Ideal Linux System for Newbies?

spiffyman asks: "In the next year, I'll begin advanced work in mathematics, and I'll also be upgrading my desktop box. In light of the advantages of Linux and FOSS in the area of science and mathematics, I want to convert from a Windows system to a dual-boot one with Linux. Primary tasks aside from math/logic activities will include learning intermediate programming, web maintenance, some computational linguistics (in Python), and LOTS of LaTeX work for my publishing activities. What do Slashdot readers recommend in terms of hardware, OS, software, and perhaps reading for a quasi-power Windows user (with no previous Linux experience) to convert to an all-Linux system?"

Comments

No Experience?

[pkcs11]

Most people (myself included) will suggest ubuntu, since it's a great Out Of The Box solution.
But Fedora might be a good fit as well.
Try out 3-4 distros and use what is most comfortable for you.

Re:No Experience?

[mordors9]

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

Re:No Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would prefer Fedora. Ubuntu is a great "I just want to have a computer and for it to work" distro but for serious scientific/ mathmatical programming I suggest something that has gcc installed by default :) Theres a reason scientific linux is not a ubuntu derivative. Of course people will mention that its a snap to install all the necessary software development tools but that misses the point which, in my experience, is that ubuntu is designed with the average user in mind rather than the developer. Not saying thats a bad thing, its definitely a good thing but in your case it would probably be good to have something which is designed with your needs in mind which is probably not ubuntu.

Re:No Experience?

[HAKdragon]

Try out 3-4 distros and use what is most comfortable for you.

While the person asking sounds like he's relatively technically savvy, that is advice I would never tell to a person who is not very good with computers. Having to install more than one distribution of Linux and having to figure out how each of then work would drive the average person away from Linux really quickly.

Re:No Experience?

[fimbulvetr]

If a linux distro has a gcc installed by default (Hopefully the same one that was used to compile the kernel, cough, unlike redhat, cough), it chould be a sign that the distro may be bloated and a heavy weight.

More packages installed by default == more space used, more security vectors and more clutter.

Personally, I prefer having to install "less" or "build-essential" in debian because I know that if they don't exist, there's probably very few useless tools on my system that could be exploited, that take up space, that conflict with other packages, that run as daemons and steal precious memory/cpu cycles, etc.

Ubuntu, while certainly heavier than debian, follows more or less the same guidelines.

Re:No Experience?

[twistedcubic]

I don't think the question is nonsensical given the specifics mentioned. There might be others with experience who can say whether certain distribution make it easy to install certain software (math software in this case), among other things. Though it probably isn't true, I wouldn't be surprised if math majors and English majors, as a group, preferred different distrubutions.

Re:No Experience?

[marcello_dl]

If you stay away from the auto updaters and read the changelogs, you will never have a broken system.

You will anyway if your hw/sw configuration triggers a undiscovered/unfixed bug. IMHO it's better to have the "fire and forget" capability available with many linux package managers and read up where the downloaded packages are stored (/var/cache/apt/archives/ on debian derived). If you have a broken package, chances are you have still on your HD the earlier version and you just need reading the docs on how to revert back to it.

Re:No Experience?

[mordors9]

You must not be that knowledgeable about installing software on Linux then. Most any major software package is going to have both .rpm or .deb packages available either on their own site or in the distro specific repositories. That will cover most of the distros out there. For the rest of us that have chosen other paths (Slackware for one), the source package will be available where we can build the package ourself. The one exception we sometimes run across is proprietary programs but since he was talking about F/OSS programs, I assume we can rule those out.

Re:No Experience?

[Epiphenomenon]

Have a look at Jonathan Cohen's webpage for a philosopher using Red Hat/Fedora. Ubuntu is fine too.

Re:No Experience?

[mordors9]

I am fairly new to Slackware (c. 2001), but have never experienced a bug like this. Patrick Volkerding is usually pretty diligent in testing his packages prior to putting them into the patches.

Re:No Experience?

[Phantombrain]

Two Words: Live CD

Re:No Experience?

[solafide]

Hmmmm. So Gentoo may be bloated and a heavyweight?

Re:No Experience?

[pizpot]

The majority of them want to run the installer CD and then just have everything be set up and work.

Me, I'm an old hpux admin. I like a distro that I have to spend all day installing. I like it even better if I need a 2nd computer to solve problems.

Re:No Experience?

[fimbulvetr]

Well, in terms of bloated, I'd say no. It needs gcc, flex, bison, ncurses-dev, etc, for daily maintenance and use operations.

Heavy? Maybe, maybe not. Heavy by comparison to slimmer distros? Yes. Heavy in terms of what you could install? No.

Gentoo, LFS and other distros of that ilk are why I used the word "may".

Re:No Experience?

[donaldm]

I don't really like to suggest a specific distro since there are so many around. I think it is best of you ask yourself if you are going to require paid support from a commercial company such as Novell (I know but they still produce a good distro) or Redhat. You could also look at their free versions such as OpenSuse or Fedora Core 6 or CentOS (basically Redhat Enterprise 4). Other distros such as Ubuntu and Debian from what I have heard are also excellent. There is always fantastic on-line support for nearly all distros but please before you ask RTFM. It is best to subscribe to a forum for beginners first then graduate to the more serious groups.

Before you get any distro make sure it is going to support all (laptop) or nearly all (desktop) of your PC peripherals otherwise you will be disappointed and will go back to MS Windows (a dual boot is excellent to test this although some will say get a test CD). One thing people should realise is that if you are going to use graphical packages such as Gnome or KDE you should look at at getting a PC/laptop with at least 1GB of memory. MS Windows Vista will require this as well.

Since many newer PC/laptops are coming out with Dual Core 64 bit processors (AMD and Intel) you should get a 64 bit Linux OS, however you will probably need a bit of patience while packages are updated to reflect this trend (this is going to impact MS Windows as well). Of course you could compile the source but if you don't have any programming experience you will most likely have problems. Obviously if you do have a 32 bit processor you should not have problems but you still need to be aware that 64 bit apps don't run on 32 bit processors however if you do have a 64 bit processor you can most likely run 32 bit apps.

When you find a distro that you can easily install (most are) which supports all peripherals and you like it, then get rid of your dual boot and have a pure Linux machine. Before anyone says "But you can't get back to Windows" my answer is you really need to burn your bridges otherwise even with the best of intentions you will slide back to MS Windows.

A word of caution. Most modern Linux distros are very easy to install out of the box but the main sticking point with a new person is partitioning and what packages you want. It is usually safer to accept the defaults for partitioning and select everything for your software (4GB to 8GB) otherwise you may have problems and have to get involved with package management too early in the game.

Now to address another problem with Linux, Games! Well there are a few mainly retro games and some good emulators but you are not going to get the latest PC games so basically get over it and get the latest console (your choice) if you like to play games. The PS3 does support Linux which may have some interesting potential, while the Wii does look like fun. The Xbox360 is the closest you will get to PC gaming but I thought you want to get away from Microsoft.

Re:No Experience?

[kosmosik]

> If a linux distro has a gcc installed by default (Hopefully
> the same one that was used to compile the kernel, cough,
> unlike redhat, cough), it chould be a sign that the
> distro may be bloated and a heavy weight.

I don't want to judge about bloat and stuff. But for sure *casual* Linux distro will include GCC installed since you usually need it to install (link it) closed only software like nvidia/ati drivers and vmware. Also GCC is needed by stuff like DKMS framework etc.

In fact you should not care if a compiler is installed or not. If it does what it is there for automagically then there is no problem at all. It is as transparent as having a printer spooler or whatever other component in system.

Re:No Experience?

[tacocat]

Seriously, it's kind of a lame question to ask. But if someone really ahs to ask...

If you want a distribution that just works and doesn't screw your installation from upgrade to upgrade then go with Debian. It doesn't a great job supporting LATEX and everything else you mentioned. And it works. It's stable.

I'm going to assume that if you are using this for your school projects and reports you would rather choose an older more stable distro over volitale latest and greatest. Debian, unlike unbuntu et al, prizes itself in their indisputable stability and consistency of performance over the notion of being the latest and greatest installation even if it fries your database or desktop environment.

Re:No Experience?

[Arethan]

I fail to see how having RPMs and DEBs available makes installation any easier for "most distros out there". Being a Slack user, perhaps you never noticed that new versions of libraries tend to be released every 2 to 4 months, and each distro tends to be compiled against the bleeding edge newest libraries available at that time. This generally causes an absolute ton of dependency hell at all levels. This is the exact reason why most commercial packages build against the enterprise distros, because their life cycles are counted in years instead of weeks. Having a precompiled rpm/deb in the distro repository helps, but it is far from an effective solution when it comes to newbies installing software, and it certainly doesn't make Linux a very friendly looking target for ISVs.

While rapid software evolution is the biggest strength to Linux based systems, it's ironic that it is also the absolute biggest downfall. After using Linux for over a decade on servers, and during that time even spending a 2 year stint of Linux as my only desktop OS, I can safely say that it isn't the distros' package system that's broken. Instead it's the complete lack of enforceable standards. If Linux wants to ever become a serious contender for the desktop OS throne, it will seriously need to standardize the versions of the core libraries. If you want to continue to maintain rapid development, deployment and deprecation, that's fine, but at the end of the day the distros should have a single version target for these libraries. The more bleeding edge versions can coexist on the same system right along side the legacy standards. The Linux Standard Base did a fair job at starting this, but as far as I can tell it's mostly fallen off the map, not to mention that it never went far enough.

