist scanning'. Obviously you have to have gotten used to the CLI and memorized the commands, but it's much easier for many things once you do.

There are some things that a GUI is better suited for (browsing, word processing, etc), but the CLI is just the easiest way to do a huge number of things.

Re:Slackware

[mattdm]

"Learn to do things without pretty GUIs. That's the best way to learn."

Why?

I can't wait for your reply...


Because a GUI only allows you to do tasks which the GUI designer thought to create a button for. The *nix command-line interface, with its "everything is a file" plus "tools do one small thing and do it well" design priciples, provides a rich environment where you can do almost anything you can imagine -- including shooting yourself in both feet. But *that's* very educational, and since it's only a metaphor, not really so bad.

Re:Slackware

[Speare]

If you learn how to do something at the command-line level, you also learn how to automate doing things at the command-line level. A simple program is just a list of commands to be performed. Few things that are GUI-driven support any notion of automation. You become a slave to the mouse wasting time shoving around widgets, instead of the computer being a slave to perform your bidding.

Re:Slackware

[aussersterne]

Becuase users are already familiar with pretty GUIs, and the things that they always need help with are outside of pretty GUIs.

Therefore, when they just use the pretty GUI, they don't actually learn anything, whereas when they struggle to use the command line and eventually master it, they have learned something.

Duh.

Re:Slackware

[barc0001]

Not all people need servers either...

If you RTFM, it sounds like this is more geared towards people using it on a desktop.

And it's that kind of zealotry that puts people off trying linux. You may be thinking you're helping, but what the average non-tech geek hears from a statement is this:

"Learn to do it without a GUI. Only stupid people need GUIs"

Now, like I say, that's not what you mean to say, but that's how "Learn to do things without pretty GUIs. That's the best way to learn." will be interpreted by a fair percentage of non tech people.

Re:Slackware

[poofyhairguy82]

Why?

I'll tell you why I like the commandline: I can copy lines of commands that I don't understand off webpages and fix problems in Linux without having to read a bunch of GUIs.

I yeah....I guess I don't learn anything. You're right!

Re:Slackware

[Tanmi-Daiow]

I agree totally. I took this approach when learning linux. I started on fedora, but didnt like it. Then i switched over to Slack 10.1 and i love it. It has taught me so much about linux. My friend got Suse and alls he knows is what the GUI does. When i talk about compiling stuff, he always ask how because he has become so spoiled with the YaST.

Re:Slackware

[brentl]

I used to use Slackware, and I learnt a lot about how a Linux system works. But I've moved to Kubuntu now. I don't regret the time I spent using Slack, but the fact is these days I just don't want to look through man pages and web sites to find out how to configure my system. I'm still using Linux, I still want some control over my system and I'm still willing to spend a bit of time to do it. But there's a certain point where it's just too much effort for the result.

Now if you want to spend time learning how the system works and configuring it to your exact tastes, that's fine. But I think you need accept that most other people don't. Some people have less time spare, some people just don't understand computers as quickly. You need to understand that people are different, not worse, just different.

Technology should supplement your life, it should make your life easier. People shouldn't have to understand how the system works just to browse the net or play games. Don't think your better just because you choose to. Yes it's important to learn new things but there's a lot more to the world than Linux.

Note: This rant isn't directed at you personally, it's aimed at all the pretentious geeks across the internet. Actually, not just geeks, everyone. It's OK to have extensive knowledge on a subject, but don't look down on people that are different to you.

Re:Slackware

[norminator]

In Windows, you'd have to click Start->Find->Files, then beat the clippy equivalent into submission, and then type in your search term.

How about "WindowsKey + F"? The first time in, turn off the stupid puppy, and set up the options the correct way, then a search is always just a WindowsKey+F away. No, I don't think the Windows search is all that great, but it's not that complicated or difficult to get to, either. You don't even have to switch to a terminal window. It's easier for people to learn a few keyboard shortcuts than to learn to understand a CLI. I'm not saying the GUI is better, but it's simpler for most people out there. For power users, there's CLI.

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

"Because a GUI only allows you to do tasks which the GUI designer thought to create a button for."

Because with a command line you can execute commands that the designer didn't think of creating a command for?

You can create inadequate command line tools just like inadequate GUI tools. The interface used doesn't dictate the coverage.

Re:Slackware

[JabberWokky]

I use Kububtu as well. Because I need to get work done. I first started using *nix in the early 80s, and know the commandline quite nicely. I like KDE because it uses the design philosophy of many small parts working together and exposes those parts though dcop so I can access all that power, even though a shell script.

Many people who have extensive experience at a command line happily started using GUIs when decent ones came out. Even the early textmode ones. The concept of partitioning tasks into parts of the screen and seeing your work "all on one screen" is powerful. Not to mention WYSIWYG and font and color cues on webpages.

I still use the command line a good chunk of the day - discarding web browsing or movie watching, I'm on a prompt the majority of the time. It just happens to be a konsole with a screen session on each computer.

Being good on a command line doesn't make you "better" or "more in tune" with a machine. It just means you are good on a command line.

--
Evan

Re:Slackware

[mattdm]

Because with a command line you can execute commands that the designer didn't think of creating a command for?

Basically, *yes*, because since the commands which do exist were designed to work together in synergistic ways to create new ones. This turns out to be very hard to do with a GUI, although it has been a holy grail of sorts -- remember DDE, and OLE and OpenDoc? What we've ended up with is some heavyweight component architecture systems, but not very much in the way of tools that *work* the way the Unix command line environment does.

You can create inadequate command line tools just like inadequate GUI tools. The interface used doesn't dictate the coverage.

Well, *maybe* the problem is just that no one has made very good GUI tools yet. But, based on the evidence, I see, it's just plain intrinsically harder.

Re:Slackware

[kfg]

Unixy shell commands live in an entirely different universe than GUI commands, with completely different "laws of physics."

Most of the really good Unix tools would likely be considered "inadequate" by someone who doesn't understand them, because they are designed and intended to work in conjunction with some other tool or tools.

So the answer to your question is, yes, by design.

That's the point. Unix tools are like Tinker Toys. Each piece has some nominal value in its own right, but are really pretty inadequate. Their real power comes in being able to combine them in novel ways to create your own structures.

You can't do that with GUI buttons, their whole raison d'etre being the delivery of a completely assembled "kit" at, well, the press of a button. A button designed to punch out cubes will do so much faster and easier than building the cubes out of all the Tinker Toy parts. . .

But you're hosed if you want a tetrahedron and you don't have a button for one of those.

When you realize how easy it is to make your own, custom Tinker Toy parts, commands, in a Unix shell, fully combinable with all the others, GUIs simply get left in the dust in terms of functionality. There are times when it can be faster to write a new command in C to get a job done than use a prexisting GUI, because it only takes a few mintues to write the needed command, and a few more to combine it with the standard commands, against countless, repetitive button presses to do the same thing.

I'm not anti GUI. I spend a lot of time in them. For easily predefined, repetitive tasks they have the value of being able to perform those tasks at the press of a button. But not being anti GUI doesn't mean I have to pretend it's always the best way.

KFG

Re:Slackware

[dtfinch]

My first distro was RedHat 6, which I hardly touched after I installed it. I didn't really start getting into Linux until I tried Slackware, which taught me a lot about how it all works, like how to do stuff from the command line, how to configure everything, how to install software from source, and other important things like that.

Some things are hard to learn unless I force myself, but afterwards I'm usually glad I did. It's not enough that something like a command line is available. It has to be all I have before I'll really learn it. Anything with a steep learning curve can't be learned a bit at a time as you need it.

I use Ubuntu now, but despite its aim for user friendliness I still need to use bash from time to time, or log in as root without starting X. Server administration would also be hard without command line experience.

Re:Slackware

[KingPrad]

reading webpages is faster for you than clicking a few buttons in a gui? man, I remember the fun I've had with linux editing obscure files trying to get the printer or sound working...YaST in SUSE 9.2 lets me flip stuff around in a minute or two as opposed to hours of guess-and-check, reading webpages, and 8 years-out-of-date manuals.

So I'm not sure how the command line is faster. For some things yes, and certainly an expert user can do amazing things with it, but for the average user there should never be a need to drop into the command line.

Re:Slackware

[vwjeff]

What if there is no GUI? Not all servers have a 'Start' button...

While I agree Linux/UNIX/Windows sysadmins (me) need to use a CLI for many tasks, my grandmother doesn't. She is never going to administer a server.

The concept of a CLI is hard for some people to grasp, even though it is primative when compared to a GUI. When my mom or grandmother wants to open a disk, she double clicks a pretty icon. Simple enough. Typing mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy is complicated.

Re:Slackware

[Frodo Crockett]

"Learn to do it without a GUI. Only stupid people need GUIs"

Now, like I say, that's not what you mean to say, but that's how "Learn to do things without pretty GUIs. That's the best way to learn." will be interpreted by a fair percentage of non tech people.

No, the non-technical people be asking, "WTF is a GUI?"

Re:Slackware

[kbranch]

I guess I wasn't aware of that. I almost exclusively use IBM model M keyboards that lack a Windows key, so I've never bothered to look into those shortcuts.

My other examples still stand, though.

Re:Slackware

[killjoe]

Because the command line more powerful then the gui. There are things you can do in a command line that you can't do in any gui especially with piping and redirection. Furthermore by learning the command line you can script these actions and run them later very easily.

Why? Because the command line is more productive and more efficient. Sure it's harder to learn but once you learn it it's easier to use. That's why.

Re:Slackware

[Chaoticmass]

Such is the state of things in the Linux world that sometimes the way to get the most out of the OS requires plonking down into a terminal.

It took me a long time to warm up to Linux because I didn't understand how things worked underneath the pretty GUI. Coming from the DOS/Windows world I just didn't feel comfortable having the command line there and not knowing how to use it.

On one hand you have Linux distributions that largly allow you to run the system without ever needing to use the command line. This is good for helping people get on the Linux boat, and I know it helped me in the beginning.

On the other hand you have people who enjoy the command line. I can truely understand this now because I've been playing with a headless Linux box for the past few months and my only interface to it is a textmode terminal over SSH. Learning to do everything through the command line has really helped me appreciate *nix systems more and I've learned more about how Linux works than I ever did playing with the GUI (or even building Gentoo.)

Is it the best way to learn? No. Worth learning? Absolutely. Infact, I think it lends an understanding of the system that goes beyond what you can get from the GUI alone.

Every interface is a layer of abstraction between the system and the user. The GUI is a much friendler abstraction and more intuitive, while the command line is a much more intimate abstraction of the system. Each one has it's place.

Re:Slackware

[killjoe]

"For some things yes, and certainly an expert user can do amazing things with it, but for the average user there should never be a need to drop into the command line."

The question is what kind of a person are you? Are the kind of a person who wants to be just another average luser^H^H^H^H^H person or do you want to be an expert? If you want to be an expert learn the command line.

Re:Slackware

[NemesisNL]

what's this obsession with having people learn something? I just want to do what I need to do and the rest I'm not interested in. Si when I installed Suse and my nvidia card did't work I learned what to do to get it working and that's about it. Maybe the CLI is usedfull for setting up servers but maybe.....just maybe, a gui is apreciated so much by people because it is a damned good way of doing things. It's easier to learn how to use a gui so taht's what I want. I installed webmin and haven't looked back since. Got mysql and apache running like a dream and both are administered thruegh webmin.

Re:Slackware

[killjoe]

Zealotry? You call the guy a zealot because he says not all servers have a gui? Maybe you are the zealot have you thought of that? Anybody who calls somebody a zealot because of how they think OTHER people will interpret something he said is worse then a zealot. You are simply insane.

Re:Slackware

[Rageon]

When I saw the title "Beginner's Guide to Linux Distros", my first thought was "I wonder if they'll find a way to explain how to use Linux without looking at any kind of code/text. So comments like this don't really surprise me. And it's exactly why Linux is still Linux, and Windows is king, like it or not. I know computers pretty well. I thought the CS program I went through was an utter joke, and I've used computers for about 20 years. That said, I absolutely hate the fact that I can't install and use LInux without having to edit text files. Seriously, even MS realized that people didn't want to edit autoexec and config files. They ditched them in 1995!! That's 10 years ago. You'd think that someone could come up with a way to find a way to use Linux easily in that time. I guess not.

Re:Slackware

[0racle]

Too many.

Re:Slackware

[MECC]

"Learn to do things without pretty GUIs. That's the best way to learn."
Why?

I can't wait for your reply...

I would suggest this:

It is like the difference between someone who experiences classical literature only through movies, and someone else who reads the actual novels.

The latter forms understanding free from the interpretation of directors, actors, and editors. The former is definitely missing something in perhaps that they are one step away from the original work and substance. It has, I think, something to do with the mental process of abstractly understanding any given thing, be it an expression or a process physical or logical.

Its as though the act of methodically reading and thinking as opposed to seeing a picture changes how one processes things. Its true that a picture is worth a thousand word, but the question then arises, which thousand words?

The desktop metaphor may work well for a filesystem, but does it work equally well for all things computer related? Does it help one basically grasp the notion of a network? Threading? Memory management? It seems to me not.

Re:Slackware

[pooh666]

You can't learn anything without reading the man pages. Simple as that..

Re:Slackware

[Kurisuteru]

Heh... I must be an old fart at heart, then. Sometimes I certainly feel like one (at 26). I was attracted to Linux mostly because it looked difficult. Now please bear with me, I'll get to my points soon. First a tiny bit of background.

I first tried some version (1.x.y) in '94 but it threw a kernel panic almost instantly (I reasoned it was due to my 540MB Conner harddrive using some kind of "EasyBIOS") and didn't know how to fix it (didn't have the 'net to look to for help either). I put it away, and installed Win95 (alpha :). Years passed.

I've now used Slackware since 7.1, currently running 10.0 on my servers; I'll probably never use anything else on them. However, for my desktop I wanted something pretty with windows and graphics, looking to kill Windows completely. I still haven't :)

I've tried the "graphical" Linuxen since the first Corel. Since then I've been through Mandrake [8-10], SuSe [5-9.2], RedHat [5-7] and Fedora Core [2,3].

My experience is that they're all easy to install (even for a non-techie) and by default boots into a pretty-looking graphical system. But if that was everything that was offered, users with the need for little more than a web browser and word processor would be at a loss. A GUI way of configuring a complete Linux system, and all other apps being a GUI, would be so slow to use (click, click, click, type, click, type, click click) you'd develop RSI in a week. With a casual, non-techie user, fine; but the pros would commit suicude in droves. Or code a GUI app with nothing but a large text window to interface the system using self-invented textual command aliases for the GUI apps ("an atrocity, I tell you! You can't even use the mouse!" -Tilly) :)

Imagine doing a simple search/replace on text in a bunch of files with nothing but a GUI having radio buttons and checkboxen for all possible options... Of course, there would be no regular expression text input available; that would be a too difficult syntax for the user to understand. And to process those results further, you'd have to save the results and start another app to do it.
Unless an app was created specifically to do that chain of tasks. But then we'd end up with a uncomprehensible number of apps tailored to one weird, specific task. The command line just can't go away.

Re:Slackware

[Erik Hensema]

Learn to do what? Things you don't need to know? There is no reason whatsoever why you would want to learn to use the CLI when you're going to use your computer for office tasks.

Also, learning in a harsh environment (which the CLI is to beginners) usually is not the smartest and most productive thing to do. You can easily learn to use the CLI from konsole while reading manpages in konqueror, you know.

Re:Slackware

[kbranch]

Two words: tab completion. It makes your life far, far easier when using the CLI.

Re:Slackware

[IO ERROR]

People should have the option of using the GUI if they want to. The challenge is how to make the GUI nearly as powerful as the command line, and while that's probably not doable in many cases, not doing it when it can be done easily is akin to locking users out of the power which their computer could otherwise provide them. Look at Mac OS X.

I find myself in the command line for just about everything, whenever a good command line is available, but on the Mac I have been known to use the Finder instead of ls, cd, etc...and actually like it.

And we definitely need better documentation.

Re:Slackware

[m50d]

Not with KDE. If it's a KAction (which if it appears as a button and a menu item it almost certainly is) it's available through DCOP for you to script it.