I really hate to break the dream-bubble here guys, but we need a "Standard Linux Desktop" specification that fully defines the available libraries and their versions all the way from libc to gnome. Now I'm not saying that once you implement the standard you're done innovating, that's just stupid. What I'm saying is that a user should have a single super-package to install that brings their Linux installation into full compliance for a standard desktop specification. Multiple standard assemblies can be installed on a single machine, and would allow the use of older binaries on newer systems. In order to enforce this standard, the installation of gcc should use the latest standard assembly by default, switchable to older and custom assemblies through the use of command line switches.

Of course the biggest pain in the ass with all of this is getting all 9 million of the various distros to work together for 6 months to define these standards. Luckily we don't need to go that far. Simply getting RedHat and Debian to work together on it should be enough to affect the majority of machines out there.

Getting back on topic for the article: If you want to use a commercial package, use a distro that claims compatibility with RedHat Enterprise Linux. Otherwise pick a RHEL compatible or something based on Debian. Those are the easy picks that offer the broadest set of precompiled software that tends to work 75% of the time.

Re:No Experience?

[melikamp]

The ideal solution for a newbie comes pre-installed. The distribution does not matter that much. I anticipate that many readers will object, but I am convinced that it makes sense to introduce a working system. I started working with GNU/Linux when I was finishing the high school, back in 95. I did not start by making a clean install, but rather by playing around with whatever was installed at my dad's work. It just happened to be Slackware, but you know, since it was up and running, I could not care less. I was free to poke around a learn new things.

If you really are a newbie, the last thing you want to learn is how to test hardware configurations and patch the kernel just make your drivers work. This knowledge is very useful, but is rather irrelevant for someone who seeks a good introduction to how the new OS works. My advice: commandeer a geek friend of yours to set up a distribution of his choice and then run with it.

Re:No Experience?

[gutnor]

"Having to install more than one distribution of Linux and having to figure out how each of then work would drive the average person away from Linux really quickly."

Installing more than 1 OS until you get one that fits your need means that you consider it as a serious hobby. Whatever distro zealot may say, choosing your distro is only the very first little step in order to get your system up and running. The most important step is having the rest of the applications up and running ( and by application, I mean the actual reason why you have a computer in the first place )

I've heard other advices for noobs:
Step 1: Choose quickly a distro ( eg: a more or less friendly, well supported like Ubuntu )
Step 2: Stick with it. The major distro allow you to do everything a noobs/average user would want to do.

Step 3: Only when you are no more a noob, and if you discover yourself a passion for OS installation, start playing with other distro.

Re:No Experience?

[goldspider]

"This answer shows why the question is nonsensical on its face. No one can tell you what distro is best for you. Everyone has a different personality."

No, it's a good question. Your answer, however, leaves plenty to be desired.

My guess is that Linux "newbies" want a system that just works. They're probably coming from either a Windows or Mac perspective, and aren't particularly interested in what personalities distributions are tailed for.

Their first Linux distribution should be intuitive and and functional. They shouldn't have to read manuals to get it working, and how-to information should be readily available in the system.

All this crap about what "personalities" are right for particular distributions makes me want to strangle someone. It's a cop-out excuse for why no Linux distribution is particularly attractive yet. Make it work. Make it simple.

Re:No Experience?

[Frosty Piss]

If a linux distro has a gcc installed by default (Hopefully the same one that was used to compile the kernel, cough, unlike redhat, cough), it chould be a sign that the distro may be bloated and a heavy weight.

More packages installed by default == more space used, more security vectors and more clutter.

I don't understand this kind of comment. We're not talking about embedded Linux here, it's probably a workstation where disk space and even RAM is not going to be an issue. Even with laptops built in the last few years, using up disk space with the OS is just *not* an issue. There are MANY good reasons to not install what you don't expect to use, but using up space on your workstation's HD is not one of them, the OS and its parts will still be a very small minority of the disk volume. In my opinion...

Re:No Experience?

[trick.one]

No, your response shows why so much of the non-technically-savvy population won't take Linux seriously. This guy wants to switch from Windows to Linux--he's already decided, you don't even have to try to convince him!--and yet your response to his perfectly valid question is "Figure it out yourself, asshole, and stop asking retarded questions." Sure, everyone has their own needs and every distro fills its own niche. This guy gave a pretty good description his needs, and is trying to figure out what fits. Surprise--not everyone thinks that fucking around with various Linux distros is a good use of their time. Most people use computers for things OTHER THAN figuring out how computers work. It's like asking the waiter for a recommendation and being told, "Why don't you just get everything on the menu and see what you like?"

Re:No Experience?

[smilindog2000]

Heck, yeah. I have had good luck getting people to try the live Ubuntu disk. In comparison, my Fedora disks just don't sell. Hopefully, Fedora will get on this bandwagon soon.

Re your sig... funny... I like the one that reads, "Be good to America or we well export democracy to your country."

Re:No Experience?

[couchslug]

I'd try to avoid the dual-boot solution for the reason that your best Linux reference is the internet, which no workee if your new Linux install barfs!
Being able to refer to the web while you are installing is also nice.

Since OP is upgrading his old system anyway, I suggest building another complete box, using one for Linux and one for Windows. A KVM switch will let you go back and forth as you learn. Having two comps also guards against ordinary bad stuff like hardware failures.
Another way to go is hard drive swap trays, which are cheap and allow you to isolate tragedies on one drive from another.

Re:No Experience?

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

So you're saying Gentoo is not your first choice? I have been using LaTeX for 10+ years and running it exclusively on Linux (Red Hat and then Gentoo) for 7-8 years. Gentoo gives the advantage of being able to emerge almost any (F/OSS) package out there, although "dependency hell" can occur. Red Hat provides stability. Overall LaTeX works great on Linux. I also find xfig to be handy.

Re:No Experience?

[mordors9]

I think it is akin to me asking you what kind of car should I get. Surely you don't think yourself so all knowing as to tell me to go out and buy X. But then perhaps you do.

Re:No Experience?

[pyite69]

Ubuntu is great - but the best version of it is Linux Mint. This is basically Ubuntu with Flash, Java, media codecs all pre-configured.

On a standard Ubuntu or Fedora system, if you put in a DVD nothing will happen.

Re:No Experience?

[Crysalim]

You know, I tried Ubuntu based on this thought, but it gave me video problems (weird horizontal green lines). I think this is the biggest problem with Linux in general, because I will not bother to play with a distro if it doesn't auto detect my vga out of the box.

Re:No Experience?

[pbaer]

Six Words: Internet Freedom Disk you Communist Pinko

Re:No Experience?

[Kwiik]

Umm, Ubuntu is based off of Debian.. in addition to that, how is it such a great accomplishment that a distro does a great job of supporting LaTeX? They can all work pretty much the same with it. Save the distro wars for somewhere else..eesh

Anyways, my suggestion is to give a live CD a try. If you want to take your system from computer to computer and have it work flawlessly between boots (plus making it ultra easy to install apps that don't come on the live CD) then give a Live USB a try. There are many distros mostly based off of Debian for this. I recommend to check out linuxonusb.com since they make it easy to choose a distro. DSL-N's homepage is pretty good too - both give you the ability to buy a USB drive preloaded with a bootable linux partition at about the same cost as a regular USB drive, and they both claim to directly support the community.

Good luck to the poster

Re:No Experience?

[jav1231]

I don't care who you are, dat's funny 'ight there!

Re:No Experience?

[macdaddy357]

Yesterday was Xmas. A whole lot of n00bs just got computers. How many have Linux? I would guess none. Someone used to Windows would be lost with any version of Linux, except maybe Linspire with Click and Run, as soon as they tried to install new software. They would then be berated as idiots if they went online looking for help.

Linux is of, by, and for unsociable dorks and dweebs who have no life beyond farting around with computers all day. They probably live in their mother's basements. Tired of Windows? Get a Mac. It just works.

Re:No Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course some of them become so frustrated the first time they run into a problem and have no idea on how to fix it, they run back to Windows.

Although true, I always found this to be ludicrously unsound logic.
That's the reason I ran away from Windows in the first place - having problems and no idea how to fix them (without a reinstall). STFW, and find no solutions, so forced to reinstall.

Sure, my first experiences with Linux caused me to reinstall a couple of times because I'd broken something and didn't know what I'd broken to be able to fix it. But that was no different to what I was getting with Windows, and most of the time I could see that a fix was possible I just didn't (yet) have the expertise to diagnose it. 6 months later I was an expert and could diagnose just about any problem I had without even asking google. I still can't fix Windows problems because of the lack of transparency - I can't even tell which device driver is causing problems if I get a blue screen, whereas a Linux kernel panic tells me exactly where the source of the problem is.

If you're really going to (ab)use the system, then it doesn't matter which distro you cut your teeth on, because you'll readily apply your knowledge to any system you use - and you will drift towards systems which better meet your needs (I started on RedHat 6.0, but these days use Slackware and OpenBSD). If you're only going to be a user and not an abuser it still doesn't matter which system to start with because you won't be administrating it - the distro maintainer or a friend will be.

So, pick a distro at random. Decide whether you're going to actually learn how to (ab)use it or just use it. Then read some fucking documentation, use your brain and stop asking slashdotters to solve your problems (This question comes up every two weeks here, doesn't it?).