Re:Slackware

[M1FCJ]

I used to use Redhat once time ago. It made sense, it was easy to administer using CLI, ncurses and GUI apps. For some reason or the other, I switched to SuSE and first FC was quite a dissapointment.

I installed FC4 recently and found a lot of differences to the old nice Redhat. Kpackage is no longer available so managing the rpms is only possible through CLI yum. It is not possible to create a software RAID array without using the CLI and using mdadm by by hand.

Ubuntu Breezy doesn't have these tools either but SuSE does. This really annoys me.

The worst thing is: Ubuntu and FC's documentation are really poor. They are (rightly) wiki bases but the content is mostly unusuable.

Re:Slackware

[PygmySurfer]

That's the point. Unix tools are like Tinker Toys. Each piece has some nominal value in its own right, but are really pretty inadequate. Their real power comes in being able to combine them in novel ways to create your own structures.

I guess you haven't seen Automator yet.

Re:Slackware

[MrHanky]

And why would Slackware be a better choice for learning "how your system works" than any other distro?

Or to break down the question: What is "your system", and why does Slackware teach it better than anything else? I thing I can answer. "Your system" is is the GNU tools collection and the init scripts, the various servers and daemons, and the various user interfaces.

In that case, you'll notice why Slackware teaches "your system" better: It's like all the other distros, with a different init. Yes, it's a different system.

So what you're saying is that Slackware is better, because it's a better way to learn Slackware. But you're not going to learn Red Hat, Gentoo or Debian better that way, no matter how poor your UIs are.

Re:Slackware

[kfg]

It looks a bit slow and clunky to me, but nonetheless a big step forward in GUI functionality.

KFG

Re:Slackware

[Toby_Tyke]

Learn to do things without pretty GUIs.

Do you buy your food at a supermarket? Learn to grow and harvest crops. Learn to hunt, skin and prepare wild animals.

See what I'm saying here?

Re:Slackware

[asciiRider]

Heres a thought.

Using the command line and using the GUI really are the same thing.

However -

Anybody ever run across a guy who just likes to click every fucking button in sight? Hell, I've even clicked through a few thing myself too quickly and regretted it.

In a nutshell, the gui does sometimes make things easier TO DO. But there it little difference when it comes to figuring out WHAT TO DO. And it's been my experience that figuring WHAT TO DO is usually the hard part.

I've met too many windows admins who like to use the GUI to figure out WHAT TO DO. They just try every option, every button, etc. This is just plain bad. They think this is normal :)

Re:Slackware

[gcauthon]

Because sometimes it's just the best way to do something. I always keep at least one terminal window open . . .

Ok, so you keep one window open so you can switch to it when you need to? I may be a little dense from time to time but aren't you describing some of the benefits of a GUI?

Re:Slackware

[gcauthon]

Wow, you can open a browser and copy syntax into the command line without a GUI? So you're a master of lynx and screen then. Hooray for you! I think you'll find that you can do this same task through X as well. Simply open Mozilla in one window and open an xterm in another window. I think you can figure the rest out for yourself. Who knows, you may learn something new about this evil GUI. For example, keeping your web browser and command line on the screen simultaneously would seem like a plus to me.

Re:Slackware

[reclusivemonkey]

Erm, because the pretty GUI isn't always available?

Re:Slackware

[colinrichardday]

Perhaps, but he could also have six consoles available. Try ctrl+alt+Fi for i from 1 to 6.

I prefer having consoles/terminals in a GUI. KDE allows 16 desktops. Do you know how many consoles you can put on 16 desktops? Besides, it's difficult to get those Elizabeth Hurley jpegs as wallpaper without a GUI.

Re:Slackware

[Rakishi]

...and everyone who uses linux wants to become a sys admin or similar. Because most other jobs really don't need it you know.

Re:Slackware

[emandres]

Or for those of us who don't like Konqueror because its a non-functioning piece of crap, you can always just open of "Konsole"(**shudder**) and type in your commands like a normal person.

Re:Slackware

[marcosdumay]

"Being good on a command line doesn't make you "better" or "more in tune" with a machine. It just means you are good on a command line."

It also means that you know how to automate tasks and you'll survive if something happens to X. Not that desktop users should know how to use CLI, but administrators should.

Re:Slackware

[Deathprong]

Hell, yes!

One of the greatest things about Linux GUI's is convenient access to the CLI.

Re:Slackware

[dodobh]

I hope your grandmom can administer a computer, or shje has a professional do it for her. like it or not, a computer is capable of running arbitrary code, and hiding the complexity does not make it go away.

Re:Slackware

[barc0001]

I know I shouldn't reply to this, but what the hell.

You want to know why I thought he's a bit of a zealot? Here's why.

Think of a city. Any city. How many people are in that city? Let's say for an average city, 200,000 people. How many of them use computers? In a first world country, probably 120,000 of them on a given day. Now, of those people, how many maintain servers? .5%? .1%? Less than that?

He looked at the writeup and the first thing that popped into his mind was to do with servers. Which is a matter of concern to only a very small percentage of the population that the article was aimed at. That is zeal for his outlook (as I gather he probably takes care of servers), hence Zealotry.
There's nothing BAD about being called a zealot, so what's with the bile you fire my way? I'm simply insane? I think you bar pretty damn low for your definition of insane. Like on the ground.

Re:Slackware

[killjoe]

You called him a zealot because of what you think other people will think of his words. That's insane. It's beyond insane.

I'll stand by my statements, you are more of a zealot then he is. But hey there is nothing wrong with being a zealot right?

Re:Slackware

[kfg]

Looks like yet another keystroke recorder to me.

A script is just a keystroke recorder as well.

This looks like a "mousestroke" recorder.

KFG

Re:Slackware

[Theatetus]

theres one major whole... you have to remember the exact command all the time

Huh? Get a shell with tab-completion. I can't remember the last time I typed the full name of a command that was longer than two letters, or the full name of any file.

I am the most productive when I'm using GNUStep/Windowmaker and doing most of my work on terminals -- it's simple ergonomics. Fewer gestures, and almost all of them with my fingertips.

Re:Slackware

[Theatetus]

My boss once said "the staff will never be able to learn to use Linux", to which I replied, "of course not, and they've never learned to use Windows, either."

People don't know how to use Windows: they learn (painfully) the 5 or 6 tasks they need to do in their job and they do them by rote. It took them about a week to learn in Windows; it would take them about a week to learn the analogous tasks in Linux (I mean, is there *really* a difference between MS Office and OpenOffice to the average user, other than being able to click a single button to save a PDF or SWF in OOo?). I've just never seen this alleged "learning curve" be much of a problem for either OS; there's little actual learning going on in either case.

Re:Slackware

[Hognoxious]

Linux has lots of pretty GUIs. Now, pretty, functional GUIs might be a different matter. I recently loaded knoppix 3.8 to do a rescue. Shudder.

Re:Slackware

[barc0001]

Actually, based on some of your other statements in this thread, I think I just hit a nerve. Seems like YOU are the zealot here..

Are the kind of a person who wants to be just another average luser^H^H^H^H^H person or do you want to be an expert?

See? THIS is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. The little digs that non-experts are losers and not worth the oxygen they consume. The attitude of everyone who uses Linux should be an expert, no excuses.

Here's a clue for you. 99.9% of people could not give a flying fuck how their computer works. They don't WANT to know how it works. It's not in their scope. They don't want to do kernel level hacking, they want their bloody email, or Yahoo news, or photos of their grandkids. They know that they move the mouse in Windows and click a couple of times and they have a printer that works. They don't want to fuck around in a config file for an hour while looking at the man pages. They don't have the experience to do that, and they don't want to invest the time to do it. And we as a computer industry have been LYING to these people for 2 decades about how goddamn easy these computers are for people to use.

To apply your line of thinking to a different discipline:

Do you change your own oil? I do.
Can you do your own tune ups? I can.
Can you swap out a transmission in an afternoon with another one from a junker? I can and have.
Can you rebuild your car's engine from a teardown? I have.
Do I have the attitude that everyone who drives a car should be able to do all of these things or they don't belong behind a wheel? Of course not. Everyone is good at something, and it's asinine to expect that the majority of the population has the time and inclination to become proficient in something like bare metal computer usage, especially when they don't NEED it.

Re:Slackware

[killjoe]

"Actually, based on some of your other statements in this thread, I think I just hit a nerve. Seems like YOU are the zealot here.."

Oh I thought there was nothing wrong with being a zealot. Are you now trying to give me a complement?

"See? THIS is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. The little digs that non-experts are losers and not worth the oxygen they consume. The attitude of everyone who uses Linux should be an expert, no excuses."

Well thanks for taking that quote out of context. I appreciate your zealotry there, I really do.

The question remains. Do you want to be an expert or do you want to be LUSER. Yes I said LUSER, the guy who thinks the CD player is a cup holder, the guy who can't tell the difference between a folder and a file, they guy who can't find the file he just saved.

Which one do you want to be? If you want to be a LUSER stick to the GUI. If you want to be bood learn the command line. That's not zealotry it's striving to master your tools.

"Here's a clue for you. 99.9% of people could not give a flying fuck how their computer works."

Learning the command line is not learning how your computer works. It's learning to use your tools effectively.

"They don't WANT to know how it works."

Learning the command line is not about lealrning how your computer works.

"They don't want to do kernel level hacking, "

Learning the command line is not about kernel hacking.

" they want their bloody email, or Yahoo news, or photos of their grandkids"

You can get all these from the command line.

"They don't want to fuck around in a config file for an hour while looking at the man pages"

Learning the command line is not about config files. But yes you will actually have READ and LEARN the tools. Nobody is going to come to your house and SPEAK the instructions to you. You do know how to read right? I mean you don't the find actual reading of instructions offensive do you?

"They don't have the experience to do that, and they don't want to invest the time to do it."

And so they will remain forever LUSERS. Poeple who are using a powerful tool without ever knowing how. Kind of picking up a popwerful gun and randomly manipulating it hoping it will do something useful.

"Do you change your own oil? I do."

Bad analogy. You don't need to change your oil in order to USE your car. You need it to maintain it.

"Can you do your own tune ups? I can."

Bad Analogy. I don't need to do my own tuneup in order to USE my car.

"Can you swap out a transmission in an afternoon with another one from a junker? I can and have.
Can you rebuild your car's engine from a teardown? I have."

Bad analogy, bad analogy.

"Do I have the attitude that everyone who drives a car should be able to do all of these things or they don't belong behind a wheel?"

Wow neither do I. I merely think people should learn to USE their tools. In the case of a car this means learning to DRIVE not to maintain your car.

After reading your post I am now not only convinced you are an insane zealot but you are also extrememly stupid. Your insane and inappropriate analogies are an excellent example. I especially loved how you think that learning the command line means you will have to start hacking your kernel that one was a doozy!.

Re:Slackware

[kfg]

Are you suggesting that you create and execute scripts by mental telepathy?

Myself I find I have to rely on recording my keystrokes in an ASCII file and then have the computer read from the file as if I had input the keystrokes from the keyboard directly.

KFG

Re:Slackware

[l_bratch]

A fair number actually. Many people get into Linux in the first place to run small servers.

Re:Slackware

[barc0001]

Thank you for proving why I shouldn't have violated my long-standing policy of replying to trolls.

An as a tip for the future, when you're insulting someone else's intelligence, you should really spell check.

but you are also extrememly stupid

Otherwise people may think YOU're the one who is extremely stupid.

Re:Slackware

[JabberWokky]

I agree totally. I just don't think that being able to use a CLI is a "better" way. Learning to use a boat and a car are both useful... depending on the surface you wish to traverse.

Or to put it another way, a semi and a super sports car can both cost the same. The sports car is pretty crappy for what the semi truck is good at and visa versa. Neither is better - they are suited to different tasks.

--
Evan

Re:Slackware

[killjoe]

Ha Ha. I picked apart your insane stupid zealotry and all you can say in return is that I can't spell.

Makes me feel good another zealot has been put in his place.

Thank you very much for the "if you learn the command line you will be forced to hack your kernel" bit though, I am going to bookmark that.

Re:Slackware

[Jomac]

There seems to be a lot of people missing the point with this - the article is about distro's for newbies, this is not about how to master shell commands or server admin, this is for newbies, if you are a sys admin, or need to do some of the more complex stuff - get a book. If you already know how to do everything - the article was never designed for you.

Although I have set-up many a Linux system, recompiled the kernel, configured X from a console and still mount drives using the command line - I am a linux newbie (imagine how scared your average linux virgin is). I thought the article was great and if we expect Linux to be taken on by the main-stream, then it needs to be less daunting for the average end-user - most of them have never heard of linux and even more have never heard of /.

Re:Slackware

[vwjeff]

I hope your grandmom can administer a computer, or shje has a professional do it for her. like it or not, a computer is capable of running arbitrary code, and hiding the complexity does not make it go away. Yeah, it's called VNC and me. Oddly enough, I find she learns quickly and keeps information when compared to my students and coworkers.

Re:Slackware

[aussersterne]

Um, if you'll check the parent to which I replied, you'll find that the question was about "the best way to learn."

That's why. Because that's the question I was answering. If the question was about the best way to fix a flat or eat a cake, we wouldn't even be here.

If you want to challenge the assumption that learning is a good thing, be my guest. But I wasn't even considering the value statement, just explaining why a CLI is a better place to learn than a GUI, in response to someone else's question about the best place to learn.

Re:SUSE

[mvdw]

Pronounceable... interesting concept that. One would think that if pronounceability was a major concern then one would choose a slashdot ident with that property...

a good resource

[udderly]

I use Linux and there's some fairly major distros that I don't know that much about. The article seems fairly free from hype and bias. That's the kind of thing I really appreciate.

Re:a good resource

[rmm4pi8]

But it doesn't say hardly anything meaningful about the various distros. Let me pick on his treatment of Mandriva, just because it's the one I know the most about, but the rest struck me as equally shallow.

1) In what way are Mandrake's /etc files less hackable than Fedora's? Or is this just a bland assertion made because the GUI tools are available? Unlike YAST, the drak tools don't get confused if you hand edit files, which I do all the time.

2) Why does he mention yum and apt-get, but not urpmi which is Mandriva's equivalent. And are there really more apps in Fedora's package trees than Mandrake's?

I think you'd be much better served by distrowatch.

Re:a good resource

[TheGuruMan]

Problem is, distrowatch doesn't do what this guy's trying to do, which is to produce a brief, easy to read, and easy to understand summary of the biggest distros.

Unfortunately, his attempt at doing so isn't that great, for the reasons you mentioned. It glosses over lots of useful information while getting stuck in details that beginners probably don't care about anyway. And he succumbs to acronym soup (HAL, KDE, GNU, CLI) without explaining any of them.

Re:a good resource

[ladislavb]

distrowatch doesn't do what this guy's trying to do, which is to produce a brief, easy to read, and easy to understand summary of the biggest distros.

It does: http://distrowatch.com/major

Re:a good resource

[TheGuruMan]

My bad. I'm not sure I'd recommend that page to a complete linux n00b, but you are right there.

SuSE Pronunciation

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought that SuSE was pronunced "zu-zah". This is the way it has always been pronounced by most German-speking SuSE experts I know.

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[Anonymous Coward]

And how can vowels be "hard" or "soft" anyway? Consonants are hard or soft. Vowels are short or long, or, as what I think they meant incorrectly in the case of SuSE, silent.

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[StressGuy]

With the small second letter, I always thought it was an acronym so I always referred to it as
"S-U-S-E". No one ever corrected me.

Oh well....

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[debilo]

I believe SuSE stands for Software- und Systementwicklung (software and system development), so the correct pronunciation would be "su-zeh".

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[big tex]

I'd always heard that it was an acronym, and wikipedia seems to agree.

Apparently, SUSE = "Software- und System-Entwicklung" ("Software and system development").

Apparently, it was originally based off of Slack, not Red Hat, so that's nested errors.

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[jspoon]

Software- und Systementwicklung

Are you sure that's not Software- und Systementwicklung? It makes a lot more sense to take the word that's being compounded rather than a random letter from a word you've already sampled. Crazy Germans.

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[steelframe]

OK, so I'll stop saying "Suzy", but what about Debbie-Ann?