Software? We've got mathematical software coming out of our arseholes... Octave, GCC (f77, gfortran), G95, LaTeX, many more.
Hardware? Err... what is your typical usage scenario? You'll probably want the latest and greatest and it still wont be performant enough for your fluid dynamics or nuclear simulations.

Re:No Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, are a moron. NetBSD installs within 200MB - with gcc. Is it bloated? An OS without a compiler is a broken OS.

More packages does not mean more security vectors. Do you mean to say that all of your packages start up network services without you asking them to? Do they all have setuid binaries for your local users to exploit?

On a desktop system, more software is good. On a server its probably not, because you want to be familiar with every piece of software on the system so as to identify problems quickly (and potentially, though unlikely, detect suspicious bits and pieces placed by malicious users).

Your motives are flawed. Please stop spreading FUD.

Re:No Experience?

[tacocat]

Unbuntu is based on Debian unstable. Not Debian stable. Right now Debian unstable is in a freeze pending release. But once that is done, expect Unstable to live up to it's name and hence take unbuntu (potentially) with it.

No distro flame war. But I really get pissed off when something breaks.

Re:No Experience?

[uncoveror]

Ideal Linux system for newbies? I recognize the words, but together they make no sense.

Re:No Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd just like to chime in with another "you have no idea" comment. For me a distro without gcc is broken: you can't add stuff to the kernel, graphics drivers being the prime example; you also can't add any other software only available as source. You could argue that, say, a ruby interpreter is bloat, but gcc is a vital component for a useful system.

And as for "attack vector", please don't throw terms around that you don't understand. Despite what you may think, it doesn't make you look clever.

Re:No Experience?

[dhasenan]

More like going to a dealership, telling the salesman what you need a car for, and having the salesman point out the types of cars that would best suit the needs you outlined.

As to the question at hand, most any distribution will work; most older/more popular distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, SuSE...) will have good default installations for desktop use. After that, it's merely a matter of installing tetex, basic dev tools, an IDE, and possibly apache. (I think there may be one or two distros out there that provide all that by default, but finding it probably isn't worth the effort.)

Re:No Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone sounds bitter that they got called a n00b for asking how to run a program... ether that or this is just another macboi troll, or both.

Re:No Experience?

[glamslam]

If you like Ubuntu, but want everything (non-free-as-in-freedom) installed, try Linux Mint. It's Ubuntu with everything you will eventually install anyways. It even has a special focus on making wireless cards work well. I highly recommend this distribution!

Re:No Experience?

[justinchudgar]

For what it's worth, this is my transition experience... I have been working as an IT professional first with NetWare on the server and DOS/Win9x clients and for the last few years in totally Windows environments. My current project is automating software distribution and maintenance for a municipal government with tools like SMS, RIS, etc. In the 99-00 timeframe, I had downloaded and dual-booted RedHat's distro for a few months. After the novelty wore off, I ended up never using Linux, so, I eventually gave the experiment up. About 8-9 months ago, I decided to give it another go. My initial try was Gentoo, because it seemed sensible to use a source based distro for open-source software. Well, it was cool in a "taking apart the old mechanical clock" sort of way; but, it took forever to download and compile everything. Now, I know that if I had been more careful about my approach it might have gone somewhat quicker; but, a multi-day OS install while googling on another PC was not what I wanted. So, I tried Fedora, Slackware, SuSE, Debian and Ubuntu. I really like both Debian and Ubuntu (a Debian derivative) because of the apt package management tools. I had difficulty with Debian because I do not have a wired ethernet connection to my desk; and, having to pick the PC, monitor and keyboard up and go to the router was not convenient, and, Debian does not have the non-free wireless drivers I need as part of their base installer CD. Ubuntu, on the other hand, installed quicker than XP; and, everything worked immediately. While I know that there are the ocassionaly hardware problems with Ubuntu's installation, It was the smoothest thing to Windows that I have experienced. Since then I have found that the Ubuntu and Debian communities provide tons of useful information for just about everything I want to do; and, there are Ubuntu or Debian packages available for just about every piece of software I have wanted I have liked it so much that I have just removed the Windows partition from my system since I had not used it in over 6 months. I've had great experiences with developers from Gnome, Ubuntu and other projects when I have reported a bug; most of them getting fixed within a few weeks, not an entire release cycle like commercial software. I just got a DVD burner for my PC; and, somewhat to my surprise, burning a DVD was easier that the process was for the first time in Windows. My MP3 player, a Creative ZEN something, works flawlessly; as does the scanner, the digital camera, etc. Since I manage Windows servers and clients, the fact that Gnome's RDP client works flawlessly is a blessing. I thoroughly enjoy Ubuntu; and, I give live CDs to anyone who is interested in experimenting; but, as many other posters have mentioned, trying a few different major distros is a very good practice. I would not buy a car without test driving several makes and models and I only spent ~1.75 hours a day in my car. I spend more time with my OS; so, that choice impacts my daily experience even more. I wish you luck finding the perfect distro for you.

Re:No Experience?

[LurkerXXX]

Agreed on all points. That's why I suggest the poster run Linux in VMWare instead of dual booting. Dual booting is a PITA if you need to switch back and forth. Besides, VMWare makes it easy to revert back to previous 'versions' if you mess up your *nix system while learning it. It also will allow him to try out a number of Linux distro's (as well as *BSDs if he feels like it) easily, so he can try out a variety to compare and play with to see what he really likes.

Re:No Experience?

[lumbricus]

I also favor Ubuntu and Fedora, depending on the circumstances. The biggest suggestion I can give is to not use dual boot, but to use a "mobile rack". Basically, sue multiple hard drives that are easy to swap mechanically, and so if and when you hose one of your operating systems, you don't have to worry about the others... and you'll still have a workable system for your work... while you wait for a chunk of time to fix the OS on the other drive. After a while, you'll realize that you're using your windows drive less and less, but you always have it in case something comes up.

Re:No Experience?

[Antique Geekmeister]

The uses of Linux are not merely for hard-core developers: shiftiing the price of using a fully featured OS from a cash price to buy licensed tools to a developmentn cost of building your own first set from scratch is simply going to keep out some bright people and waste their time re-inventing the wheel. Humans have specialiists for making better tools for their community: this is one way to share them: we don't make even professional chefs in school milk their own cows and harvest their own wheat and feed their own chickens to learn to make pie crust, except perhaps once for appreciation of the source of their food.

Not that farm-made produce isn't wonderful and tasty, but the rest of us have to get to work to do everything else we do: we trade them the machine tools and goods the rest of us make for their goods. It's good to learn a bit about them to appreciate them, but we don't give new parents a pile of wood, a pile of seeds, and an empty field to make their first home. We help them get a home and throw them a baby shower to help htem raise their first child. After they get settled, they can look at buying their dream house and how they want to raise their kids and whether to use cloth or disposable diapers.

Re:No Experience?

[vn1983]

Personally, I find that finding a set of drivers for your wireless card, video card, sound card and other hardware might be harder as you pick a more obscure Linux distro. Moreover, the major distros are more likely to have good googleable support and FAQ&As. (SuSe, Fedora, Mandrake). What you want seems to be readily available on all these operating systems. Personally, I use XP SP2/Suse 10.1 dual boot, and have been a very satisfied user for > 5 months. Yast package manager makes finding software for Linux a breeze. I use LaTeX everyday, browse using Firefox, listen to music using XMMS, play movies using Totem/Xine and Realplayer, check email using Thunderbird and chat using Gaim, Skype. So far, other than games unique to windows that use directx like age of empires and FIFA I haven't had a problem with Suse :). Good luck with whatever you are planning on. One last piece of info, you can use LaTeX on windows - free latex package called MikTex and there are IDEs like WinEdt to write the tex files.

Re:No Experience?

[Wolfier]

A distro without GCC is a bit extreme, however, I have another few criterias:

1. How many text editors does it install by default
      Ideally, one for GUI, one for not GUI, and it should NOT install both vi and emacs by default. If it installs vi, emacs, ed, joe, etc. by default, stay away.

2. How many GUI environments does it install by default
      Ideally, only one - Gnome, KDE, or XFCE. If it installs even twm by default, it's too much. If it install 2 Window managers by default, stay away from this distro.

2. If you can start and stop services thru the GUI after installing a service without manual configuration
    (e.g. Ubuntu does it for PostgreSQL, for instance)

3. Does it turn on services by default (e.g. telnetd, sshd)

4. Does it install httpd by default - if it does, also stay away.

5. Does it install thru a Live CD? If it does, chances are that it's a newbie-friendly distro.

6. Does it recognize USB drives automatically and create USB drive icons on the desktop (and those icons disapper when you unmount the drives)? If it does, it's a good sign.

So far, Ubuntu satisfies all these requirements, I even get by without gcc - unlike what someone said, an OS without a compiler is NOT broken.

Disclaimer - I've been a Slackware guy since 1998, it may come as a shock, I now have only my "server" machine on Slackware, everything else Ubuntu - I find that, I don't need to optimize the kernel for everyday use on a machine with 2 GB RAM and a modern CPU. I don't need to worry about driver installations, I don't need to spend any time thinking how to configure everything - and limit myself on security configurations - which by default are excellent on Ubuntu) and binary installations of programs from the official depositories satisfies my need - I haven't compiled anything from source on any of my Ubuntu boxes.

In short, a distro that lets you think less while remaining easy, functional and secure is good. I cannot recommend Ubuntu more.