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[KillerDeathRobot]

I was a linguistics major for a while, but I think the problem with expecting people to use terms like aspirated or tense is that most people don't know what those terms mean (really, they're linguistic jargon). Thus even if the speaker learned, the hearers wouldn't understand.

What you're wishing for is for everyone to become more educated, and while it's certainly a noble wish, it's also not entirely realistic.

Also, I've never heard anyone saying a soft c to mean anything other than a c that sounds like an s, so I don't see what benefit there'd be to saying the latter. (I'm not sure what a soft t would be in contrast to a hard t, perhaps a th sound?)

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[Arker]

Soft tends to only have meaning within a phonological and orthographical system. For instance, while both English and Swedish have soft 'g's, in English that means the g is realised as a 'zh' sound, while in Swedish it's more like an English 'y.' The only sensible parsing I could make of a 'soft e' in English would be a silent e. BTW, the linked page has already corrected that big of misinformation, although more remains. But back to what you wrote, a soft c in English is obviously an 's' sound, but in, for instance, Italian, it's what we would write as 'ch' (and, to confuse English speakers trying to learn Italian even more, 'ch' is used in Italian to indicate a 'hard c' in a position where it would normally be soft.) In Castillian Spanish, it's a 'th.' So, if I had to guess at what someone might mean by a 'hard' and 'soft' 't' in English, the only thing I can come up with off the top of my head would be to parse 'hard' as 'aspirated' - but most non-linguists don't seem to notice that English actually has both, and a linguist would simply say 'aspirated' instead I would think.

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[Ecko7889]

Why not just soose?

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[Quattro Vezina]

Eh, that's how I've always pronounced it, based on what I've heard about German pronunciation.

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[thirty2bit]

I wrote to SuSE/Novell a couple months ago about the pronounciation in order to settle the controversy between a couple friends and myself.

The response from them was that it is pronounced "zoo-suh".

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[croddy]

the thing with linguistics jargon, like computer jargon, is that it's consistent, and if someone wants to look it up, the documentation is available.

the problem with describing the "u" and "e" as "hard" and "soft" is that it's not only vernacular, but it's being misused. the words he's looking for, to imprecisely describe vowel pronunciation, are "long" for the u and and "short" for the e -- "hard" and "soft" are used to imprecisely describe consonants.

the four phonetic segments in "SuSE" are:

1. voiceless alveolar fricative ("s")
2. unrounded close back vowel, accented ("u")
3. voiceless alveolar fricative ("s")
4. schwa (a mid-central unrounded vowel) ("e")

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[exile D-K]

I always figured it was pronounced "zu-zah", similar to "Zuse" in Konrad Zuse, an early German computer pioneer. In fact, I've always wondered whether SuSE/Zuse was a double-entendre.

Re:SuSE Pronunciation

[Jesus_666]

Note that common usage in Germany is as follows:

1. voiced alveolar fricative (IPA z)
2. long rounded close back vowel, accented (IPA u <triangle colon thingy>)
3. voiced alveolar fricative (IPA z)
4. schwa (IPA <rotated e>) (Why the hell doesn't /. support &#xxx; type character entities? Ever heard of Unicode?)


Note: IANALinguist, but I'm currently in the process of making up a (hopefully) somewhat linguistically sound language using a tutorial. You do learn a bit there.

Re:SUSE

[XanC]

I'm not marketing my Slashdot name to PHBs. Although I wonder if that's been tried...

Summary

[823723423]

[1]
Currently, the biggest distros not derived from RedHat or Debian are Slackware and Gentoo which also have their own package management systems with various advantages/disadvantages
[2]
Now with Lycoris (just purchased by Mandriva), Xandros, Linspire, and a number of others, Mandriva no longer is known as the most dumbed down distro, but still is very good for people new to GNU/Linux
[3]
There are plenty of ground up distros, but most are derived either from RedHat using RPMs (RPM stands for RedHat Package Manager) or Debian using dpkg files

Re:Summary

[oncebitten]

Actually, according to http://www.rpm.org/ RPM stands for RPM Package Manager (sort of like GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix).

Re:Summary

[reverius]

It was originally the RedHat Package Manager, as it was designed specifically for RedHat.

See here.

Progressing

[Eternauta3k]

The user will change distros as he adquires skill... just start with an easy one.

Re:Progressing

[cthulhu11]

The desire to not lose their browser bookmarks and other files will discourage most people from switching distributions.

SuSE != 'sue with an S on the end'

[Anonymous Coward]

SuSE is phonetically pronounced soo-suh.

Re:SuSE != 'sue with an S on the end'

[TykeClone]

SuSE is phonetically pronounced soo-suh. Cue the John Phillip SuSE sountrack here...

Re:SuSE != 'sue with an S on the end'

[WilliamSChips]

No, zoo-zuh. Prevocalic S makes the /z/ sound in German.

Re:SuSE != 'sue with an S on the end'

[AFairlyNormalPerson]

SuSE is phonetically pronounced soo-suh.

No, zoo-zuh. Prevocalic S makes the /z/ sound in German.

Yes. I agree, but you both miss the finer point of the german language: you must yell it... loudly.

Re:SuSE != 'sue with an S on the end'

[houghi]

http://houghi.org/suse/suse.mp3
That is the German opronounciation. As with other languages, they will be pronounced differently.

Just as Paris in English and French (and german ...) is pronounced differently, or my nick is pronounced differently (in the same directory, if you are interested)

Re:SuSE != 'sue with an S on the end'

[Arker]

That's a reasonable English approximation. If you really want to sound like you work there, it's more like 'zoozer' though.

Re:SuSE != 'sue with an S on the end'

[flatface]

Is it appropriate to call you a grammar nazi?

Distrowatch

[vasqzr]

For a less biased review site, check out Distrowatch. They also link to independent reviews.

eh...

[ltwally]

"...The beauty of Slack is in its simplicity. The core of the OS is based off of BSD, whereas Debian and RedHat are based off of AT&T UNIX..."

eh... Is this guy smoking crack or something? I've played with Slack, and have multiple FreeBSD boxes. While Slackware might be the least graphical (and thus, more arcane -- like the BSD's) linux distro out there, it is not based off any BSD that I've ever seen. The kernel is linux, the userland utilities are all GNU, and the location and configuration of all the system files is definitely not BSD related.

I dunno... while much of this dude's article seemed accurate, after reading the above, I've come to the conclusion that even after all his years of experience, he's still a newb... or he's just plain smoking crack.

Re:eh...

[Anonymous Coward]

He means that Slack's "culture" (file structure, interface, init script style, etc.) is in the spirit of BSD, not that it's code is BSD based...

Re:eh...

[Anonymous Coward]

He is probably talking about the structure of everything, most notably the init scripts. Slackware uses BSD style init scripts, while the others he mentioned use System V style init scripts.

It was poor wording, but what he said makes sense if you think of it that way.

Re:eh...

[datadriven]

I've tried every major distro available. One of the main reasons I settled on Slack was because of the init system. The beauty of the init is that it is NOT system v init, there's no tangled mess of symlinks in Slack. Just a few WELL COMMENTED init scripts.

Re:eh...

[ari_j]

And he claims that "sue with an S on the end" is a long U and short E in SUSE. Last time I checked, "silent" and "short" are not the same. Newb, on crack, or whatever else - he's an idiot.

Re:eh...

[Brandybuck]

Slackware is not based on any BSD. But it's init system is unique among distros in that it copied the older style BSD init system.

Re:eh...

[Feztaa]

He's referring to the init system. Debian and RedHat use sysvinit (this is where you get /etc/rc#.d for each runlevel containing symlinks to scripts in /etc/init.d essentially), slackware uses the "bsd style" init which is basically just a bunch of scripts that just run on boot as far as I can tell (I've never looked at it that closely).

Although I agree it's a very poor explanation.

Re:eh...

[Majix]

Slackware's init system is absolutely SysV if you look under the hood (or even just at the slackware package name). It's just that it SysV stuck at r2, before the now-standard symlink structure was introduced.

Sometimes people like to call it BSD-"style", although it has very little to do with BSD except the lack of symlinks, which is usually the only thing its proponents can name as a "feature". Another common theme among people who prefers this style is usually a complete lack of understanding of how a modern SysV is managed (hint: it does not involve creating or removing symlinks yourself). The point of SysVr3+ system is how it integrates with the packaging system and how services can *easily* be modified in pre/un-install targets of packages without bothering the user. It is completely unacceptable in a system of any complexity such as a Linux distribution that a package would by itself modify some file shared among all services, which is what you need to do to achieve the same effect on Slackware.

I'm not saying Slackware's system is bad, it's good if you value a little *administrator* simplicity over a whole lot of end-user's simplicity. I, and apparently most Linux distributions these days, seem to value the later a lot more.

Re:eh...

[datadriven]

No, it's really not sytem v, but has compatibility with system v
http://www.slackware.com/config/init.php

Since version 7.0, Slackware includes System V init compatibility. Many other Linux distributions make use of this style instead of the BSD style. Basically each runlevel is given a subdirectory for init scripts, whereas BSD style gives one init script to each runlevel.

The rc.sysvinit script will search for any System V init scripts you have in /etc/rc.d and run them, if the runlevel is appropriate. This is useful for certain commercial software packages that install System V init scripts and scripts for BSD style init.

Re:eh...

[Majix]

The init, inittab etc. files in Slackware all come from the sysvinit-*.tgz package, the only init package Slackware ships these days. It really is vanilla SysV init if you examine the binary, same as you will find on Fedora or Debian or what you can download from upstream. It's usually even the latest available release whenever Slackware is released.

The default scripts and the directory layout just aren't in SysV style, hence the confusion.

Hard U? Soft E?

[R.Mo_Robert]

I don't claim to be a linguist, but WTF is a "hard U" or "soft E"? I'm familar with "long" and "short" (and their accepted definitions in modern English) ... but hard and soft vowels?!

Were they confusing this terminology with that used for consonants, such as "hard g" or "soft g"?

Re:Hard U? Soft E?

[mattdm]

Hard means you pronounce it, soft means you don't. Sorta. They're trying to convey it's one syllable (suse) and not two (su-se).

Which is interesting, given that the SuSE FAQ says otherwise:

SuSE, pronounced soo'-suh, comes from the German acronym, "Software und Systementwicklung (Software and System Development).

Which makes more sense to me given my (limited) knowledge of how to pronounce German words....

Re:Hard U? Soft E?

[medgooroo]

Around the world, thousands of geeks are saying "soosah, suuuseeee, sUse, zeuss, suus..." under their breath. how many others are also getting strange looks?

Re:Hard U? Soft E?

[Jesus_666]

Note that after the name change, "SUSE" expands to "SOFTWARE- UND SYSTEMENTWICKLUNG!!!11"


PS: AFAIK the correct expansion is "Software- und Systementwicklung". The dash means that both "Software" and "System" are supposed to be compounded with "entwicklung". So, the expanded acronym can be further expanded to "Softwareentwicklung und Systementwicklung". (Compare: "software and system development" vs. "software development and system development")
You didn't really think that we'd use a language with support for large word compounds without developing some kind of compression algorithm, right?


PPS: acronymfinder.com expands it to "Gesellschaft für Software- und Systementwicklung MBH" ("Gesellschaft mbH" is similar to a limited liability company in the US).

my linux experience...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been raised on Windows, but tried distros off-and-on for the past 5 or so years starting in college. I never really got comfortable enough with it to leave it on my system for very long doing anything important, but recently I made an effort to find an easy distro to build a Samba server.

Went through Debian, Mandriva, Suse, but settled when I got to Fedora. Of them all, it was an easy install and surprisingly easy to configure the Samba server. I'm CLI-defficient, so its GUI tools to configure/manage were what I couldn't find in any of those other distros (or if they are there then they're too hard to find!)

I definitely agree that most savvy Windows users will find Fedora's setup more intuitive than the other distros!

Re:my linux experience...

[toddestan]

Call me strange, but I just made a streaming radio server out of Damn Small Linux. It was pretty easy actually - take an old crummy Dell Celeron 700Mhz, pull out all the good bits, stick a 128MB Dimm and a 1GB harddrive back in, partition the HDD and install DSL, download and configure Shoutcast for Linux, set up SSH server & seti@home, and be done! Works well, only took a couple of hours, and I learned a lot from doing it in such a "barebones" distro.

The best part of DSL is it's using less than half the RAM and none of the swap space. If I had a 64MB DIMM laying around, I would reclaim the 128MB in the machine, but I don't :/

But people don't want to learn.

[CyricZ]

Most people aren't interested in learning how to not use a GUI. They want to check their email. They want to browse the web. They want to pay their bills online. They want to track their spreadsheet. But most of all, they want to do such things easily and efficiently. That's why GUI-based systems like Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows are so popular.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[killjoe]

Last I checked all those things were also possible on Linux. Are you under some impression that linux has no GUI?

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[kneeless]

What a troll, but I'll bite.

Have you installed Linux lately for Desktop systems? I installed Fedora Core 4 and Ubuntu recently and was blown away by both. Both detected everything on my relatively new computer and loaded the drivers correctly. With Windows XP, I had the mundane task of installing drivers and programs manually, which isn't fun. Face it: Linux is becoming easier every day.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[CyricZ]

No, you fool. Did you read the parent post? It suggested that the best way to learn Linux was to drop down to the shell. I was stating the fact that many people don't want to use a command line. That's why GUI-based systems are so popular.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[CyricZ]

I'd recommend Kubuntu (http://kubuntu.org/). It offers you the very user friendly power of KDE, combined with the awe inspiring packaging of Debian and the quick release cycles of Ubuntu. The system will be very usable right away, but not as restrictive and Mandrive and Lycoris releases. You'll be able to hit the shell if you choose to do so, but you're not forced into using it by any means.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[killjoe]

No you were saying that macosx and windows were popular because people wanted to use spreadsheets and such. It clearly sounded like you thought it was not possible to use spreadsheets in linux.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[joeljkp]

I agree that desktop Linux is getting easier every day, but I don't see it as 'ready' yet, especially for a laptop. Ultimately, Linux (and UNIX in general) was designed for time-sharing mainframes and stuff like that, where operating conditions were relatively predictable.

One consequence of that is that nearly all Linux distros out there need to bring up a network connection before X starts, which is completely the opposite of what a laptop user wants, especially in the age of wireless network roaming and such. The only one I've seen that seems to work well with such an environment is FC4 with NetworkManager.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

"One consequence of that is that nearly all Linux distros out there need to bring up a network connection before X starts"
Knoppix?

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[m50d]

Kubuntu's KDE is not very well integrated. It's very much second fiddle to the main (gnome) ubuntu. I'd recommend mepis for a kde debian derivative with fairly quick releases.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

Linux isn't a desktop OS. No matter what people say, that's not its purpose.

If someone wants to use their computer to check e-mail, browse the web, or pay bills online, they should stick to OS X or Windows...

Ok. Could you maybe open that up a little?

See, for me linux looks like a very good desktop OS. On my old HP laptop Ubuntu works faster and more reliably than Windows 2000 that it replaced (it was also easier to install). Most of my computer use fits in to the categories you mentioned -- the fact that setting up a ssh daemon is possible is nice too, but that's just a bonus.

Now, how exactly would Windows or OS X do those three things you mentioned better than my (pretty much out-of-the-box) Ubuntu installation? I'm trying not to label you a troll, but you just gave no explanation to your opinions...

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[colinrichardday]

Linux was designed for time-sharing mainframes? Is that why Linus wrote it for a 386?

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[colinrichardday]

Linux isn't a desktop OS. No matter what people say, that's not its purpose.

Linus Torvalds has stated that he is more interested in the desktop side on things. It is also my purpose in using Linux.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[joeljkp]

The UNIX system as a whole, of which Linux is a clone.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[xs650]

Linux isn't a desktop OS. No matter what people say, that's not its purpose. With that in mind, people shouldn't be moving to it with the desktop OS mentallity.

Relax, it's not like there is only one copy of Linux in the world. It is actully possible for people to do things you do not approve of with Linux while you do what you want to do with Linix.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[colinrichardday]

Actually, UNIX was first designed for the DEC PDP-7, which is a minicomputer. UNIX was designed to be multiuser and multitasking, but not just for mainframes.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[Arker]

See, here's where you're wrong. Fundamentally.