Re:No Experience?

[Chandon Seldon]

The way the Ubuntu development cycle works is that they sync with Debian unstable at the beginning of their six month release cycle. Then they spend the next 6 months getting things stable (and ready for the last-minute Gnome drop).

Debian unstable is reasonably stable anyway (I ran it as a desktop for a year with no major issues), but Ubuntu is really a polished and stable distro fully ready for production use rather than just a copy of Debian's development branch.

Re:No Experience?

[Chandon Seldon]

This really isn't as big a deal as you make it out to be. Unix-ish systems have versioned libraries, which means that multiple versions of the same library can be installed in parallel. Further, it's possible to do what Windows developers do with their apps - just include a copy of the library with the app.

I don't run that many apps that aren't in the Ubuntu package repository. The only two I have installed are Unreal Tournament 2004 and Google Earth. Both apps just work, even though UT2004 is two years old (and therefore would have mad library problems if there really was a library compatibility issue).

Occasionally I decide I want to dig out Loki's Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It's using some ridiculous old version of libc, so I have to install an old-libc compatibility package. It's there in the repository, so I just have to fire up the package manager and grab one package to get my game working. The fact that installing a six year old binary application is that simple pretty much debunks the "hard target for ISVs" claim - my distro didn't even *exist* when the app was released.

Re:No Experience?

[mackyrae]

Agreed about it being pre-installed. I installed mine with no problem, but I looked up my hardware first to be sure it'd work. Now some friends are asking me about Ubuntu and wanting to try it. I'll install and configure it for them. I don't expect them to figure it out on their own. They, like a lot of Windows users, are sick of spyware and viruses, and this is a cheap way to get rid of that issue (because a Mac would cost a pretty penny). My brother and sister see that benefit and have decided that they will use Ubuntu on their laptops when they go to college in 2 years. To help them adjust, I installed it on my mom's computer. She can barely use Windows, so there's no relearning. It all runs without a hitch. The video driver doesn't break once a week, it's faster, no virus issues. They like it. I got two negative responses. The first was "I don't know how to make it save a MS Word file" (click on file type, and choose that one). The second was "my info on AIM looks a little bit different" (font issue is my guess). Other than that, they have no problems. It's easy for them to adjust.

Re:No Experience?

[fucksl4shd0t]

Well, after my experience with Gentoo and Kubuntu right before it, I'd have to say Mandriva is the one to start with. :) Unless you need a network printer setup...grrrr...

I'm really sick of every distribution being broken in some way. They're all like 90% perfect, and then 10% broke-ass piles of cow shit. I'll take less distributions if we can push that up to something more like 95% perfect, 4% workable, and only 1% broken.

All that said, I don't think dual-booting is a good idea. The reason? Simple, you'll choose windows more often than not, and in 3-6 months you'll say "Why do I even need that Linux partition anymore? I never use it". Pick one of the older, more well established commercial distributions and throw it on there (backup your data first!) and just dive right in. You don't learn to swim by dipping your toe in the water.

Re:No Experience?

[jrockway]

1. How many text editors does it install by default
              Ideally, one for GUI, one for not GUI, and it should NOT install both vi and emacs by default. If it installs vi, emacs, ed, joe, etc. by default, stay away.

vi is required by the POSIX specification (and general sanity). You are confusing vim with vi, probably.

2. How many GUI environments does it install by default
              Ideally, only one - Gnome, KDE, or XFCE. If it installs even twm by default, it's too much. If it install 2 Window managers by default, stay away from this distro.

twm comes with the xserver. A system with XFree86 or XOrg without twm is broken. /me thinks you're either braindead or very very new to UNIX.

Re:No Experience?

[Scratch-O-Matic]

Administrate?

Also, I suspect the poster was expecting a number of different opinions with brief explanations, which he could peruse before making his choice from among those offered. That is far from nonsensical.

Re:No Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone sounds bitter that they got called a n00b for asking how to run a program... ether that or this is just another macboi troll, or both.

As least he didn't post as a god damned AC.

Re:No Experience?

[jimharb]

My daughter was majoring in advanced mathmatics at the University of Padova in Italy and they had their math department all set up with linux. I have about ten years experience with linux and have run all of the major distributions and many of the not so well known distro's. I found that what was best for her was not the latest and greatest but, a distro that was extremely stable that had many different software options available. Python and Latex packages are available in all distro's. However, I found that if you also want Plotting (scigraphica, PgPlot5), Geometry (Mathmatica, Eukleides), Algebra (Maxima, Yacas), and Math Programming Languages (Octave and R-base) and you want them all working your better off with Debian Stable. Don't believe the hype that Debian is difficult to install (debian has solved this problem for some time now). If you go with most of the other latest and greatest distro's your going to find many bugs in the more esoteric software such as those you will be using. For stability you cannot beat Debain stable and I think that this is what will be most important for you.

Re:No Experience?

[Wolfier]

My main editor is a highly customized vim, so I can tell between vi and vim...I said "vi" so the intended audience does not get confused :)

Re:No Experience?

[jacksonj04]

The trouble is, although your package manager can get you some maths software pretty damn easily finding out exactly which package does what you want can be more of a pain with Linux than Windows. How it functions (Menus etc) is also more likely to be different to the OS than under Windows or OS X because the coder thought "That's a good UI idea!" rather than "How does everything else do this?".

A 'maths' distro may have 10, 20, 30+ different maths applications which accept input in different formats, have the same switch do different things... in which case the user would be better off with something specifically designed for usability than something designed for flexibility. I'm no expert on different distros, but I think this question is extremely open even with the specifics.

Re:No Experience?

[Wolfier]

TWM comes with the X server, true - because it's the default - just like how IE comes with Windows, yet you can have a Windows installation without IE.

Try Ubuntu.  It does not have that ancient TWM tied to the X package, and it does not get installed by default.  That got a thumb-up from me.

You think I'm braindead?  Give some reasons or I call you BS.  More on braindead - I remember using TWM 10 years ago on SunOS 4, and _THAT_ was a brain-killing experience.

Re:No Experience?

[melikamp]

Hey, your are bringing up a good point. I've seen it time and time again: a clueless user encounters the Gnome desktop, and... nothing happens. "What is this? Some kinda Mac?" Click, click, Firefox starts, he's on his way. GNU/Linux not ready for the lowest common denominator? I just want to laugh. These people do not even know the difference.

Re:No Experience?

[Wolfier]

OOookay, I get it.  I didn't say "all of" where I should have.  It's what I meant but not what I typed :\

Read it as "If it installs ALL OF vi, emacs, ed, joe, etc. by default, stay away."

Re:No Experience?

[Rick17JJ]

I used Slackware Linux for about 3 years on my home computer. I liked it, but it is not what I would recommend for a newbie. I have switched to using a combination of Ubuntu and Kubuntu at home. Slackware is for serious Linux geeks who dislike using point-and-click GUI interfaces for most administrative tasks. Slackware users prefer to directly edit the various configuration files. They dislike having too much stuff configured automatically for them, they prefer the control of doing it themselves instead. However, if your goal is to learn more about Linux a slightly more difficult distro such as Slackware or Slamd64 might be appropriate. Slackware would also be great for a server although, Ubuntu, Red Hat, CentOS and other distros do that well too. Linux from Scratch would be even more of a learning experience.

When installing new programs, Slackware does not automatically do dependency checking. If I had used the Slackware Slapt-get program to download and install the software packages it would then have done some dependency checking but I doubt that it would have done it as well as apt-get does it in a Debian derived distro such as Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Mepis. For desktop use a newbie would find Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Mepis much easy to install and configure. Ubuntu also has Synaptic which is an easy to use point-and-click GUI front-end for apt-get. It can be used to install or uninstall free Linux software from the hundreds of free programs from the Ubuntu repostiories on the Internet. Not only that but, the Ubuntu or the Kubuntu desktops have a more polished feel than Slackware does.

A Windows user probably would wonder what dependencies are. Most Linux programmers don't like to reinvent the wheel when they write a new program. There are already many free GPL licensed programs that can do much of what they need. They rely on those other programs to do some tasks, so those programs are dependencies and must already be there or be installed too. In Windows, commercial software companies do not share each others programs as dependencies. The apt-get package manager in Debian is the one that is best known for automatically resoling dependencies. Ubuntu inherits apt-get and Synaptic from Debian.

Re:No Experience?

[Peter (Professor) Fo]

The best advice I've heard so far.

Last month I spent days trying to get various distros working. All I wanted was a host for a private web server and an opportunity to fiddle with Linux for real. DAYS of installers failing for some reason or other - usually unspecified and therefore unrecoverable. So eventually I reverted back to trusted NT. A command line doesn't worry me, but when I tried to run FTP and typed in 'help' I was none the wiser - a dictionary approach to manuals is utterly useless.

A possible alternative is to get a 'learn Linux' book with CDs. I believe O'Reily do some Fedora ones. In this case your 'how do I know if it's good' becomes picking between publishers which you might know something about their reputation.

Re:No Experience?