Linux is not an OS. Linux is a kernel. Suse, RedHat, Slack, Debian, etc. produce OS's based on that kernel, but they're all different.

And that kernel is just as suited for Workstations as Servers. Any specialisation is at higher level. It may be that some Linux-based Operating Systems are as you say (although I dispute that as well, any of them work quite well for using the web and email) but Linux just provides access to the hardware, very efficiently, which is what you need in a kernel, whether running a server or a workstation.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[petermgreen]

X for local apps uses unix domain sockets and even if it did use ip the loopback interface can be up even with no external network up.

what issues exactly are you having?

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[poofyhairguy82]

That's funny. I have a relatively new computer (A64 based mobo, ddr, sata, etc.), but I still have problems with sound and other issues when installing both ubuntu and fc4. Now as for programs, when we're talking about FOSS, you have to know what to download to be able to play DVDs, MP3s, etc., which most people don't. I love linux, but it ain't ready for prime time.

Prime Time=presinstalled OS as an option on computers.

If that happened tomorrow (or yesterday at Wal-Mart) these problems go away.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[joeljkp]

Mainly distros like Gentoo and FC3 insisting on starting a network interface before X. If one isn't present, things start failing (apache, ntp, sshd) and it's a giant hassle.

FC4 seems to be working fine though, so we'll see.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[ultranova]

Mainly distros like Gentoo and FC3 insisting on starting a network interface before X. If one isn't present, things start failing (apache, ntp, sshd) and it's a giant hassle.

Maybe I'm missing something really obvious here, but... why do you want to run apache without a network connection ? And if you only run it to serve local users (to use a web browser as a frontend to a database, for example), why don't you simply edit the configuration and have it bind to the loopback address (127.0.0.1) only ?

Why you care if sshd fails to start up without network connection is beyond me, thought - it's not like anyone could connect to your machine remotely in such a case anyway.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[joeljkp]

Because on a roaming laptop with a wireless connection, the network usually comes up after you've logged into X, when you can select the network to connect to and other stuff.

It's really a weakness with the init system, rather than X or anything else. If the network isn't up during the init process, stuff that "requires" a net connection (apache, ntp, sshd) fails very visibly, and must be manually restarted once a connection is established.

On Windows, they just start and sit there until a connection is established and usable, without the user having to worry about it.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[ultranova]

Because on a roaming laptop with a wireless connection, the network usually comes up after you've logged into X, when you can select the network to connect to and other stuff.

Maybe you could use a Makefile for system init. Simply create starter scripts for services that touch a lock file in tmp directory (or, preferably, a memory-mounted filesystem) and add rules that consider those files targets and run the scripts to generate them. Then simply add the dependencies as normal. This way you could have X started as soon as it can, and have network initialization depend on some program that's run from your xinitrc and which allows you to choose network options. You could also make external network interface keep trying to initialize forever, so apache & company will wait until it's up, preventing errors.

Startup times might even be significantly improved, since make seems to support starting multiple jobs at once (with the -j option). No more waiting while dhcp packets make their round trip !

It's really a weakness with the init system, rather than X or anything else. If the network isn't up during the init process, stuff that "requires" a net connection (apache, ntp, sshd) fails very visibly, and must be manually restarted once a connection is established.

Yes, obviously stuff that requires (without quotation marks - unless you'll explain how apache will work without network ?) network will fail to start without network being up. This is hardly the fault of the init system.

On Windows, they just start and sit there until a connection is established and usable, without the user having to worry about it.

This seems to me to be a feature of the program, not the system. There's no reason why Apache on Linux couldn't fail silently if no network interfaces are usable and simply try to rebind every few seconds.

However, I still don't understand why anyone would want Apache to bind to an external interface on a roaming laptop.

Re:But people don't want to learn.

[joeljkp]

Yeah, I could probably hack things to work. I'm just complaining that things should just work by themselves.

As to your other questions, I use Apache for localhost web site testing, sshd for emergencies, and ntp to keep my time synced. In Gentoo at least, Apache is set to require "net", which in their terms means any kind of external network connection. No external connection on boot, no Apache.

On FC3, ntp failed if there was no external connection at boot, instead of failing silently and just waiting for a connection to open up.

sshd is the same as Apache, on Gentoo at least.

Yes, all of these things could be fixed with a few small changes and some minor rethinking. My point is just that this type of thinking hasn't been taking place, at least in the distros I've tried. FC4 seems to be doing things very nicely so far though, so the time for Linux on the laptop may finally have arrived.

Awesome!

[Blaaguuu]

I will definately read through this when I have a little time to spare. I've been wanting to set up a dual boot with a linux distro and Windows XP, to see if I could realistically make the switch to Linux in the near future... a friend of mine suggested SuSe to me, and I have the ISO burned on a disc and ready to go when I format my old HDD which is currently not being used. But I'll def read through this to see if there is another distro that apeals more to me.

Got the debian releases wrong

[mattbadass]

I think he got the order of his debian trees wrong. He had it at stable>>unstable>>testing. It's stable>> testing>> unstable. Testing is to test it before it becomes stable. Unstable is, of course, unstable. Just in case anyone reads this and uses the info. And yes, i'm being pedantic :)

Re:Got the debian releases wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that he writes:

"Debian operates with 3 major trees, stable, unstable, and testing, and the bleeding edge experimental tree."

Somehow, that seems to add up to ... four.

Re:finally...

[rmm4pi8]

Do "newbs" know what HAL or curses are or even necessarily the differences between KDE and GNOME? His use of terminology would be baffling if I didn't know a fair amount about Linux.

Slack-current

[KillerBob]

The guy's information is a little out of date.... For one, while it isn't a GUI-driven installation, Slack's install *is* menu-driven. If you read what you're presented with when you boot off the install CD, it's pretty obvious, too. It says very clearly, partition the disk, then type "setup". It even suggests using cfdisk to partition the disk if you want a "gui". I'd hardly call it arcane, since the information is given to you without your needing to hunt for it.

There's some assumption that you know what you're doing, and Slack doesn't set X as the default runlevel, but there's also a really helpful book available for free at Slack's website. About the only thing you really need to know is that RL4 is X, not RL5. That, and that it uses BSD init placement (/etc/rc.d/) instead of SysV (/etc/rc.d/rc.X/). Other than that, it's Linux. What works for one distro will work for Slack. Only there's probably already a package so you don't have to compile from source, just check linuxpackages.net first.

Also, Gnome has been moved to /pasture. It's not in -current.

My pronunciation of SUSE is my password

[noidentity]

Does it require voice authentication with the proper pronunciation of "SUSE" or something? Reminds me of the whole section on Bjarne Stroustrup's home page on how to pronounce his name.

Maybe it's me

[serutan]

I've tried installing Mandrake 8, 9 and 10, SUSE and Debian on my old P350, and the only install that didn't croak was Mandrake 8, and with that one I never could get the sound to work. I assume it's my hardware, but then of course that box ran Win98 just fine. I would like to learn Linux and get away from MS, and I have this nice old machine to play on. I keep hearing how easy it is, so wtf?

Re:Maybe it's me

[HermanAB]

Well, it is always hard to get things to work on either a really old, or a really new machine. However, I suggest that you install Mandriva 10.2LE and install all the window managers and run KDE when you want fancy screens and IceWM when you want to get things done more quickly.

Re:Maybe it's me

[xsspd2004]

My "Web TV" machine is a 333 Gateway with Ubuntu and scrounged up 256mb, 2 3.2gb HDs and Nvidia GF 256mb card with TV out. (Yes the NV card is worth more than the computer, but it was given to me.)

Re:Maybe it's me

[KwKSilver]

Mepis or Ubuntu for a hd-install. The Mepis standrd disk doubles as a Live-cd. Puppy-linux is a very light live cd: super-fast with a nice app-selection.

Re:Maybe it's me

[torpor]

Try MEPIS, dude. Get the Live CD, boot from it. Pretty sure it'll find your sound system and set it up for you .. and if you like what you see, install it onto hard disk.

Lets hear how that goes..

He got the order wrong

[strikethree]

It should be:
Slackware
Debian
Gentoo
Redhat
Suse
Mand rake
etc.

Slackware is the oldest existing distro. It is also my second favorite. :)

Debian is... Debian is just incredible. It should be covered early on because it defines a linux based distro for anyone who has been around for a while. I do not particularly care for debian though.

Gentoo needs to be covered early because it can give you the most features with the least amount of hassle. Personally, this is my favorite distro.

Redhat, and therefore Fedora, should be covered... if only because they got their act together after 7 years of improper security practices and poorly thought out packaging. I really do not like this distro, but I suppose I should thank them for pushing me to slackware pre 3.2. :)

Suse and Mandrake have enough history to be considered important. I have no personal opinions on either one though.

strike

Linux From Scratch

[HishamMuhammad]

I'll join my voice to the ones praising Linux From Scratch. It's an amazing resource for learning how a Linux system is built.

We used it as a reference when we built the first full version of GoboLinux -- essentially following the steps of the book and adding our modifications (configure and makefile flags) to build the new directory structure, to make our "/usr"-less distro. :)

To this day, I refer to their build instructions every now and then. They also contain a good collection of security patches, so if you're into compiling your packages by hand, drop by at their site and see if they suggest any additional patches. LFS covers the basic system and Beyond LFS covers the additional stuff (KDE, GNOME, etc.).

Re:Linux From Scratch

[stinerman]

so if you're into compiling your packages by hand

Everytime I hear someone say "compiling packages by hand" I think of some guy looking up assembly equivalents of the code in question, then optimizing the assembly in his head, and finally doing an opcode translation. :-)

I wonder how long it would take to do a stage 1 install of Gentoo that way? Any takers?

Re:Linux From Scratch

[HishamMuhammad]

Everytime I hear someone say "compiling packages by hand" I think of some guy looking up assembly equivalents of the code in question, then optimizing the assembly in his head, and finally doing an opcode translation. :-)

As someone who has already done exactly what you described, in a distant Apple II past (6502 asm... large chunks of code any time you needed a 16-bit operation, what a pain) -- except for the "optimization in his head" bit of course; I resorted to plain-old paper, much easier to fix the jump offsets -- I can say the Gentoo experiment would take something in the order of centuries. :)

But seriously, while "compiling by hand" sounds funny is not that much of a misnomer. With so many tools to automate compilation out there (emerge, SRPMs and of course our own Compile) , there is definitely a distinction nowadays to be made. In the mailing lists we often ask "was that compiled 'by hand' or with Compile?"

Re:Linux From Scratch

[stinerman]

You, sir, are a better man than I.

Laptops...

[skiflyer]

I still just want a distro that works great with my Thinkpad laptop.

I've been through Debian installs so many times, and I get so close, but there's always one thing or another I can't quite get (used to be sound, now I got that working but the darn thing won't sleep anymore)... I tried Kanotix, again the sleeping issue... downloading Ubuntu now. (Yes, in case you can't tell by the list I'm a big Debian fan... but Fedora is next on the torrent list, lousy 2.7GB download though)

Is there a reason laptops are so tricky for linux, and yes I know all about linuxforlaptops.com and the other websites which cater, but still, the installs are frustrating, the wireless has finally gotten to a point where it's ok, but still not great (enabling wep and connecting to a varity of networks etc)...

Does a "for laptops" distro exist?, I'd love it, hell I'd help with it if my skills could be used.

Sidenote: The old debian installer had much better support for laptops than the new one!

Re:Laptops...

[xsspd2004]

I've had really good luck with PCLinuxOS www.pclinuxonline/pclos on ThinkPads. It's a good system overall and has Thinkpad utilties installed by default. I haven't tried PR9 but 8 and 81a worked well. I wouldn't try KDE of you have less than 256mb though.

YMMV I mostly use Ubuntu now and just keep PCLOS around for a rescue CD.

Re:Laptops...

[everphilski]

I had Slackware (7.1 i think?) working on my old Thinkpad 600. Had everything working except the modem (it was a win modem.. but didn't need it, network connection at home).

Make sure to check out www.linux-on-laptops.com. Tons of articles for virtually every make and model of notebook.

-everphilski-

Re:Laptops...

[Ninwa]

I think you'll strike gold with Ubuntu. It works great with my Thinkpad T-20, and that's a pretty old model!

Re:Laptops...

[taylortbb]

Mandrake 10.1 was done with a focus on laptop compatability. As a result all Mandrake/Mandriva versions since then (10.1 and LE2005) work very nicely on every laptop I have tried.

Also means they have good GUI tools for setting up Wireless and managing it (connecting to new networks, WEP, etc.).

Re:Laptops...

[MsGeek]

I have Debian Sarge running beautifully on my 600e. Sound and everything. http://www.thinkwiki.org/ is the place to go for Linux on ThinkPad goodness. Also get on the Linux-ThinkPad mailing list. Details also on ThinkWiki.

Re:Laptops...

[The_Quinn]

I really would like to try Ubuntu out, but I can't get past their abhorrent manifesto:

"... software whould be available free of charge..."

As someone who used to make a living developing software, I would prefer something more like:

"...software should cost as much as people are willing to pay, and software developers should expect to be paid top dollar for creating top-notch software that make people and corporations productive, happy, and wealthy!"

Of course this idea extends beyond software ... you get the idea!

Re:Laptops...

[HermanAB]

The best 'for laptops' distro is always the newest distro - whichever it happens to be - since then it is most likely to have the right drivers! So, presently, I'll recommend Suse.

Re:Laptops...

[killjoe]

It sounds like you and open source not ever going to get along. Why would you install any linux distribution or for that matter any open source software on your windows PC?

I think you should always buy your software, that way you set a precedent and you live by your ideals. Don't ever install anything free on your system and you will be helping the paid for software ecosystem.

Re:Laptops...

[grammar fascist]

SuSE puts an awful lot of work into making the OS work well on laptops. Their "powersaved" is one of the best power management tools I've ever seen.

That, and I like the GUI stuff. You can be a power user on SuSE without having to remember arcane CLI commands. Of course, if you want to, you can.

I tried Debian on my laptop and gave up after struggling with the devices for 20 hours or so. With SuSE it was all done for me.

Re:Laptops...

[The_Quinn]

Why would you install any linux distribution or for that matter any open source software on your windows PC?

For that matter, why would IBM purchase SUSE, Ximian, etc.?

OSD Charity?

I think there may be a great profit model in open source, I'm probably just not smart enough to grasp it by myself, with my limited knowledge.

In the meantime, I will not ignore the whole open source phenomenon.

Re:Laptops...

[Bootard]

I just installed Suse 9.1 on a friend's laptop and it blew me away with how easy it was. I am a not an expert in hardware or in installing linux by any means, so I was really glad when it worked fine right out of the box. The only thing that took any time was getting wireless to work, for which I used ndiswrapper. Even there, 99% of the difficulty was due to my really basic knowledge of networking and stuff like that. And that was for the cheapest laptop my friend could find. Sound, video, everything worked great with the autodetect. So I don't know about any other distros, but my experience with Suse was really good. My 2 cents.

Re:Laptops...

[killjoe]

IBM did not purchase SUSE and Ximian. Novell did. Novell did that because people were not interested in their own operating system anymore. They thought it might be a good idea to take linux, rip out the good parts of their OS and rewrite it to run on linux. We'll see if it works but it was better then doing nothing and watching the company slowly become irrelevent.

As for you I'll repeat myself. Every time you install something on your machine for free you are going against your ideals and you are encouraging open source development. If you want developers to get paid you should always buy software. If you want developers to get paid well you should always buy the most expensive software you can.

Re:Laptops...

[The_Quinn]

Thanks for the correction. Novell is the corporation I was referring to.

And, of course, as you know, quite a few other corporations (whose goal it is to make money) are involved in open source.

I've read in some forums that these companies are using open source developers as cheap, serf-like labor to make their millions. Of course, if that is in any way accurate, I don't think it could last forever - so at some point something would have to give. My poor powers of prognostication would point to a mass exodus from the open source model.

On the other hand, there may be some other paradigm shift that occurs that I am not fathoming. But I have not seen any kind of real, detailed philosophic manifesto of what open source activitist think that would entail.