[gronbaek]

I could not have agreed more. VMWare (or another virtualisation solution of your choice) is perfect for learning new users linux. Me, I'm a die-hard linux user and would not use anything else at home or during the day studying. But every once in a while one of my fellow students want to change from Windows. Normally to get the power of the terminal and use the loads of free software including Subversion and Latex. Often in the past they would dual boot and eventually get frustrated with some problem the could not solve without hours of researching or help from another user. But now, with Ubuntu and VMWare it's a lot easier. Ubuntu just works... and it works out of the box. At least it works just as good as Windows XP in my experience (and I work as an IT-supporter at the university in a 90% Windows enviroment in my spare time). At the same time I usually advice the people making the switch to use VMWare. Only I ask them to install it on linux and run Windows in the virtual machine. Then the can always fire up XP and do what ever it is that the need to do, untill the time when they are ready to complete the plunge in to linux 100%. That way it's a slow transition, and people get the best of both worlds. I would not recommend the whole dual boot thing... usually people get stuck in Windows because they need time to find a replacement for some important program. All the time they are using that program they are not using any linux programs and seeing the benefits of linux. That way it usually end up with them staying in Windows and only ocassionally booting up in linux. With VMWare you can have the benefit of both operating systemt while have time to see the glory of linux. And finally... you will not need Windows anymore.

Re:No Experience?

[b4upoo]

I agree that Ubuntu is now a great way to go. The reason that I think that it would work well in an academic
setting is that Ubuntu tends to self maintain and requires little concentration from the user. That means that mental energy can go to the task at hand rather than maintaining the OS. Conversely there is also an OS called scientific Linux that is maintained by the fellows at CERN. It is loaded with math and science tools and descends from RH. I liked Scientific Linux quite a bit. Flip flopping between the two approaches I would go with Ubuntu as the Debian repository surely has enough math and science tools to suit almost anyone. And with Debian derived systems there is never that endless effort to chase down dependent files.

Re:No Experience?

[Rick17JJ]

If Make it work. Make it simple is your goal, then just use Ubuntu. You don't need to look any further. Not everyone has the right personality for a distro such as Linux from Scratch. That would be for someone who wants to better understand how it is all put together and how it all works. Building your house from scratch isn't for everyone either, although some people have that kind of "build it yourself" personality. I built my own computer from scratch partially as a learning experience. Not everyone has a "build your own computer from scratch" kind of personality either. I do understand your point though.

In Linux there is some disagreement about whether it is easier for an experienced user to use point-and-click GUI utilities or by knowing how to manually edit the various configuration files manually from the command line. Some Linux geeks also seem want to prove their superiority in the geek pecking order by using a more expert oriented distro such as Slackware or Gentoo. Perhaps they should just get a life instead.

Re:No Experience?

[Fred_A]

All that said, I don't think dual-booting is a good idea. The reason? Simple, you'll choose windows more often than not, and in 3-6 months you'll say "Why do I even need that Linux partition anymore? I never use it".

This depends a lot on users, I know it worked exactly the other way around back when I switched from Win 3.x.
Since then I've had a Windows partition every now and then for games but never missed it when it was gone since I didn't have any applications for that system and had grown increasingly uncomfortable with it anyway.
So in short, ymmv.

Re:No Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

My daughter was majoring in advanced mathmatics at the University of Padova in Italy and they had their math department all set up with linux. I have about ten years experience with linux and have run all of the major distributions and many of the not so well known distro's. I found that what was best for her was not the latest and greatest but, a distro that was extremely stable that had many different software options available. Python and Latex packages are available in all distro's. However, I found that if you also want Plotting (scigraphica, PgPlot5), Geometry (Mathmatica, Eukleides), Algebra (Maxima, Yacas), and Math Programming Languages (Octave and R-base) and you want them all working your better off with Debian Stable. Don't believe the hype that Debian is difficult to install (debian has solved this problem for some time now). If you go with most of the other latest and greatest distro's your going to find many bugs in the more esoteric software such as those you will be using. For stability you cannot beat Debain stable and I think that this is what will be most important for you.

Re:No Experience?

[Lumpy]

I used to reccomend ubuntu... but not anymore.

Why?? 6.10 no longer has working wireless out of the box. Atheros drivers are a download only item for some nutty reason. Nvidia drivers are a mess, easy ubuntu no longer works, etc....

I had to do a huge amount of work to my wife's pc to get it going. She was running a 5.XX release that was a dream to install and had the atheros drivers automagically, easy ubuntu worked, it was great.... so I waited a few moths after 6.10 comes out and it's a nightmare compared to earlier ubuntu releases.

Ubuntu used to be the newbies linux. Now, I had to manually install flash and java to get the internet 1/2 useable. had to drag the PC to the basement to hook into the switch to get the wireless drivers installed. just a PITA compared to how Ubuntu is supposed to work.

None of the above was in my wife's abilities, so it's not newbie ready.... it's newbie with Linux IT expert on staff for the install and setup ready.

Re:No Experience?

[wdj]

Since you said you're going for a math PhD, my experience (I have a math PhD and switched from Windows to linux years ago for similar reasons) might help. In addition to latex (and kdvi, etc) and python you'll probably want to use SAGE at some point (SAGE = Software for Algebra and Geometry Exploration, sage.scipy.org). SAGE is developed on ubuntu and Macs but works under SUSE and Redhat and probably other flavors of linux. However, it does not work well under VMWare. If you have trouble setting up a dual boot for some reason, you might also consider colinux. My understanding (I've never used it) is that colinux is essentially linux sitting in windows. I've not used it but heard from some people that it is better than cygwin in some ways. Probably if you google colinux, you find more info. Good luck!

Re:No Experience?

[HellFeuer]

I vote for Ubuntu. What i really love about Ubuntu is how the live CD works. You can install apps, and write files and all of it can get saved on a USB drive. It remembers your apps flawlessly between boots. Knoppix has a similair, but more restricted feature. The Live CD can create a partition on a USB drive and store the /home directory there. It can not, however, easily remember installed apps between boots, as only /home is writable. And Ubuntu is better than Knoppix anyway IMHO. Oh except that unlike Knoppix, Ubuntu does not create a partition on your USB drive, it uses the whole thing (AFAIK) so you cannot use that drive at all for anything else

Re:No Experience?

[cloudmaster]

sauer@midnight:~$ ssh stain uptime
  07:12:48 up 43 days, 2:31, 1 user, load average: 1.01, 1.09, 1.09
sauer@midnight:~$ ssh stain cat /etc/debian_version
testing/unstable

That machine (stain) is running at near 100% load 24x7. It's not on a UPS, which is why it's only been up 45 days - the last power failure was 45 days ago. It has not experienced a software problem since Ubuntu 5.04 was installed (which was apt-get dist-upgrade'd to Hoary and then Dapper). In fact, of the machines I'm running Ubuntu on at my location right now - including two daily-use desktops, two mythtv backends, three mythtv frontends, a MySQL cluster, two mail servers, three web servers, and a wireless router - I have not experienced a *single* notable failure due to Ubuntu's software (from warty up to feisty). I have experienced hardware problems, but that's not Ubuntu's fault. I have experienced misconfiguration problems, but again, that's the sysadmin's fault - not Ubuntu. Other people have reportedly had problems, but I wonder how many of them may have had a hand in the failure happening, since I seem able to avoid them just fine... I've had similar luck with Debian, FWIW, but I like Ubuntu's release cycle better (among other things).

So yeah, Debian's great. But seriously, the jealousy at Ubuntu's success while Debian's still semi-obscure is just petty. Ubuntu contributes their changes back to Debian, and the whole "free software" thing Debian pushes is supposed to encourage others to reuse the software.

Re:No Experience?

[Frosty Piss]

What the hell are you talking about?

Re:No Experience?

[ubergenius]

I'm going to go ahead and suggest Ubuntu. I know most people already are suggesting that, and it would therefore be "cool" to suggest some other major distro, but Ubuntu is clearly the most newb-capable distro. I did NOT say that is was the best distro, but just that it is most suitable for newb, especially those who are (and let's face it, most of them will be) coming from Windows.

Ubuntu has what they would be looking for: An easy, quick, and clean installation with very few required settings to be worked out before the installation is complete. Then, once done, all settings can be set from a windowed environment. Oh, sure, the shell is there for you to use if you want, but it's not required to work the machine. Also, it comes with a host of good programs pre-installed: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, games, IM client, etc. And the mechanism for getting new software is a snap, with the package manager retrieving all files and dependencies you need for you, thus reducing the need for building source (which may be better for us, but from a new user coming straight from Windows-world, building from source is not the most familiar thing).

While Ubuntu may not be perfect, it certainly makes it much easier for new users to migrate from Windows into the wonderful world of Linux easily and painlessly.

Re:No Experience?

[bensch128]

I really hate to break the dream-bubble here guys, but we need a "Standard Linux Desktop" specification that fully defines the available libraries and their versions all the way from libc to gnome.

The problem is that everyone wants to use their own stack: kernel (2.4vs2.6) -> libc (5vs6) -> gcc (2.95 vs 3.4 vs 4.2) -> WM (gnome vs kde), etc, etc. Everyone wants everything customizable but still 100% functional and bug free. It's inevitiable unless one really big player (ala redhat) imposes their stack on everyone else and bug fixes it. I think that's why RHE9 is always 3+ years behind the bleeding edge. Bug fixes and stabilization. And as soon as you define a "Standard" spec. it;ll be out of date and people will complain why there isn't a "Standard" spec for all of the stuff which isn't unified. I'm quite surprised that DBus was so uniformly excepted by everyone. Now I think there'll be namespace fragmentation when people can agree on which dbus channels should be common or not... Its a neverending story...

Cheers
Ben

Re:No Experience?

[bensch128]

Use gentoo. It's revdep-rebuild tool is amazing and works 100%.
The only problem is identifying when functionality is missing because of a missing kernel driver and
making sure that you're not too much on the bleeding edge. (like using dbus 0.62 "stable" vs 1.0.1 "testing")

This requires you to be picky about which packages you "absolutely" need.

Otherwise, I find gentoo's bleeding-edgeness and ability to navigate "dependency hell" unbeatable. Hats off to the maintainers. And I find the time for rebuilds not too bad. (amd x64 3200+ 1GB Ram)

Cheers
Ben

Re:No Experience?

[uglyduckling]

Unbuntu is based on Debian unstable. Not Debian stable. Right now Debian unstable is in a freeze pending release. But once that is done, expect Unstable to live up to it's name and hence take unbuntu (potentially) with it.

Not aiming for a flamewar here, but... um... no.

You're right that Ubuntu is based on Debian unstable, but it also has a develop, freeze, release cycle. When an Ubuntu release is - well, released - it is as stable as any other up-to-date desktop Linux distro. The way they acheive this is to hand-pick a subset of Debian packages which form the main Ubuntu distro and work on them to create a stable desktop OS. Conversely, Debian takes so long over a stable release at least partly because they support thousands of packages, including multiple packages that solve the same problem, in their main package archive. A major update to Debian unstable won't suddenly break Ubuntu, it might just make the next release cycle harder work.

The only slight caveat is that the latest Ubuntu, Edgy, is designed to be a bit more bleeding-edge (hence the name) and they recommend the previous version (Dapper) to those who want total production stability. This is an LTS (Long Term Support) version which is supported for 3 years for the desktop and 5 for the server release. Having said that, I run Edgy on my desktop and the only difficulty I've had is an occasional Firefox crash, from which it recovers rather gracefully in any case.

Re:No Experience?

[noundi]

That doesn't make any sense. All the major distros have stable releases that work perfectly fine. Some have installers with more options and some with less. A lot is depending on how much crap you have, hardware-wise, and how much of this you crucially need to work right away. Perhaps learning how to use v4l for your webcam isn't the first priority in learning Linux. That's why I would also recommend Slackware (still uses the 2.4 kernel which causes a lack of fancy stuff support, but offers a stable enviorment) as a first distro, this is coming from a gentoo user. Slackware offers a step-by-step installer that will teach you new stuff right from the start (rather than inserting a disc, clicking yes, going away, returning and wondering what the hell you're supposed to do) and a clean enviorment perfect for someone who wants start the Linux experience. Would I recommend Slackware to granny? No that would be Ubuntu, but you seem to have more potential than that. ;)

Re:No Experience?

[Antique Geekmeister]

I was trying to agree with your statement that leaving out core packages is unwise. I have different reasons than you do to say this. It's not that disk space is cheap on desktop systems, as you pointed out, but rather that tools like a good compiler is core to poking around with the system. Leaving it out of a new user's operating system to avoid "bloat" is like not keeping plates in your kitchen to avoid cluttering your shelves. It kind of defeats the purpose of having a kitchen, or in this case an operating system.

Re:No Experience?

[leathered]

Agreed with most of what you said but mentioning the memory requirements of KDE and Gnome in the same breath as Vista is ludicrous. I have KDE 3.5 running nicely on a laptop with 256KB of RAM and I'm sure you'd get by with 128. Going to something more lightweight like XFCE or one of the superlight WMs and you could dig out that old P1 machine with 32MB RAM and run it quite happily.

And the thing is you would have a completely up to date OS running on old hardware. With a Microsoft OS, this simply isn't possible.

Re:No Experience?

[bzipitidoo]

I'm throwing a bit of cold water on the Ubuntu recommendations. Ubuntu isn't the best for turning a Windows system into a dual boot. Perhaps Ubuntu has improved in 6, but the Breezy version's installer could not handle NTFS partitions. Had to boot up Knoppix to get a partition editor that was up to the task, then install Ubuntu. Another nuisance, for those who want gcc, is Ubuntu doesn't install gcc by default. It's not obvious that the "build-essentials" package must be installed as well as gcc. And for me, I'm not too keen on being constantly nagged to install updates, a feature that Ubuntu and Windows share. Other than such nitpicks, Ubuntu is a fine distro. One more thing: if a more responsive faster desktop experience is wanted, and Ubuntu is still the #1 choice, maybe try Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu.

Anyone mention Distrowatch yet? Great site for info about dozens of Linux and BSD distros. There's the Linux.org listing of distros of course, but I prefer Distrowatch.

Re:No Experience?

[because789]

Jesus, Thank you!! I'm so sick in tired of these "go fuck yourself" flaming answers to valid questions! Has anyone thought that maybe, JUST maybe, if forums like this were "on a whole" a bit more compassionate and helpful and less filled with this geek bully bullshit talk that, that might help the adoption of open source software? In my opinion, if I was a "newbie" and I read responses like "Ideal Linux system for newbies? I recognize the words, but together they make no sense." would tell me that this linux shit is still in a hobby tinker state and I might not want to use it because I need to actually get work done. And posting questions on forums like this is more likely to lower my self-esteem than provide me with a helpful answer. We all know linux is not in a "hobby tinker state", but stop and think about how responses like that come ac crossed to others? If we all want linux to be adopted by the masses and dare I say it, "user" friendly, start with yourself and be friendly. I know I'm opening myself up to get flamed too but fuck it. I can take it from you social retards. Just wipe the pizza grease off your fat little fingers before you start typing.

Re:No Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I decided to make the switch I bought one of those cheap pc's with Lindows preinstalled. Not wanting to shell out for their Click and Run without really knowing what it was about I sent off for a bunch of distros from Cheap Bytes or someplace like that and started trying to install them. I tried Debian first but the install failed (probably a good thing at the time) so I stuck in a Mandrake install disk, hit yes, yes, yes...and I was off and running. From my experience for someone switching from Windows to their first Linux distro Mandrake (now Mandriva) is an excellent choice. It installs easily and with KDE it is very similar to Windows in day to day use.

Re:No Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is akin to me asking you what kind of car should I get. Surely you don't think yourself so all knowing as to tell me to go out and buy X. But then perhaps you do.

This shows exactly why you don't get it.

Non-technical people need to find someone who actually is all-knowing enough to be able to answer this question.

This happens all the time with smaller-scale questions. For example: "What is the best desktop?" Well, the good people at Fedora and Ubuntu have put their reputations on the line by answering that question simply and clearly, by the choice of their default desktop: Gnome.

It doesn't matter if you agree with their choice, or if others answered the question differently. The point is: They understood that they had to provide an answer, otherwise their distributions had no hope of achieving mainstream popularity.

Not everybody can provide answers. In fact, most can't. But we absolutely need people to step up to the plate and put their reputation on the line, and tell us, authoritatively, what the best-of-breed is. Even if their answer is "wrong", at least it's a step in the right direction.

Do you not hear the roar of people shouting, over and over, "Which is the best?" They are pleading, and they need answers urgently. They out-number the tech-savvy by a 1000-to-1 ratio, and their demands for an answer absolutely must be met if GNU/Linux has any hope of becoming mainstream. If you are not overwhelmed by their roar, then you have chosen to be deaf.

Re:No Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

"This generally causes an absolute ton of dependency hell at all levels"

To the distribution developers, not me. I haven't seen a dependency hell for ages.

"This is the exact reason why most commercial packages"

Commercial? I bet you meant closed source.

"Having a precompiled rpm/deb in the distro repository helps"

Well, thanfully you understood this.

"but it is far from an effective solution when it comes to newbies installing software"

How is it? How can be installing software any easier than "aptitude install this" or "urpmi install that" (even on a GUI if you want to).

"and it certainly doesn't make Linux a very friendly looking target for ISVs."

You mean, people making a live out of selling software licenses, don't you?

"If Linux wants to ever become a serious contender"

Who's Linux? I don't know him. If Linux wants this, or Linux wants that... Who's that Linux?

"it will seriously need to standardize the versions of the core libraries"

Binary versions so binary vendors can make their day, that's what you mean?

"The Linux Standard Base did a fair job at"

At trying to take their piece of the cake for the binary only vendors, if you ask me.

"I really hate to break the dream-bubble here guys"

Hey! don't break it then! Or is it that you rrreally don't hate it sooo much?

"but we need a "Standard Linux Desktop" specification that fully defines the available libraries and their versions all the way from libc to gnome."

We? Do you really think you know what do I need better than myself? On the other hand, I find your "from libc to gnome" phrase quite enlightning about what you mean with what "we" need.

"What I'm saying is that a user should have a single super-package"

It's not as if I didn't have my super-package for ages: it's called "Debian"; others prefer other super-packages; their choice.

"and would allow the use of older binaries on newer systems"

Not my problem. I use the newer system with its newer binaries whenever it fits. Of course I probably would percieve your problems were I accustomed to use binary-only software; I'm not and I don't feel your pains.

"If you want to use a commercial package"

Why should I *want* to use it? From time to time I *have* to do it, nothing else.

Re:No Experience?

[fucksl4shd0t]

I guess you're blind to text that says stuff like "After using Gentoo, I wouldn't recommend it". Everything you're saying is true, but what you're not saying is that you're required to spend 1-6 hours a week maintaining your system, it will arbitrarily break periodically when you update, and so forth. I could go on. Suffice it to say, I will probably never even attempt to run Gentoo again. I really do have things to do with my time that do not involve my computer.