As far as why I install free software on my PC: I have no problem encouraging open source development, since - as I said, there may be a great financial model to tap into. Why else are large corporations getting involved? In the meantime, I don't want to miss the train if it really arrives.

Of course, buying the most expensive software I can sounds pretty ridiculous. I want to make money. Not throw it into the marketplace indiscriminantly.

Re:Laptops...

[ms1234]

FC3 installed ok on my laptop (IBM). Biggest issue seems to be to get WLAN to work (fedoraforum discussions).

Still not sure if I should try and break everything with FC4.

Re:Laptops...

[asavage]

Ubuntu also works well on my R40 thinkpad. The wireless even automatically connected.

Re:Laptops...

[Chas]

I still just want a distro that works great with my Thinkpad laptop.

DEFINITELY try Ubuntu then. I have it working on my A31P with nary a hitch. It even likes my PCMCIA wireless B/G card (Netgear WG511T).

I have several friends on newer (and several on older) Thinkpads. And the problems are damn few.

Also, DEFINITELY hit the Ubuntu Starter Guide. Even if you're an old hand with Linux, the SG will point you in the right direction to get everything purring right from the outset.

http://www.ubuntuguide.org

Re:Laptops...

[IO ERROR]

Gentoo runs just fine on my ThinkPad R40 and everything works including that damned internal winmodem (which I don't use anyway so I don't really care). I've also used Debian and Fedora on it with no trouble at all.

Re:Laptops...

[skiflyer]

You were absolutely right... Ubuntu is virtual gold... still took a tiny bit of tinkering to get a couple things going (enabling DMA on the DVD drive, and finding the new repository lists to get used to) but I have 99.9% of the system going...

In case anyone cares I have 2 things left which I'll leave til tomorrow to look into
1) It seems to switch from eth1 to eth0 whenever it recovers from suspend/hibernate for some reason (minor inconvenience at most)
2)My grand test (mostly cause I don't know what I'm doing) getting wine to run, and specifically getting the 1 program that keeps windows on my computer (Rosetta Stone Language Software) running under it

Re:Laptops...

[(H)elix1]

Try the SuSE 'personal' edition - free if you figure out how to install via FTP, $40 for media. It picked up all the hardware on my T40p, T42p, and some of the older thinkpads I still have in service. Wireless works, bluetooth works (did not even know the T42p had that), X works. Just run the setup, hit next, next, next...

Re:Laptops...

[toddestan]

I found that Knoppix actually seems to run pretty well on Thinkpads. While I have never gone that route, you could download the newest Knoppix and try it out as a bootable CD. If it works well, do a harddrive install, get apt going, and basically have a Debian-like system.

Re:Laptops...

[killjoe]

"And, of course, as you know, quite a few other corporations (whose goal it is to make money) are involved in open source."

That's because the software market is pretty much closed now. THere are handful of companies that make money, one huge gorilla and thousands of mom and pop operations barely eking out a living. In order make headway you need to get rid of MS. As long as MS in in this marketplace nobody will be able make any real money. So companies get invovled with open source in order to do to MS what MS has done to them. Namely to cut off their oxygen supply. It's kind of working too. MS has been forced to drastically cut their prices across the board and will soon star giving away their products. They have cut R&D and are manipulating theit stock heavily to make their numbers. They still have billions of dollars and their monopoly cash cows but the armor is starting to show weakness.

" But I have not seen any kind of real, detailed philosophic manifesto of what open source activitist think that would entail."

That's because open source is more like hive intelligence. There is no leader, only a mass of people who roughly believe in the same set of basic principles. I'll sum those up for you real quick although much more can be said about them.

1) Generosity is good.
2) People of the world can benefit from free software.
3) Software generation is fun and other people should not be able to stop you from doing it.
4) Software projects should be run based on meritocracy and not some arbitrary beuracracy or marketing demand.
5) It's possible for people to collaborate despite the differences in their age, nationality, religion and political affiliation.

"Of course, buying the most expensive software I can sounds pretty ridiculous. I want to make money. Not throw it into the marketplace indiscriminantly."

You are almost there grasshopper. Meditate on your sentence for a week and you will get it.

Re:Laptops...

[Ninwa]

Glad to see it worked out for you. You may be aware of these but these are good Ubuntu resources. Maybe they can help with your problem:

Ubuntu Wiki
Ubuntu Beginner Guide
Ubuntu Discussion Forums

Cheers!

Re:Laptops...

[talis9]

I gree with the parent. If you want a distro 'that just works' on your laptop Ubuntu is the way to go. I have had Mandrake 10.0 on my laptop for some time and have never gotten around to getting Wireless Networking working properly. The Ubuntu liveCD detected everything out of the box and 'just worked'.

Now to find time to install Ubuntu properly.

Re:Laptops...

[hyfe]

Posting from Dell Inspiron using Mandrake. I too gave up on Debian / Redhat. Mandrake / SUSE both worked wonders though.

Re:Laptops...

[Excelsior]

SuSE puts an awful lot of work into making the OS work well on laptops.

Sure, as long as you have a modern laptop. I downloaded Suse with the sole intent of installing it on a laptop. The first thing the installer does is try to set up a 128 MB ramdrive. On a laptop with limited RAM (64 MB in my case), this step fails, and the installer gives up.

I've often heard the ability for Linux to run on older hardware as a selling point. And every other distro I've tried, even new distros like Ubuntu, had no problem installing on the laptop. Surprisingly, even the Suse-based Novell Linux installed without trouble.

Nice

[Transcendent]

I've been an avid BSD and Solaris user for the past 5 years, but never set foot in Linux-world (theme park anyone?) because frankly... I didn't know where to start.

This article gave me a good ground to work off of as far as what I should be looking at to start with. I wanted something that would give me configuration flexibility and a good set of packages, but I really didn't care much for graphical configurations (99.9% of my unix work is on the command prompt anyway, and I actually like the OpenBSD installer). Having it there would be nice, but I can certianly live without it. My current guess... Debian. Any other suggestions?

//Side-thought
What I must point out is that the writer used "free-as-in-beer" as least 4 times... but I guess he's free to do that.

Re:Nice

[Chas]

My advice. Play around with one of the LiveCD versions of one of your perspective distros (if any such exist). If you like what you see, move on to a full install version.

I've been raving about Ubuntu for the last half year and more now. Works really well as a desktop. Yet has everything you need to run CLI if you need to. The "Warthog" version was damn impressive. The current "Hedgehog" version is just about perfect for me. I could plunk a Windows user down in front of it, and they'd never miss Windows unless they're part of the "Wintendo" crowd.

Re:Nice

[arkhan_jg]

If you're looking for a server, go for debian (but then you run bsd, so why switch?) If it's a desktop, use ubuntu (or kubuntu for kde), as the package selection is more orientated for a desktop setup (and more often updated), but you can still use pretty much the full range of normal debian packages as well.

Another honourable mention goes to gentoo for the desktop, it's got a huge range of ebuilds and portage (package management program) is very similar to BSD's ports system. Plus, the advice forum and wiki's beat the hell out of every other distro i've run, wheras debian is pretty much the opposite.

Another distro guide

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I just found another overview of several Linux distros that may add some information to TFA.

Suse Manuals

[miyako]

Although the article mentioned YaST and the overall refinement of Suse, it failed to mention what I think is perhaps the biggest incentive to buying suse for someone new to Linux. The Documentation.
The Manuals that come with Suse are some of the best I've ever seen. Granted by the time I switched to Suse I'd been using Linux for several years and didn't find the user manual all that useful, but the administration manual is still a great reference. In fact I probably refer to it more than my Linux: Complete Reference book.
The author makes quite a point of mentioning that Suse Professional runs about $100, but fails to mention the quality of the manuals you get with it, or that you can buy an "upgrade" version, which is the full version without the printed manuals, for around $40 from Suse's website.

Re:Suse Manuals

[Chas]

Yep. I still have my old version Suse manuals sitting on my desk as reference material. Great books.

Unfortunately, I've never been able to get the distro itself working worth a damn. Even with bog standard, KNOWN-supported hardware, there's always some glitch, or nastiness that no amount of tweaking, updating, and even sometimes recompiling from scratch will rectify. This is why I stopped giving my cash up for successive versions of Suse. I miss the splefty manuals terribly. But I can live without them. A nice book isn't enough of a sop to throw someone when your distro just doesn't work properly.

Re:Suse Manuals

[pgilman]

if documentation is important to you, check out openbsd's documentation. their reputation for having the best docs in the open-source world are well-deserved.

Fedora core kernel upgrade how to?

[Travoltus]

I love Fedora 3 because of the way it sees my hardware perfectly, but I've wrecked my system once trying to compile and install a new kernel.

Is there a howto for this?

I sure do miss the nuts and bolts style of slackware, but the instant hardware recognition makes up for a lot of it. Also, RedHat FC3 is a snap to configure my LAN. I could never figure out the arcane commands needed to set up a LAN/internet connection over cable modem/router in Slackware (although hooking a single machine to DSL was insanely easy).

If I could overcome the instant hardware recognition barrier and figure out the pea soup of setting up a router/lan thing in Slackware, I'd go back to Slackware 10... Slack 9 did work fine when I upgraded the kernel...

First experience with Unbuntu.

[British]

I went through the install menus, fiddled with the partitions, and after a bunch of text screens later, it was alive.

Then I easily got samba installed & running with the package manager. Yay. This failed previously when it was a debian box(none of the d/l sites worked).

Much to my amazement, sound worked! I copied a mp3 file off a windows share(that was effortless) and boom, it was playnig in xmms.

Then I tried to edit the samba config file, but it needed me to be root. Okay, let's just put in the root password I thought i put in(it did ask me for one, right? I guses not), nada. Darn.

Just looking at google's results, looks like I can sudo in, er, or something. Or if someone replies here. I was so used to using root when I was using fedora & debian.

Me likey unbuntu. No bullshit to get things going, and more importantly, first time I ever got sound working in Linux, and I didn't have to do jack.

Mind you, 99% of this server will just end up benig used for samba, but that's good enough for me. I would like to get it to broadcast to a shoutcast DNAS server, but couldn't find any plug-in to do it.

Re:First experience with Unbuntu.

[poopdeville]

None of the mirrors worked? Are you sure you were connected to the internet? Did you try running dhclient? Did you ping the sites? Report the problem to the debian administrators?

Re:First experience with Unbuntu.

[ubernostrum]

Ubuntu doesn't set a root password in the install; the recommended way to perform administrative tasks is to use 'sudo'. The user account you created during the installation will have full sudo privileges, so just typing 'sudo foo' and providing your user account's password at the prompt will work fine.

You can set a root password by doing 'sudo passwd root', but it's really not necessary; with 'sudo' you never have to be able to log in as root or use 'su' to switch to root. Also, some people would argue that having no root password is a security enhancement (since it makes it impossible for outside attackers to try to log in as root).

Re:First experience with Unbuntu.

[M1FCJ]

I can't understand why this is a security feature?
The only possibility is you are less likely to leave a shell with root at your desktop and go and get some coffee, leaving your machine vunerable.
Surely it sets a password, it just sets it randomly and sets up the sudo trust relationship by default. Instead of attacking your PC for root access, I can as easily attack your PC for your user access, then do whatever I like, eventually.
Most of the password-related security problems are due to user mistakes. I leave my laptop with a root shell on the window all the time although theoretically I shouldn't. I shouldn't scream any root password for a particular server over the phone but ocassionally I do that as well. Whatever that gets the work done, especially in an environment security is not that strict (read: development, academia vs. banks and business).

Ubuntu

[rinkjustice]

I've tried most of the major distros in the last 6 or so years: redhat/fedora, debian (I haven't tried Debian Sarge yet)/storm/ubuntu, slackware, mandrake, caldera, gentoo/etc and even a few floppy distros. The one I like best is Ubuntu. It's not a very pretty install (I was a little alarmed at the lack of input I had during the installation process), but it's polished, nimble and alot of the useless crufty apps is happily absent. A firewall is also amiss (not a good thing and the only beef I've got with Ubuntu), but you can easily remedy the situation with:
apt-get install firestarter

If you're a regular /. reader, you've likely already heard the buzz on this newer distro, but for those newcomers wondering which linux to try, I heartily recommed Ubuntu.

Re:Ubuntu

[jrcamp]

The firewall isn't a huge issue becacuse it ships with 0 listening services by default. I guess that if you know how to setup SSH, mail server, etc. then you're smart enough to configure the firewall.

Re:Ubuntu

[MichaelSmith]

I think it would be even better if it had a graphical front end for apt.

I installed Ubuntu on my sister's machine and she really needs me to be there to run a shell and install new applications. A graphical tool would make installing software much easier for non-technical users.

Re:Ubuntu

[Slack3r78]

System --> Administrative Tools --> Synaptic Package Manager.

Fully GUI based package manager complete with search function and automatic upgrade functionality. HTH. :-)

Re:Ubuntu

[MichaelSmith]

Thanks. I must have missed that one when I was working on this Ubuntu system.

Allowable post types:

[stevobi]

1) Downside X of my distro is actually an advantage, but only if you a) are hardcore, b) need optimization.

2) Downside X of my distro isn't a problem, you just...

3) You left out that my distro does...

4) My distro has apt/emerge, therefore...

and the only reasonable response...

5) Good. We need a simple guide to the pros/cons of the various distributions and of their intended userbase.

He should, however, add that Ubuntu gives a linux user the best of both worlds - ease of use and power. My distro is the best.

Re:Allowable post types:

[dabigpaybackski]

Nobody's mentioned PC Linux OS. That's the only distro I've used that has ever configured sound correctly on boot. It rivals Mepis and Ubuntu for refinement and ease of use.

Re:finally...

[The Snowman]

Do "newbs" know what HAL or curses are or even necessarily the differences between KDE and GNOME? His use of terminology would be baffling if I didn't know a fair amount about Linux.

I agree. At the very least, he could have provided links to pages describing what these terms mean, or even a short blurb at the beginning of the article. There is much more to Linux than the distro, even for people that do not stray from the confines of the installation CDs. For example, I use Mandriva 2005. Just off the CDs, I have a choice between 8 or 9 desktops, at least 4 email clients, several web browsers, and of course the choice to run in X or the CLI where ncurses becomes an important term to know.

However, I still think this article does a good job. It talks in more abstract terms that do not overwhelm the new Linux user, while providing enough guidance that the user can narrow his search to two or three distributions. This is essential given that too many choices can overwhelm users, and most new users are used to having only one or two choices (e.g. Windows or MacOS).

too many distros

[Loconut1389]

IMHO, we shouldn't need a guide to the different distributions. Ideally a couple basic types that could be extensible into what people need- for one simple reason: cooperation. Why have all these different people fixing security and other problems in all these different distributions when we could take all those same people and put those eyes towards a much lower number of lines of code. IMHO, there's more in namesake adoration in the different distributions than there are actual differences in functionality provided. All these distributions with all their different package formats makes it that much harded for the open source developers to release source. Why should every end user have to compile from source when a package could be available, or why should every developer have to make packages for the umpteen different distributions? There isn't even a common source package format that would let you quickly build the appropriate package for your distribution. It's quite a pain at times to find some of the less common packages even for a 'major' distribution like RedHat enterprise linux or fedora core. IMHO, we need to ditch some of these and work towards a couple of perhaps more flexibly administered distributions.

Re:too many distros

[dbcad7]

I dont think it's as complicated as you make it out to be... you have RPM based distributions, DEB based distributions, and a few others package systems that are special to their distro. Slackware uses tar.gz I beleive, and that brings me to your comment on a common source package format.. well that is it ! source "tarred & gzipped" is a "common" format to all distributions (if you want to compile and build from source that is)

Usualy the distro maintainers or even users will create a package for a given distro to provide to the software developer. If it's good software then both an RPM and a Deb will be made for it.. I don't see a problem.

As a Debian user, I am partial to distros based on debain packages. There are several, and I choose to go with the stock debian sarge. I do also like a derivitive called XFLD which uses the XFCE4 gui., I also currently have Xandros installed on a seperate partition, and I like it for different reasons (it seems more buisness like and polished) but without the core start of debian these three great distros (and ubuntu) would not exist. I think they all should exist, and as Forest says.. that's all I got to say about that.