Re:No Experience?

[An Onerous Coward]

A gig of memory to run KDE/GNOME? I've seen GNOME-based distros run happily on machines with a quarter that. If you're trying to install on an ancient machine with 64MB of RAM, I'd suggest going with something like Feather Linux. But I don't think your warning is accurate for any machine he's using as a primary workstation (rather than for simple nostalgic purposes).

Re:No Experience?

[FloridaSage]

LiveCDrom Distros: All my school kids start with http://pclinuxos.com/ and it's 5500 programs. Out the Box solution. I use it. On at least a dozen of my systems, (8 of my systems are Mac OS9 and OS X). On many of my dozens of older machines, http://knopper.net/knoppix rules, also! Damn Small Linux is great for the really oldies, plus, for the absolute newest ones! Firewall/router is http://ipcop.org/ I keep a single M$ XP Pro machine around, but, rarely spin it up. Maintenance (security, 7 protector programs, it wears out harddrives, prematurely!) isn't worth my time. Maybe if I was a "PC gamer". But, I do play some games on GNU/Linux. Operating systems are tools to make the machine do work. I choose those that do the particular job best. Play, and learn, then choose! It is about absolute freedom and ownership of MY DATA!

Re:No Experience?

[ArmedStupidity]

I used to use DOS for most of my computing, and that's been the thing most useful to me. I could relate to Slackware very well, being a command-line fan. So I grabbed the installers about five years ago and only boot into Windows for games. It is very easy to administrate, but the text-based interface that Slack defaults to is intimidating to new users who have been raised on Windows' sometimes-idiotic UI. Windows users aren't used to dealing with problems, simple as that. That trait will cost them if/when they boot into a Linux distro for the first time. With something like Ubuntu, if you have the space, dependency hell can be overcome by simply downloading everything. But that's not the most ideal solution, either. I've read so much about Ubuntu lately, so I tried it for kicks once. Nothing compared to the level of control I get with Slack 10.2. If the new user is familiar with Unix or BSD, give them Slack or Gentoo. Anything else? Maybe Ubuntu or one of the flashy distros that I haven't used. I'm not all-knowing, but Slackware gave me the best start I could have gotten. Maybe it's good for new users too?

Re:No Experience?

[Fred_A]

Another nuisance, for those who want gcc, is Ubuntu doesn't install gcc by default. It's not obvious that the "build-essentials" package must be installed as well as gcc.

I have to agree that the whole installation of development environments, whatever the language, is a major pain in the neither regions in Ubuntu because of the lack of meta-packages. Hopefully this will be addressed in one of the next releases. For now it must all be installed by hand which certainly isn't practical.
Can't say about NTFS support, never looked at that side of the system...

Re:No Experience?

[tacocat]

I tried Ubuntu. I don't like the interface. I am a windowmaker fan and will just stick with Debian. As for stability, I don't think Ubuntu can actually beat Debian-Stable. It might be more a question of "is Unbuntu stable enough?"

Re:No Experience?

[cloudmaster]

What? You don't like the interface of a debian-derived distro, so you went with debian? Because you like windowmaker? You can run windowmaker in Ubuntu, too...

http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/x11/wmaker
http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/x11/wmaker

Like I said, Ubuntu has not experienced a single crash for me. I'm pretty sure it's not possible to be more stable than that. Grad the server install, then do the "apt-get install wmaker" thing to get Ubuntu without the ubuntu desktop. It'll be just like Debian, except for the updates happening more than once every decade. ;)

Re:No Experience?

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

Let's see. "emerge sync" doesn't take any time (since you don't stay and watch - crtl alt F7). Seriously, (almost) the only problem I've seen (once the system is set up and except for rebuilds) is updating config files without messing up something (e.g. sendmail, cups). It has been such a long time since I had a problem that I can't really remember details. (However I do recall that there were a few in the past that required a "gentoo expert" to fix.)

I know three good "IT people" at work. Our IT person knows Red Hat (and Windows) well. The IT person on the floor below knows Debian (and Windows, I suppose). The third knows Gentoo and Windows. All three can deal with any Linux distro but each is most familiar with a particular Linux distribution. Of course, they all think Windows sucks but it's part of the job.

Re:No Experience?

[fucksl4shd0t]

emerge sync doesn't actually update anything but portage. If you want to update installed software, you have to do emerge -uDav world, and if you haven't noticed a couple of recent migrations (like the switch to modular x.org), then you're probably still running the base system you installed. :)

Seriously, between packages being phased out and the holy grail of package managers being completely unable to deal with it without manual intervention (a problem urpmi doesn't have), I really did find myself spending 1-6 hours each week maintaining my system. That's ignoring the fact that every single package seems like it's perfectly designed to make sure that only Gentoo documentation can help you, the project's original documentation can't because it doesn't work that way anymore (either because config files have been moved all over the place or because of excessive amounts of third-party patches). Looking for help in Gentoo land? RTFM. Only nobody ever seems to notice that every single Gentoo how-to gets you 90% of the way there, and then leaves you hanging. Go to their irc channel if you want to be called an idiot and have your every decision questioned, but there's no help to be found there.

I want the time I wasted on Gentoo back, goddammit!

Same as a Windows system

[TuringTest]

The one that is babysitted and administered by an expert.

Re:Same as a Windows system

[kc32]

Works for me (tm)

Although in this case I'm the expert running the Windows box for my family.

Why???

[udderly]

Why dual boot? It seems so inconvenient to me. Perhaps virtualization would be better?

Re:Why???

[linguae]

There are some cases where dual-booting is more advantageous than virtualization. Virtualization takes a heavy hit on RAM (I tried Parallels on my MacBook with a measly 512MB of RAM, my 1.83GHz dual core computer felt like my old 8MHz Mac SE), and if you're strapped for cash and don't have much memory, it's better to just dual-boot where the OS has full access to all of the RAM needed.

That reminds me to invest in a upgrade to 2GB of RAM soon.

Re:Why???

[Kwiik]

You can get a USB drive preloaded with linux, and use it on any computer - no risk to your data.

websites like www.linuxonusb.com give you a good solution and promote the community... yellow dog linux also has this service.

the drives generally cost little more than a standard drive, and they do all the work for you.

Re:Why???

[convolvatron]

get the 2gb, parallels just flails painfully with only 1, although i haven't tried turning down the guest size very low. just upgraded to 2 and both oses are very usable..except for an occasional usage spike that i can't really explain.

Re:Why???

[Antique Geekmeister]

How well does Ubunto handle Xen or another lightweight Windows virtualization system? I'd absolutely recommend that new Linux hardware have the CPU virtualization features to run another Windows OS directly locally: most new hardware comes with enough speed and RAM to do this, and a Windows license anyway, so let the user have Windows available in a local installation for games and Windows Media and other tools they may require, and use Linux for the basic OS stability and tools as they learn to play with them.

A recent enough OS to support Evolution for access to MS Exchange email and calendar functionality in a shared or corporate environment is vital. Fedora Core 6, the RHEL 5 demo, and the latest OpenSuSE seem to support it, although Novell has just made a huge licensing mistake involving Microsoft patents and just lost one of the core Samba developers in the resulting mess and will doubtless lose other core people. Expect SuSE support of critical Windows compatibility to be actually hurt by their deal with Microsoft, as they cripple themselves by using Microsoft technologies directly and not being able to use GPL tools from that patent agreement.

For ease of use, find what the local Linux experts use at home, and stay away from bleeding edge hardware that may involve a lot of manual work to integrate into your OS. 64-bit dual-core Opterons have good reports and better Linux support than Intel's 64-bit oddnesses: high-end ATI video cards are better supported than NVidia because ATI publishes their specifications, NVidia tries to shoe-horn their proprietary and extensively modified libraries on top of existing Linux tools and does a very strange job of it. 250 Gig drives are cheap and plentiful: use known-vendor, actual hardware RAID instead of software RAID, if you need RAID, since a lot of software RAID drivers are poorly documented and a nightmare to integrate. Check what the network chipsets are: if they're something unheard of, prepare to spring for a $10 NE2000 card or borrow a cheap USB network port, just to get booted far enough to grab patches.

Describe what you need or want to accomplish for more ideas: are you a gamer? A Perl programmer? Doing simple web browsing with flash and animation making you excited? Doing Q/A work?

Re:Why???

[fm6]

The key phrase in your post is "some cases". Let's look at this specific case. The guy has asked for advice on buying hardware, so he's not stuck with adapting an existing machine. And anybody buying a new machine these days needs to max out the RAM anyway, because RAM is cheap and today's software is RAM-hungry.

Re:Why???

[dilute]

Xen is nice, but not at all Newbie-friendly, and last time I checked, wanted to run on a Linux host. VMWare Player does not (AFAIK) take advantage of hardware virtualization support (as provided in newer CPUs), but the performance hit is not too bad, if you have a recent machine with lots of RAM. And, it is trivial to install and use, and can be hosted on either Windows or Linux (Mac in the works).

Also, with VMWare Player (or Server, or whatever), you don't have to sweat whether your basic hardware will be supported. No, it won't run stuff like TV tuner cards, and things like that, but the basic video, disk drive, network, USB and sound setup is covered.

Re:Why???