Re:too many distros

[Loconut1389]

source and source package are pretty different.

source is something that once installed is hard/impossible to roll back if you need to switch packages or do some other gyrations to get something working. There's no way to be sure you got all the malignancy if you need a clean reversion.

source has to be compiled for every machine, source packages only have to be compiled once per architecture. when you manage 400+ machines, this becomes -very- important. When you can't find a source package or a binary package (presuming its compiled the way you need it) you have to devote a lot of time depending on the package to get it ready to roll out to all of the systems.

the average user has no idea what it's like to keep that many machines up and running and get all the software on them that users need/want. In any case, quite a lot have redhat S/RPMs which is just fine for us, but there are still a handful of packages that we have to roll ourselves, and in my personal use there are -quite- a lot more that need to be done.

You also missed the point of my post- imagine if all the different eyes/hands that were working on all of the different distros worked on say two or three distributions instead. Imagine how much faster flaws would be patched and features would be added. More than that, I really don't see what is so different about some of these distributions aside from the name, some use xinetd, some use inetd, some use rcX.d directories, some use a couple of rc scripts, etc... Now if people were either willing to take the time to understand another distribution's layout (which generally shouldn't take long for a seasoned admin), we could really focus on quality and not quantity.

Re:too many distros

[dbcad7]

I have no idea of your work environment, and what your company is doing. I would think however, that it would be safer for you to only install tested software in the form of RPM and DEB.

I again hold to my veiw that there is nothing wrong with having many distributions. A distribution is nothing more than a collection of software with an installer and some customization (usually wallpaper and menu layout and such) This is over-simplification, but not by much. What sets the distros apart is focus. There are many ways to serve a customer "hamburger and fries", and the best resturant is not necessarily the one with the most customers. Service, quality, ingredients, presentation, atmosphere, and price all play a part in the over all eating experience.. but it's still a burger and fries. A distro that is to my taste and needs could probably be made to work for you as well, but isn't it nice that there is another one down the street that has onions with no pickles and is a lot closer to your taste ?

Re:too many distros

[Loconut1389]

The world you suggest with the burger coming different from different vendors sounds more like the commercial world or something like closed source where its take it or leave it.

but what we have is two completely flexible corporations where ultimately with some modifications you can make your burger however you want, but more or less chose to leave it one way.

this isnt burger king versus mcdonalds. you can chose your packaging, you can chose many things. Why not make a couple of basic types or perhaps one basic type and make it modular so you can piece together exactly how you want things to work. Either way, take one or a couple of basic types and make them extensible enough to meet or closely meet the needs of all but the most bleeding edge folks.

i just think it would better serve the world if the effort was spent on less distributions that can provide exactly what you're talking about with perhaps some modifications.

does that make more sense or meet your needs?

Re:too many distros

[Loconut1389]

forgot to add.. why have the same thing with different package formats? Isn't that like having a dozen different form factors for 1.44mb drives and expecting software developers to generate installer disks in each form factor?

Re:too many distros

[dbcad7]

http://componentizedlinux.org/

Anti-Gentoo bias?

[zanderredux]

Heck, Gentoo is the only distro where the author mentions that "more experienced" users left it but still recommend it to newbs as a learning experience.

But he fails to mention where those "advanced" users went and why it would make sense to recommend a potentially more complex distro to new non-Linux savvy users.

Being a Gentoo user myself, I agree that Gentoo is not a dpkg/rpm-based distro, and that it can take ages to compile stuff, but this blatant bias is just completely partial. He was somewhat neutral on other distros (the ones he mentioned, never mind the ones he just ignored, like Mepis), he even showed some ignorance on Slack, but Gentoo did not deserve those lines, imho!

Re:Anti-Gentoo bias?

[professionalfurryele]

My first attempt to get Linux running was Gentoo. Newbies without supervision should not be let near that distro.

I don't get the authors attitude to Gentoo. It isn't a good learning experiance for a newbie. The flexibility it offers is fantastic and once I'm smart enough I want to use it as my main distro, but if you have no idea what you are doing, run Ubuntu or Debian for a bit first...

Re:Anti-Gentoo bias?

[Leffe]

Gentoo- Like Ubuntu, Gentoo came out of nowhere and took the Linux world by storm. Gentoo is drastically different from the other mentioned distros in that it is source based. This means that with a system very similar to apt-get it allows a user to enter a command, pull the packages and dependencies needed, and install software, but instead of pulling prebuilt binaries, Gentoo pulls the source code and compiles everything. This means Gentoo has a major learning curve compared to other distros, but it makes up for this with superb documentation.

????

The real bonus is that the user becomes VERY familiar with the operating system and how it is put together.

????

Many GNU/Linux enthusiats may not use Gentoo anymore, but strongly recommend it as a learning experience for new users.

????

On the other hand, it certainly provides a very fast, stable, and usable system. The package archives aren't nearly as thorough as that of Debian, but certainly better than any other. The other downside is the time involved to use the system. To get a fully compiled system from scratch installed can take days, and when you need to do any major upgrading, expect your system to be chugging on code for hours.

No really, my P2 can recompile every package I have installed in two days. And that's many more packages than you'll compile when you first install Gentoo.

Re:Livening the discussion...

[dhasenan]

More like:
1) Fedora Core 4: an updated version of the hats you see in gangster movies, except the brim comes separate.

2) SUSE: too obvious

3) Gentoo: pretty

4) Slackware: the guy in the cubicle next to mine

5) Lycoris: Twizzler?

6) Mandriva: the reason New York City traffic is so bad. (No, really, female drivers aren't bad. They're the only ones who stop to let me bike past.)

Okay, I'll stop while I'm ahead.

from teh author

[jwhamilton]

So, first wow I'm on slashdot. Second, I'm shocked I'm not getting flamed more. Third, sorry I missed so many distros. MEPIS is super and definatly should have been included. It was late and caffine started wearing off. And I'm wrong about SuSE.

Re:from teh author

[Zwets]

MEPIS is super and definatly should have been included. It was late and caffine started wearing off. And I'm wrong about SuSE.

Um, am I the only one who questions if this is really the author and should be modded up to +5??

Re:from teh author

[Ikester8]

Considering he just posted the same comment to TFA, I's say there's a good chance he's the author. As for the +5, well...

Experienced Gentoo users

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo users are to experienced Linux users as ricers are to race car drivers.

Re:Experienced Gentoo users

[cortana]

I expect it's 'insightful' because that is the closest moderation Slashdot has to 'true'.

Re:Experienced Gentoo users

[**loki969**]

Experienced Linux users are too well informed about the pros and cons of Gentoo, to make such nonsense claims!

Every tool has its purpose! So bashing any distro in the way you did, just proves your ignorance!

Re:Experienced Gentoo users

[psyeye]

What a useless thing to say. Gentoo is a voluntary distribution made by all sorts of people for all people.

Discriminating people off their used distribution is childish beyond words - labeling something like this "Insightful" is a disgrace.

Way to go, people!
o.O

psyeye

Re:Experienced Gentoo users

[purple_cobra]

I'm a relatively experienced Linux user, and a soon-to-be former Gentoo user. The reason I ditched it? Too much temptation to fiddle with things that work so you can get them to work 'better'. I've broken (and fixed) various essential and non-essential parts of the installation but I'm giving up and installing SUSE later this week.
As one of the other replies mentioned there's little real-world performance advantage gained on a modern desktop machine, but if it makes people happy...

Re:Experienced Gentoo users

[**loki969**]

True! ;) --- But bashing the users in general, is just as ignorant as bashing the distro. There are stupid people in any distro's userbase. Gentoo is no exception here. But claiming that every Gentoo user is a "ricer" (what a rassist term, btw), is just stupid, childish, ignorant, whatever....!

I'm gonna miss slackware! =(

[v3xt0r]

I hope Pat Volkerding gets better, it will be a HUGE loss to the linux community if slackware disappears.

I've used most of the distros available... Redhat, Fedora, Gentoo, Knoppix, Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE, and Yellow Dog, but I feel most comfortable w/ Slackware.

I don't really agree with the author from the article link, when he says...

"It is a bit more simple but less powerful to hack around the init scripts and change the real guts of the OS"

I feel that is the most in-accurate statement possible, as that is part of the main reason I enjoy slackware so much, compared to say SuSE's moronic boot-script 'logic', or distros that use inetd (by default) to launch most of the server applications.

Slackware is one of the easiest os's to customize and optimize to do specifically what you want with, whether it be a development/production environment on a single system, or even on a multi-node clustered environment, so I have to also disagree when he says...

"You don't build the system from the ground up like Gentoo"

Gentoo's installation is not builing the system from the ground-up, it's choosing which packages to install, which is also an option in the slackware installation process.

Overkill?

[tezbobobo]

I don't agree that LFS is overkill. It has its place. In terms of the learning curve, its about halfway. For newbs it is out of the question. When I did it though I'd been using Linux for about 2 years and that was right for me.

Summary:

LFS brilliant for learning Linux

LFS definately not for newbs.

Hardly

[Arker]

It's actually full of errors.

He's already corrected the first one (SUSE, being from Germany, is not pronounced with a silent 'E') but more remain. For instance, he confuses Debian testing and unstable, reversing them.

Re:Hardly

[dbcad7]

I agree with you on errors, but worse than this is it is supposed to be for beginners... If I am a beginner, what can I come out of this article with, that will guide me to a successful linux install ?

Live CD's are good, and he should encorge beginners to test drive. An actual distro for install, requires setting up the hard drive to accept it., and possibly partitioning and dual booting, if you want to have windows as well. Using his information, what distro is best for a beginner to use for this ?

Mandriva has disk drake, and that's pretty easy for a beginner to grasp, and Xandros (which he blows off) also is pretty darn easy and lets you split up an XP installed drive ... others require you to understand things like mount points, and /dev/hda1 etc..

I use Debian Sarge, but for beginners I recommend a Knoppix CD and a Mandriva set of CD's if they want to do it themselves... later, I would suggest they try debian, which will be easier now that the hard drive has been setup.

Re:Hardly

[Erik Hensema]

Also, suse was never based on Redhat. It was based on Slackware, but now uses rpm.

Re:Hardly

[Arker]

Heh, that's funny.

I use Debian Sarge, but I still think Slack is best for beginners.

I guess we have a different focus here on beginner. To me, a beginner is someone that is beginning to learn. You seem to have a different definition?

I suspect you mean users, people that don't want to learn, just want something that works with the minimum fuss. For them, I'll set it up myself, for less than the cost of XP or SUSE, and then handle routine admin tasks for a very reasonable yearly fee. In my experience they're much happier with that than any 'easy to use' distro.

Re:Hardly

[zurab]

And to think that all the author had to do was look up a wikipedia article about SUSE to get his facts. I didn't think it would be that hard to do. Anyway, SUSE hasn't been "based" on any other distro for over 9 years now, so it hardly makes any difference, especially for beginners (which the article claims it is for), to explore any historical links that have not been relevant in about a decade.

Ubuntu and Slackware

[teslatug]

Funny that the author mentions some Slackers going to Ubuntu, seeing as this slacker just gave it a shot. I haven't installed too many distros after switching to Slackware from Mandrake, but after hearing so much hype I decided to try it. At least for my system, Ubuntu turned out to be too much of a memory hog for my taste. On my laptop I have a gig of memory. With Ubuntu I had close to 600MB free with no apps running (just Gnome), whereas with Slackware I had close to 900MB free (just KDE).

Re:Ubuntu and Slackware

[ptarjan]

Linux likes to eat up the memory and allocate it for itself. You free memory is not an indication of what is actually free. Try opening a program, it will just be given some memory that was previously allocated to the kernel.

Re:Ubuntu and Slackware

[reverius]

That's a difference between Gnome and KDE, not between the distros. There's a lot more to a distro than desktop environment... both KDE and Gnome can be run on either.

In fact, there is a customized version of Ubuntu that uses KDE by default called Kubuntu.

Ubuntu, like debian, has spectacular package management support through dpkg and apt. Slackware simply lacks that functionality, using tgz files to unpack onto the filesystem... no dependency resolution, package searching, downloading from (one or more) repositories, or any of the features I've come to depend on to make installing and updating software less of a chore.

Re:Ubuntu and Slackware

[FidelCatsro]

Its probably just reserved memory space .
I have ubuntu running on a machine with 256MB of ram and it runs perfectly well.
I think its down to how much RAM the DE reserves , which does not mean the ram is not available .
If it bother you though "apt-get install kubuntu " then remove gnome if you wish

Re:Ubuntu and Slackware

[cobbaut]

And why is this parent modded up informative ?

Less free memory (as reported by top or free) does not mean the distro is a memory hog, it could very well mean the distro is taking advantage of the *full* memory available on the computer.

pol :)

Re:Ubuntu and Slackware

[teslatug]

I also looked at the +/- caches size. That's also larger by about 200MB on Slack/KDE. As to why compare Gnome and KDE, because that's what comes by default with these two distros.

Re:Ubuntu and Slackware

[Slack3r78]

I have to say I've had the same observation about Slackware to Ubuntu convertees. I think a large part of this stems from the fact that, for a while, Slackware+Dropline Gnome was one of the most straightforward, easy to use Linux desktop environments around to a lot of people.

Ubuntu arrived on the scene at almost the exact same time that Dropline was starting to stagnate a bit - Todd had pretty much burned out on the project and started a transition from a one-man metadistro to the project being community maintained. So while Dropline had always had the latest Gnome packages inside of the week in the past, they were very, very late getting Gnome's October 2.8 release, and when HAL was added in, it was more than a bit flakey.

At this same time, Ubuntu 4.10 Warty was released, which was a stable, easy to install distro with the same type of focus on usability that Dropline had always had. For many, it was their first taste of apt on a system that was easy to get running, and seemed to be headed in the right direction.

Personally, I made the move in late October/early November, and haven't looked back. While I still love Slackware, its underlying system wasn't the friendliest in the world for a usability-oriented desktop system. It's a distribution that's really fleshed out much of the potential I saw in Dropline, and Canonical is moving everything in the right direction to keep this happening.

Although I also have to say that it's not just Slackware users pulled in by this - it's no coincidence that it's been the top distro on Distrowatch for quite some time now. I think the most compelling case I've seen personally is a good friend of mine that's a total Mac fanatic. He's a geek, and enjoys computers, but in the past, he's hated anything Linux simply because it was too much hassle for him. That said, he's fallen absolutely in love with Ubuntu, and has been installing it on almost any piece of x86 hardware he touches lately. That's quite an endorsement to me. :-)

Re:Ubuntu and Slackware

[teslatug]

Well, what's Ubuntu, it's a distro. So while Gnome may be a hog, Ubuntu is definitely. I can't believe people would consider KDE lightweight. I only look at the default state of the distro as that's what's been tested the most. Ubuntu comes with Gnome, Slackware comes with KDE. I fire each up and from the get-go Ubuntu uses more ram.

Re:Ubuntu and Slackware

[zborgerd]

I wish that we had been able to take over the Dropline GNOME project a bit sooner. It was really a bad time for everything, and it took us several weeks to get up to speed to even get our first release together in time for Christmas of 2004. We weren't sure how we could pull it off, but all seems to have turned out well.

After several months of hard work, I believe that we've been able to put together one of the finest GNOME desktops available. In fact, we had a stable and smooth GNOME 2.10.1 release before anyone else. Future releases should be much more timely than our first 2.8 series releases.

We're quite proud of the results so far, and have a lot of plans to make our 2.12 releases even better. While Todd did an abolutely amazing job on Dropline GNOME for two years, a larger team seems to be able to do many things that a single maintainer cannot do alone. That said, his work was nothing short of amazing. It's no wonder that he bagan to experience so much burn-out after a while.

We do not publicize it very much, but we've been discussing the possibility of releasing a complete Linux distribution, sans KDE and a few server-side components, that can fit on one easy to install CD. Aside from some small changes that focus on improved usability, the intention would be to provide something as close to Slackware as possible while retaining all that is needed for a functional and usable GNOME desktop.

We love Slackware and believe in most of the principles that make it one of the finest distributions in existence. We feel that providing it, bundled with Dropline GNOME, completes some of the missing usability and desktop refinement issues that scare people away from it on the desktop. I feel that we can fill this missing gap, particularly now that GNOME is no longer part of the Slackware suite.

We want to make Linux available to everyone. While there is still a learning curve for Slackware, we feel that we can still make it usable for everyone while retaining flexibility for power-users. I think that Slackware is the best platform for that. Its simplicity is second to none.

I hope that some former Slackware+Dropline users will keep an eye out for what we have in store for the future. We will have a new website going up soon with even more focus on community interaction. This will likely include a user package repository as well. If you haven't tried our 2.10.x releases of Dropline GNOME yet, please give it a shot and let us know what we can do to improve it for you. :)

Re:Ubuntu and Slackware

[aichpvee]

I just have to ask, how much software are you people installing that it's a chore to do? Because I've never found myself feeling the need to automatic dependancy resolution or package downloading.

Re:Ubuntu and Slackware

[reverius]

I'd say I install or remove an average of 5 packages per day. Part of the reason I use linux is to try out all of the thousands of packages available to me to see which ones I like best... and somehow I haven't gotten through them all in 7 years.

Re:Great. However...

[KwKSilver]

bash is the typical shell installed. the distros i've used also have at least one editor & usually two installed already.

Re:Great. However...

[Fropper]

Not enough of them come with Pico, they all should.

Re:finally...

[smartsaga]

[acronym title="This is a description, get it?"] Hover over this text to see a description [/acronym]

I hope the previous code shows up the right way.

Anyways, the author could have used the acronym tag and showed a little something more informative to avoid going off his structure while still giving enough info to the visitors.

Your stupidity are belong to... mm... you!... get it?

Have a good one.

Agreed

[ghostunit]

Instead of romanticizing Linux, let's not forget it's first and foremost, a software project. Because it is a project it should have well-defined objectives. Because it is software it must avoid failings such as redundancy and unnecesary complexity.

I try to be a linux user and grieve that I still have to use Windows for several uses, including desktop because linux (insert distro name here) just can't compete in such areas.

Instead of getting better support for regular user's needs, we get GNOME vs KDE flamewars. Instead of getting better app-OS organization, we get package management systems that only work with their own packages. Instead of getting features and functionality, we get distros.

This is why Linux has no chance against Windows. Blame hardware manufacturers, OEMs and the media, but Windows works for regular users while linux only does so partially and after lots of patchwork. At this rate, Windows will still plague computers as it does for another 20 years or so while the linux community wonders why they are still only 1% of the computer users.

And regular users are we when we are not using the computer for setting-up web servers, programming in obscure languages or setting the box as a router.

Linux is free software, but freedom should be accompanied by responsibility. It should be a priority of the community to act as such, instead of breaking into isolated islands everytime they disagree.

Re:Agreed

[51mon]

I'd dispute Windows working, it doesn't work compared to most other operating systems. It remains unstable, and the core Microsoft apps are hideously designed, and insecure.

Those people who don't understand why we get KDE/GNOME flame wars, also don't understand why they get an email client, which despite shipping to 100,000,000+ desktops still has a fit with more than 16384 messages in a folder.

Re:Agreed

[ctid]

Instead of romanticizing Linux, let's not forget it's first and foremost, a software project. Because it is a project it should have well-defined objectives. Because it is software it must avoid failings such as redundancy and unnecesary complexity.

If a "software project" needs to have well-defined objectives, then by definition Linux is not a software project. Linux has no well-defined objectives, so why do you think it is a "software project" in your terms? And you're confusing one of the characteristics of good software (lack of redundancy) with the process of developing Linux.

I try to be a linux user and grieve that I still have to use Windows for several uses, including desktop because linux (insert distro name here) just can't compete in such areas.

I read this kind of thing here a lot, but I'm often frustrated because the authors don't specify what they are missing. So what is it that prevents you from using Linux? I'm not doubting your view, but I think it's just too easy to say "Linux isn't quite there yet", because everyone says it. But just saying what everyone says is slovenly so I prefer to hear specifics.

Linux is free software, but freedom should be accompanied by responsibility. It should be a priority of the community to act as such, instead of breaking into isolated islands everytime they disagree.

This paragraph reflects the overall tone of your message by suggesting that free software developers have a responsibility to do something. But why should they? If they worked for Linux Incorporated, that might make sense, but most of the creators of distributions just do it because they want to. There's no should about it unless it comes from within. It's a hobby and the only thing they should do is whatever they want. To understand this activity, you have to stop thinking in terms of what an employee must do.

Distrowatch

[rolfwind]

If anyone wants to research which flavor of Linux to get, go to Distrowatch.com and read the reviews by online magazines. They also send out CDs for a small price if you can't download/burn your distro of choice.

My personal suggestion for newbies to get a LiveCD like Knoppix or UbuntuLive. Then move on to an friendly system like Mandriva/Fedora/UbuntuInstall/Mepis, etcetera depending on their specific needs and research (distrowatch again).

If they want to get even more into it, try something like Slackware or Gentoo. Maybe as a final stage of total mastery Linux From Scratch:D

OTOH, if they really have spefic needs, there's no end to distros out there addressing a niche market and not just the desktop.

Oh, and avoid those people who make "their" distro a religious choice and all other nonbelievers infidels.

Pronunciation of SUSE:

[MOMOCROME]

I've always pronounced SUSE like "sue us". don't know why.

Re:SUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC it is an acronym for System und Software Entwicklung.

Mandrake

[Deliveranc3]

Though mandrake tries to be really user friendly (and actually pulls it off to a certain extent).

It's HELL to try and unlock when you want to make your first changes, if you're coming from windows and you just want to change some networking stuff or install a codec you will be faced with an absurd amount of security warnings and they make it tough to switch to root (You don't set your own password and there were a bunch of other problems).

I've gotta go with redhat, though I'm new to Linux it comes with a ton of useful stuff, good options in terms of guis and has tonnes of support.

Plus you can search for RPMs which is much easier than compiling everything from source.

Debian's apt-get sounds pretty sexy and I'd like to see it resolve problems (without even prompting ALA redhat) but telling someone to start with jigdo? Please that thing is garbage and the installer isn't as friendly and...

It's gotta be redhat.

HIgh Priests

[shmlco]

Learn to do things without pretty GUIs..

Why??? Here we are decades past Xerox Park, the Star, and the Lisa, and you're telling me that the best way to interface with a "modern" OS is to memorize hundreds of cryptic text command line and configuration file options?

Are you sure you wouldn't care for a bank of front panel switches so you can toogle in the boot loader by hand?

It's not, IMHO, that in the majority of cases a CLI is better, it's that the high priests of the servers delight in secret, unintelligible, arcane rituals that no one else understands...

Re:HIgh Priests

[pooh666]

Just try to configure user privileges with MS Active Directory. It is the best example I know about of a GUI that went horribly wrong that would be a lot easier to understand with a config file. Another good example is just about any DNS interface. There is some safty in a GUI for DNS, but there are also lots of problems that can be delt with a lot faster in DNS if you can just directly edit the zones if that be by hand or script..

GUI automation

[mr_tap]

Actually it is a fallacy that GUI tasks cannot be automated, it is just more difficult to implement.

Never fear, Automator is coming to an x86 near you soon :)

The First Live CD?

[torpor]

Sorry, but Knoppix was not the first Live CD.

The first Live CD was Yggdrasil. You young whippresnappers would do well to learn how to say that word, yo!

Re:The First Live CD?

[thebatlab]

It said Knoppix was the first "major" live CD. So you're correct on your correction but that's based on an incorrect interpretation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux

Re:The First Live CD?

[torpor]

Hey, Yggdrasil was a major distribution too.. or don't you remember that era?

I still rue the day I chucked my small bundle of Plug N' Play Yggdrasil releases in the dustbin.. those were some classic CD's.

Re:The First Live CD?

[colinrichardday]

When was Yggdrasil a Live CD, as opposed to just a CD?

Re:The First Live CD?

[torpor]

From the beginning. You could boot from it (if your BIOS supported it), or you could boot from the included floppy with the CD in the drive, and you would have a fully working system: no install required.

I used it to convince the company I was working for at the time that Linux was a viable Unix workstation alternative .. even in 1994, this worked just fine. We dumped DOS from our 486's and installed Linux .. and I've made my living out of implementing Linux solutions in business ever since..

Re:The First Live CD?

[colinrichardday]

Thanks, I didn't that Yggdrasil CD's were live.

Re:The First Live CD?

[torpor]

Yeah, it was a pretty neat feature, and often-overlooked actually. It always seemed weird to me that there were a whole new generation of Linux hackers around who rejoiced when Knoppix&co. came out .. i mean, i was like "whatever, we've been able to do that with Linux since the beginning" ..

Funny how things go in waves.

The Gentoo conundrum

[Chas]

Here's the problem I have with Gentoo.

On those systems that would actually BENEFIT from a near-complete self-compiled setup, most are too underpowered to do it in any reasonable amount of time (think days or weeks).

On those systems that are actually fast enough to compile the system in a reasonable amount of time, they see performance improvements measured in fractions of a percentage point. Big flarkin' whoop.

Add to that the dev community (who seem to be taking classes "You're too stupid to use OUR distro newbie!"), and you have just cooked up a rather unattractive pudding known as Gentoo.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[iCEBaLM]

Gentoo for me has never been about performance increases, it's been about packages compiled with the options I wanted, instead of what the maintainer wanted.

No, I didn't want mysql when I installed postfix, no, I didn't really need libjpeg/libtiff/libpng to install samba, no, this box is a server and I don't want X, why is php dependant on X! (and other weird package dependencies I've noticed in various distribs)

The flipside of the coin is that perhaps I want php or something compiled against postgresql or some other combination of modules which, for instance, fedora or debian won't allow me to have? Gentoo gets around this rather well as everything is compiled and you can link packages against the libs that you want. Also since you're compiling it yourself for your system you know it'll work whereas you can't be sure with rpms these days as they can be made for any number of distribs.

Gentoo is for advanced users who don't mind compile times and like having things customized the way they want it. It's not a bad distrib, don't knock it because of some of the users.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[Chas]

I'm not knocking it.

I'm not knocking the users.

I'm knocking the devs who respond to simple, straightforward questions with asinine non-answers and recriminations about how stupid I must be.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[m50d]

That's what distcc is for. Compile stuff for your P-90 with the faster boxes on your network.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[M1FCJ]

Those damned dependencies is the reason why you should use Slackware, not gentoo and save a lot of time.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[**loki969**]

What the fuck is going on here! First an obvious troll gets rated (Score:4,Insightful) for bashing Gentoo and now iCEBaLM's post gets a (Score:3, Funny) for such an informative reply!?!

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[**loki969**]

Thanx for fixing at least iCEBaLM's score! ;)

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[The_Dougster]

I ran Debian for many years and ultimately just got kind of bored with it. I switched my own personal deskop over to Gentoo about a year ago and I must say it has been a lot of fun to use.

It *was* fun tinkering with all of those wild compiler settings, but eventually I just went for stable tried and true settings and recompiled my system. I just did an update of my system, for the first time in about 6 months, last week, and it's all running like a champ. I probably won't mess with it for another six months now.

I like Gentoo mainly because the compilers and development libraries are all integrated in a pretty seamless way. In Debian I was always installing libFoo-dev this and that every time I wanted to try and compile something from source, and honestly, I thought it was a hassle, not to mention the Debian versions were usually too out of date to be usefull, and I ran unstable.

That being said, I still put Debian on all my satellite systems and just run Gentoo on my main home workstation. For systems that don't get booted into Linux much and aren't used to compile source code, Debian is much quicker to install and keep current. It runs about as fast, looks about the same, and makes my life easier.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[(H)elix1]

I've struggled to put my finger on it, but I think you nailed it. Gentoo makes it possible for a 'non-guru' like me to maintain the software on my server.

Originally, I had kicked Gentoo around because it had 'bleeding edge' support for new hardware. Wanted to run AMD64, wireless, or some ATI video chipset on a laptop - I could usually get it up and running a few months before the major distros started including it. All good and fine, but not enough to hold me to a distro when the others got the support sorted.

What did it for me was having a couple commercial applications (a zSeries mainframe emulator was the worst culprit) that were tied to specific distributions. Great, except for two months after buying the commercial cut of RH 8 for one and RH9 for the other, RH dropped the distro support for anything other than the enterprise versions. I then got the joy of trying to keep these boxes patched on my own. (eventually switched to the red carpet service) I was very much at the mercy of folks who packaged the RPM's or what ever the software used to distribute binary updates. Did I mention bitter? I found myself circling back to Gentoo not because it was faster or l33t, but because a n00b like myself could actually keep a system up to date with the source based approach.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[shutdown -p now]

Being a Gentoo user, in fact, I'd very much rather prefer binary packages myself. But there's two reasons why I keep coming to Gentoo again and again, no matter what other distro I try. First, it has probably the most comprehensive list of packages. Debian is nowhere even near, neither is FreeBSD for that matter. And second, its FS layout and init system got much more sense to them than any other Linux flavor I've seen so far.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[swillden]

First, it has probably the most comprehensive list of packages. Debian is nowhere even near, neither is FreeBSD for that matter.

I really, really doubt this. I just ran an update and my Debian unstable system has 16,924 packages listed, when I remove the half-dozen extra repositories in my sources.list. With all of those in, the count tops 18,000. I can't find a way to get a similar count for Gentoo, but in my experience it's much smaller. I gave Gentoo a shot about four months ago and switched back to Debian because I kept running into software packages I wanted to install that weren't yet packaged for Gentoo.

If you can find an accurate package count for Gentoo x86, I'd like to know what it is.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[poofyhairguy82]

I just ran an update and my Debian unstable system has 16,924 packages listed, when I remove the half-dozen extra repositories in my sources.list. With all of those in, the count tops 18,000. I can't find a way to get a similar count for Gentoo, but in my experience it's much smaller.

I hear you as a Debian user and a package whore. I had it explained to me once that in Debian each lib and dependancy have a package, while in Gentoo each ebuild is a whole program in some cases, dependancies and all. I could be wrong, and I would like to be corrected if I am.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[swillden]

There's a mix of both in both distros. There has to be, because so many open source programs share libraries. It's possible that Debian does it a bit more. But even at the level of whole programs my (fairly recent) experience is that Debian has lots of stuff that Gentoo simply does not. I can't recall right now what programs I was unable to find for Gentoo, unfortunately, but in less than two weeks I found a half dozen that I was going to have to build from tarballs. So I went back to Debian.

Re:The Gentoo conundrum

[shutdown -p now]

I gave Gentoo a shot about four months ago and switched back to Debian because I kept running into software packages I wanted to install that weren't yet packaged for Gentoo.

Ironically, that's the same reason why I switched from Debian back to Gentoo. I'm not sure about the overall package count, really, but I know that quite a few packages I use were not available for Debian at all, or only available with the help of third-party repositories, which you first have to find. Just to name a few: NVidia and ATI video drivers, X.org, mplayer, Eclipse 3.0.

Also, it's rather hard to find proprietary software in Debian repositories. I'm speaking of things such as Adobe Reader, Nero, and Flash plugin. Gentoo developers seem to have less trouble with "non-Free" software there.

i'm a slacker

[Suchetha]

i use a mixture of GUI and terminals (XFCE and xterm) because that is what works for me.

what i have found is that when you start linux you're always on GUI, then as you get better and better you gravitate to the CLI. this is because for somethings the CLI is SO much faster (filesystem work for eg)

but when you're editing webpages, you really need a good GUI editor and a GUI client. sure you can do it with vi/emacs/ but its just faster and easier FOR ME with the GUI.

ultimately ANY distro is about what suits you most. and you can't force your choice on anyone else. their needs may vary greatly from yours

atb

Suchetha

Re: Why

[jrushton]

The same reason people go out into the wilderness with nothing but a knife to learn how to survive instead of going to the local Tesco

Gentoo install

[fafne]

He says can take days. Last time I did an install from scratch, it took about three hours.

Re:Gentoo install

[MichaelSmith]

He says can take days. Last time I did an install from scratch, it took about three hours.

A friend of mine, who is an experienced software engineer, started installing Gentoo months ago and he is still going at it. The last part of the story I heard is that he accidently disabled something required for USB disks in the kernel and now he can't get anything on to the system.

It sounds like an interesting hackers tool to me, but a bit dangerous in production environments.

Re:Gentoo install

[sbenj]

I've been using Gentoo for about a year or so, maybe more, and have built it on 3 systems.

Building a system in 3 hours sounds really unlikely, in that the compile for some of the larger things (X, KDE, a word processor, firefox) will take significantly longer than that. It is possible to get it up and running in about 3 hours by installing some of the larger packages as binaries. It's also possible to get the thing basically set up in about an hour or so, run emerge to get everything you want, and come back in a day or two. If you're doing the compiling, it seems pretty unlikely to me that you'd be done in three hours, in the sense that you'd have the system you want and be done.

Months is also pretty unlikely, although it is the sort of thing you can continually mess with to get is just right, making Gentoo an excellent procrastination tool.

In practice, at least for me, the install's not much of an issue, I"m not doing lots of machines as I'm not doing this for a production environment, the initial install is fairly quick.

Re:Gentoo install

[fafne]

It's unlikey but it is possible? Stage 3, AMD64 3200+ Using it as a production system.

Re:Gentoo install

[sbenj]

Not sure what your question is. If you're doing a stage 3 install (that's the mostly-binary-prebuilt one, right?) then, yes, you can build the thing pretty quickly, as it's the compiling that takes forever and you're skipping that.Production system also might not need most of the big GUI apps that take forever to compile (KDE, Word processor, mozilla, xorg).

AMD64 3200+ is faster than what I've used, although I'd be pretty surprised if it compiled X in 5 minutes-to get a complete desktop system to compile in 3 hours would be an order of magnitude better than I get.

Re:finally...

[FidelCatsro]

"Do "newbs" know what HAL or curses are or even necessarily the differences between KDE and GNOME? His use of terminology would be baffling if I didn't know a fair amount about Linux"

Im sorry Dave, I can't let you know that please RTFM

Re:finally...

[Krusty_Klown]

Do "newbs" know what HAL or curses are

Yes they do Dave. Would you like to hear me sing a song?

What? Is that wrong?

Re:finally...

[MTO_B.]

Yeah...
Not only that, I have always personally wondered if I can run a program that says it's for KDE on Gnome, or the other way around.

I did install some time back a few distros, doing full installations with both Gnome & KDE installed at the same time, and all programs seemed to work. But what would have happened if I would have only installed only one of them? Are programs not only distro dependant but also KDE/Gnome/other dependant?

Anyway, this article wasnt about that but rather distros... I liked the article, though it would be nice to have side by side tables with the differences.

Re:Great. However...

[m50d]

ed should be enough for everyone

Re:He lost me with his vowel description...

[Bambi Dee]

ZOO-zeh or -zuh is more like it anyway. At least that's the only way I ever hear it pronounced in Germany; definitely two syllables and voiced (soft) "s"es.

Re:Progressing-or not

[dogugotw]

I found a version I like (Mandrake 10.0). I've got my system set up, running the way I like, apps I want installed and tweaked to do my bidding. I'm not even sure I'm going to move from 10.0 to 10.1 or whatever is the latest whizbang verion much less attempt to run a new version of Linux. I am not an uber-geek and don't know (or want to learn) how to migrate a zillion custom settings and application data from one Linux to another.

If/when something comes along that warrants the pain of conversion, I'll think about it.

Re:finally...

[VStrider]

I did install some time back a few distros, doing full installations with both Gnome & KDE installed at the same time, and all programs seemed to work. But what would have happened if I would have only installed only one of them? Are programs not only distro dependant but also KDE/Gnome/other dependant?

They'd work but they wouldn't look "native" to your desktop. On KDE there's also a GTK-Qt theme engine which makes Gnome apps look like KDE native. I wish there was something like this for Gnome as I'm using Gnome only. I wonder why noone has done it; is it because of Qt's licence?

Welcome to the Linux car dealership....

[warped23]

Hi folks, you say you want a new Linux car? Step right into our training room where we will go through our special course "How to buy and configure your new Linux car 101", and we will have you out and ready to actually select and buy your new car in just a matter of hours! What? You think you want to purchase that Dodge Caravan at the dealer down the street? Hell no! You don't want that!! Why, don't you realize that our Linux vans can be configured with no less than 23 different kinds of seats? We will even give you a map to show you the way to the 23 different aftermarket Linux car parts shops that sell them! OK, enough talk of other inferior cars! Come on in, take a seat, get comfortable. Let's go through the overview of what we will cover in the course..let's see..frames..yep, we will go through the 12 different kinds of frames and what associated parts and components you can actually buy in install on each. Engines.. great module .. we go over the 9 different engines you can buy, and also the many differrent carberator, cooling, and air conditioning systems available for each engine option, just terrific stuff.. what? yes, questions? Oh, you say you've really no mechanic experience? Well, don't worry! We provide a full set of Snap-On tools (of course, you could also choose Craftsman or one of our other 3 brands) and even let you borrow a car lift to make installation a breeze! Does that answer your question? Great! Now on to the next module, Suspension and Tire options...we'd better hurry if we are going to make it to the interior seating module by the end of day...can I get you folks some coffee?...hey! Where are you going?!? Come back! Don't buy that Dodge, they only have 3 models..come on, they don't give you the 38 differrent kinds of headlights that you can put into OUR babys! THEY EVEN FORCE YOU TO TAKE DELIVERY WITH THE STEREO SYSTEM ALREADY INSTALLED!! HEY, COME BACK!!!......

LBA/SOT (Linux Business Association) !!

[gelfling]

LBA's SOT - yet another Fedora based distro geared for business desktops is one of the best out-of-the-box distros. Great fit and finish. Excellent installation.

Gentoo

[zecg]

Gentoo is extremely low maintenance (which could be said of Debian and Ubuntu), but unlike those allows you to easily set a persistent policies of what elements you allow or do not allow through USE flags. Compiling WOULD be a pain in the ass, but all the truly large ones (OpenOffice, Mozilla et al.) come as binary packages. And with KDE now atomized, compiling is truly no problem any more.

Rehashing tired "ricer" jokes is fine by me, but it would sadden me if prejudice stopped anyone from trying it out. For me, it completely broke the impression that Linux is difficult.

Re:Great. However...

[ckaminski]

If you're not a masochist, don't chose Vi/Vim or Emacs, choose Pico instead. :-)

And the one true shell, bash even though I'm a tcsh guy. ;-)

SUSE.. soft E?

[Kafteinn]

so it's pronounced Zeus then why isn't it called Zeus instead of completely messing up all marketing in non english speaking countries with a word that doesn't mean anything, that comes with a manual on how to read it?

Uh.. it's German

[bach37]

If you speak German, or are from Germany, it's quite pronouncable. It's not English. You might as well flame a Russian software company name for being 'dumb,' too.

And the 'E' on the end of a word in German has the English short 'A' sound, or 'uh' sound. So it's somewhat pronounced like 'su-suh.'

Slightly OT: but Knoppix is also German, and is pronounced with a beginning hard 'K' sound at the beginning: 'Kuh-noppix.' Though if you say it that way in the US everyone will look at you strangely.

Do a course on comprehension

[DABANSHEE]

You might not get so many people wanting to moderate you as a fool.

Either that or next time you want to reply to someone, check their parent post to see the angle they're coming from

Re:finally...

[Mattintosh]

Though I'm not a complete newb, I am a newb to Linux. I did some research a few months back because I wanted to try Linux. I tried all the big names and found that they all had something huge in common - none of them have a decent website. Finding a download page is like herding cats. After finding download pages on each one, I found that I liked the install options for Debian best. They offer a bootable CD for their net-install, so I grabbed it and tried it.

It asked a half-dozen questions (most of which are asked when you install Windows from scratch too), then asked something along the lines of:
"What will you be using this machine for? Pick one:
1) Desktop/Workstation
2) Web server
3) File server
4) Print server
5)..."
It then asked something like:
"Would you like to add any major functionality? Pick as many as you like:
1) Web server
2) Samba server
3)..."
Then it took an hour and a half to download and install the packages I selected. At that point, it asked to restart without the CD (note: Windows does this twice during install, so it's NOT going to detract from Linux). Once it rebooted, there was a login screen and then a working desktop.

On each of those "extra" screens that Windows doesn't have (because they bilk you for a desktop version, a workstation version, and a server version in three different packages and pricing schemes), the default was what a newb would probably want. It defaulted to Desktop/Workstation on the "pick one" option, and it defaulted to nothing selected on the "pick as many as you want" options. In all this, it installed a default email client, a default web browser, a default everything else. And a bunch of games. All in a default window manager that worked just fine for my purposes.

Now for the point of this post... I disagree with both the parent and the grandparent posters. A newb doesn't need to know what those things are. I don't know what those things are, and I had a working desktop up and running inside of two hours (again, net-install is slow). What matters is not the number of choices, but what those choices are. If you're asking them to decide what the machine is supposed to be used for, people are going to be able to answer that. But if you're asking them whether they want Thing A or Thing B and they have no clue what either of them is, then they can't answer it because... they have no clue what either of them is!

There's another point here, though. And it comes in the form of apt-get's GUI. If I'm a newb that has a clue (which I am), I can go to this cool GUI pane in the system config menu that lets me go get new stuff for free. I checkmark a bunch of items that I want (like Samba, which I didn't install at first), a tool here, a game there, whatever. Then I can hit the "go get my new free stuff" button and in a few minutes have (dun dun dun) security holes! Whee! It's not that Samba (or whatever else I get) isn't secure. It may be completely secure. It's just not configured for my setup, which means I, as a newb, have to go dick around in config files and change stuff.

Fortunately, it seems they thought of that already. Whatever window manager it is that comes with Debian by default (Gnome, I think) doesn't have any sort of "Welcome to Linux/Debian/Gnome/Your-New-Unfamiliar-System" screen, or even a Read/IgnoreMeFirst file in plain view. For a user that's clueful enough to get this far and not much farther, that would be a welcome addition. Tell them where to go to change config files. Have a universal config file editor (with color highlighting, like a code editor). Heck, throw in a list of available config files and let them pick from a list which one they want to screw around with. And keep a backup when they do. Do it transparently. Once they're comfortable with that, they can read the next section in the readme/welcome-screen and find out how to get into the CLI and ls/cp/mv/rm/sudo/grep/tail and all that other stuff. Warn the

Riiiiight.

[gosand]

That's why GUI-based systems like Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows are so popular.

Exactly. So why Microsoft is developing a command shell again?

Because concepts actions

[gosand]

"Learn to do things without pretty GUIs. That's the best way to learn." Why? I can't wait for your reply...

Because if you don't, you are tied to the GUI. People always learn much more when they learn the concepts behind something instead of just learning the actions. GUIs have problems, are designed poorly, etc. Many times the GUIs are just interfacing the command line anyway. You can always NOT use the command line, but you can't learn it instantly. GUIs differ greatly, and sometimes don't implement things the way that make sense to everyone.

Here is a simple example. I work for a company that does ecommerce. We made changes on the server to allow for free shipping on about 35 products for the site. How to test it? Well, I had to create a shopping cart first, then .... click through, find 35 items, and add them each in succession? Ick. I had all the item numbers, so I built a quick script that built the url and called "firefox $URL". It opened up each item in a new tab, then I could just click ADD TO CART, verify the shipping was free, go to the next tab, etc. If I didn't have a quick script, it would have been a much longer process, lots of clicking and copy/paste.

Re:Root of the problem

[WhiteWolf666]

Obviously, its much easier when you have a monoculture.

Why not just have the government pick one automaker, and that can be "the" automaker.

Or airline, for that matter

Here's my beginner's guide to distros

[melted]

1. Download, install and configure Slackware until you really like it.

2. After about half a year move on to RedHat/Fedora or Ubuntu to simplify package management.

#1 is necessary, because without it you won't understand "how shit works".

Re:Root of the problem

[fishbowl]

"Ahhh. Exactly what makes adopting Linux such a hassle. The multiple distros."

Why don't the same people have a problem with all the different car manufacturers?

I fail to see the problem. It's not as if the different distributions are all *that* different, and it's certainly not like they all keep their implementation details hidden. It's not the vendor's fault the potential consumer chooses not to educate himself. And nothing stops him from trying out 2 or 3 or more different ones to find the right one for him.

In my experience Debian, especially in the form of Knoppix, turns out to be the easiset to deal with, from installation to operation to maintenance.

Re:Root of the problem

[generationxyu]

I can get into just about any car and find the gas pedal. I can't boot any distro and figure out how to start Apache. I have to know something about the philosophy of the maintainers.

<bsdrant>
In BSD, you know how everything's gonna work. Even in the lucrative, flamewar-ridden world of Theo de Raadt, you've still got man hier(7). Now you know where your shit's going to be.
</bsdrant>

Re:Root of the problem

[fishbowl]

I know where you're coming from, but then, I don't think that anyone who can't figure that out, needs to be running Apache in the first place.

I can't think of a distribution that features Apache, that does not start it with "/etc/init.d/apache start"

I'm sure if that's a problem it's the least of your problems configuring the server.

Re:Root of the problem

[generationxyu]

http://cr.yp.to/compatibility.html

Oh, god, I sound like a DJB fanboy... but he makes a good point here. It's not that I or anyone else can't figure it out, it's that I shouldn't have to figure it out. I should only have to learn how to start Apache once. Maybe it's cause I'm used to my Mac JustWorking(tm).

unless

[alizard]

your system is completely preconfigured and your needs are completely satisfied with what came with it, how the hell do you use Linux without dropping to command line?

For instance, there are lots of config files only accessible via text editor. The automated installers only work for root.

Though I usually use the command line when and because it's less hassle than the GUI, e.g. making directories.

your post content and conclusion don't match

[alizard]

Most people aren't interested in learning how to not use a GUI. They want to check their email. They want to browse the web. They want to pay their bills online. They want to track their spreadsheet. But most of all, they want to do such things easily and efficiently.

An average user can do all that with a pre-configured Linux box, and without concern about Windows viruses, trojans, and other malware. Here is a how-to piece on building a preconfigured Linux box. Yes, multimedia is included.

What the end user of this box would have to remember to use it without hassle is simply to buy peripherals (scanners, printers, cameras) from the "approved" list provided by the vendor, derived from SANE / CUPS / gphoto supported parts.

Re:finally...

[cheesy9999]

It's a perfect overview for someone like me who knows quite a bit about computers, but hasn't yet run Linux for any significant amount of time. I know what all those terms mean but but didn't know about most of what he talks about in the article. It was very informative.

No.

[ubernostrum]

Surely it sets a password, it just sets it randomly and sets up the sudo trust relationship by default.

No. The root account exists, obviously, but the field for its password in /etc/passwd is blank, meaning no password whatsoever exists for root. This means that it is not possible to log in with the username 'root'.

I can't understand why this is a security feature?

Because every automated script-kiddie attack out there is programmed to try to log in as 'root'. If it's not possible to do so, then all those attacks have been neutered. While it may still be possible to escalate privileges if a user account is compromised, the difficulty of doing so is greater than the difficulty of running an automated exploit; for one thing, 'root' is a username guaranteed to exist on every Linux system, but cracking a user account which might have any username requires much more devoted and detailed attention. Making it more difficult or time-consuming to crack your system increases the chance that an attacker will try somewhere else instead, since very few attacks against home users are deliberately targeted to their victims; instead, attackers simply scan for computers with known vulnerabilities and crack the easiest targets.

Hence it's a security improvement.

Re:finally...

[rmm4pi8]

First, I wasn't suggesting that new *nix users need to or should know these terms, and that's precisely why the fellow shouldn't have used them in his article, as if they would help people make an informed choice.

Second, I think you underestimate the degree to which config files interact in a typical linux installation. The user downside of the developer dream of "do one thing, do it well" per program is that you need to get each program in the series working right for the system to work. This is the beauty of tools like SuSE's YaST, Mandriva's *drak tools, and/or even Webmin: they diddle all the requisite files at the same time per the GUI instructions.

I think, therefore, that opening up the CLI right away with some minimal instruction set is more likely to be frustrating than helpful.