[headkase]

Maybe it would be so I'm gonna try! I've installed Qemu with the acceleration module that promises native execution (or near) speeds! I also did a little bit of leg work and found some Qemu disk images at OSZoo. I'm downloading both Kubuntu and Ubuntu images to try out on my MCE system.
I hope it works well, will find out in a couple hours when the torrents finish.

Re:Why???

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't help that your host OS is the slowest half-NIX in existence. RAM is one thing, efficiency is an entirely different beast.

Re:Why???

[miyako]

In general, I think that is pretty good advice. I use VMWare regularly to try out new distros, and it's a great way to toy around with something before making a full commitment to installing it on the computer.
The biggest downside for the poster however, is going to be that virtualization is going to have a lot of overhead. Mathematical and Scientific applications are among the most resource intensive things that are done with computers now days, so the overhead of running Linux in a virtual environment may be unacceptable in this case.

Re:Why???

[coffee_bouzu]

How well does OSX run on only 512? I know that its the standard, but after seeing how well a G4 runs Tiger on 256 (if you can call it running, it wasn't usable by anyone with normal patience), I can't imagine that 512 would be that much better unless you only run 1 or 2 apps at a time.
Maybe paging sped up a lot with the move to intel chips, but I still think that OSX is a bigger memory hog out of the box than WindowsXP is (until you start installing stuff, anyways).

Re:Why???

[quacking duck]

I recently upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook with 1 GB of RAM. My old machine was a dual-533 MHz G4 with 768 MB. Both are running the latest 10.4.8 OS.

Although operationally the Macbook smokes my old G4 at any given task, sometimes it develops very noticable lags in switching apps, and otherwise basic responsiveness issues. At the moment I attribute this to a) occasionally firing up PowerPC-only apps under Rosetta, and b) the 5400 RPM hard drive which takes longer to load stuff into RAM and read/write the swap file. I can't really test either assumption at the moment since I can't pay to upgrade my RAM to 2 GB, or my hard drive to a 7200 RPM one.

One other factor is that I rarely shutdown/restart my Macbook, instead putting it to sleep. Every time I stopped using my G4 for more than a few hours, it would be shut down and the swap file reset.

This comes up pretty often

[drinkypoo]

Step 1: Whatever hardware you get, be sure to make sure that it is compatible. The easiest way to do this is to buy a centrino system, because that means all the major hardware will work properly :)

Step 2: Use Ubuntu. It's the easiest, bar none. It gives you access to gigantic repositories (debian.) It has by far the most support today, meaning that you're more likely to find an install package for software on Ubuntu.

Step 3: Get lots of RAM. This is the most important hardware-related advice I can give any user of any computer :)

As for reading, I suggest The Unix Programming Environment by Kernighan and Pike. It will help you understand Unix, which will help you whether you're using Linux or Slowlaris.

OSX

[krunk7]

OSX Leopard It had to be said.

Re:OSX

[FishWithAHammer]

He asked for a Linux system, numbnuts. Not a user-coddling half-a-*NIX.

Re:OSX

[boner]

I could not agree more! Macbook with Intel Core Duo, 2 GB of RAM, 120 GB harddisk and *Parallels*!!
I can run Windows 98, Windows ME, Ubuntu, OpenSolaris and WindowsXP whenever I want! Shared disks using NFS or SAMBA.

As for my publishing needs, I am writing my thesis in LaTeX, using Xemacs as editor. Xfig, R, OCTAVE, gnuplot etc. to do the research and generate the plots (all under MacOS X, thanks to macports).

It is *so* usable... why would anyone need anything else... and it looks cool too!

Four years ago I would have said that Linux was the desktop of choice... I no longer believe that to be true. The ease of use of MacOS X convinced me, a computer is a tool not a workout station. I still play with Linux and Windows, but rarely boot them anymore... From a user experience MacOS X is sooo much better than Linux (yes my Ubuntu is the most recent), and Windows... nothing compelling there....

Re:OSX

[talksinmaths]

Which TeX distro will he be working with right out of the box under OS X?

Re:OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree with the recommendation to get a Mac, but I have used TeX installed via fink on OS X without much problem.

I still recommend Linux for this particular thread. Much cheaper than a Mac, for one. And it sounds like this guy's needs are right up Linux's alley.

Re:OSX

[reemul]

Is the "just buy a mac" thing becoming some knee-jerk response that just happens in every thread? It's starting to be the equivalent of "first post", "hot grits", or voting for the Cowboy Neal option in the poll.

The question was very specifically about linux. Not mac. I get where you are coming from: M$ bad, Mac good, Linux too hard. Just accept that I understand that without you having to say it again and move on.

Re:OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether "get a Mac" is appropriate for a Linux question depends on why it's a Linux question.

If somebody wants to move to a Unix system, rather than specifically a Linux or free software system, "get a Mac" is an excellent answer. The Macintosh is probably by far the easiest to use
Unix system around, particularly for those without Unix experience. (I've had a few problems
with mine, since I insist on using it as a Unix system much of the time, including heavy use
of vi, but nothing I couldn't figure out.)

If somebody wants a Linux system, "why Linux in particular?" is an excellent answer. Many people
want the advantages of Unix, and don't realize immediately that Linux is just one way to get them.

However, since the original poster specifically wanted to get into free software, "get a Mac" isn't
really appropriate. Macs are in many ways lovely machines, but what's special about them isn't
free or open source software.

Re:OSX

[NineNine]

I have no idea what "Tex" is.

Re:OSX

[iminplaya]

You mean to say that none of them run in Darwin? How 'bout X11? I have found the unix that comes with a mac to be fairly complete and would wager that most unix programs will run "right out of the box"(as unix programs go...). Does TeX come in a box?

Re:OSX

[WillAdams]

Reasons not to buy a Mac:

  - already have a PC and don't want to go through the nuisance / expense of selling it and buying a Mac

  - want/need a form-factor Apple doesnt make, e.g., subnotebook sans optical drive or a pen-system w/ integrated graphics digitizer (Tablet PC)

  - no single vendor clause / requirement to purchase a supported configuration

Which is why I wish Apple would license Mac OS X or build a pen slate.

William

Re:OSX

[Llywelyn]

i-installer ftw. Sure, its not "right out of the box," but it might as well be considering its just a simple installer. For working with LaTeX, I've found TeXShop to be one of the best editors out there, and its Mac only.

Re:OSX

[Llywelyn]

I'm not sure that it doesn't apply to filling the needs that the submitter was asking.

He wanted Linux for its advantages "in the area of science and mathematics" and lists:

* Intermediate programming (language/tools unspecified)
* Web maintenance
* Python work
* *Lots* of LaTeX

In my mind, unless there is a specific need to be on Linux (such as ideological or interface requirements), MacOS X will work just as well for all of these using many of the same tools that are available and would be used on Linux (Octave, SciPy, LaTeX, etc) as well as a few that are Mac specific (TeXShop).

It seems to fit under your category of the best question is "why Linux in particular?" Since everything he wants--including the free software--is available on other platforms. MacOS X or FreeBSD would probably fit his needs just as well, based on what he has specified here.

Re:OSX

[boner]

When the main purpose is publishing (and I assume academic publishing), the computer is a tool...
Why would I keep a dull knife if I can vastly improve my productivity by buying a sharp one....

Expense and form factors are just nits when considering the task at hand... If he needs a Tablet PC for something, please don't consider writing your thesis on it... It's like expecting the comfort of a sedan when buying a go-cart...

I am now in the final stages of my dissertation. I have had four brushes with carpal tunnel and other ergonomic issues. I can say from bitter experience, if someone is serious about publishing but inwilling to spend $2500 on a good laptop, wireless ergonomic keyboard and mouse etc., GIVE UP... The pain ain't worth it...

For ergonomics the adagium is also true: penny wise, pound foolish...

How much are pain-free arms and wrists worth?

In my experience the Macbook has been an extreme pleasure to work with. Mind you. I stack my Macbook on two Phonebooks and use a wireless mouse and keyboard for all my typing. Good ergonomics are a must.

My two cents.

Re:OSX

[talksinmaths]

What, none of you still runs TeXtures in OS9 mode? :)

I know about Fink, iInstaller, and the various TeX distros and utilities available for the Mac. OS X is a great product, and I know lots of folks who happily do lots of TeX stuff under it. I was simply amused at the idea of being required to add in the core functionality you need to the OS you're switching to in order to have that functionality available in that OS.

Re:OSX

[rob1980]

Why on earth would you ever want to run Windows ME? I'd rather pay somebody 5 bucks to kick me in the jimmy than put that lump of catshit on my computer.

Re:OSX

[WillAdams]

Actually, I'm writing this out now, since I find regularly switching between keyboarding and writing mitigates my own carpal tunnel problem.

Editing and annotating with a pen is also for more natural and efficient, and it's hard to beat the improved portability and flexibility.

I can drop my pen slate into a docking setup at my desk, or place it in a portfolio case which mimics a laptop but rarely do so, but when I had a traditional clam shell laptop, I almost always had to carry around a graphics tablet and/or scanner. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't have anything with the flexibility I need.

William

Re:OSX

[boner]

That's great.

  I also use a graphics tablet (specially for illustrations), and agree that they are not convenient to lug around.

  I think we are in agreement that the computer is a tool that should fit the task. You have found your groove, I have found mine. Together we have shared our experiences and someone hopefully better understands the options.

In respect to the grandfather post, my opinion remains that he should choose what works....

Re:OSX

[WillAdams]

Yeah, the big problem here is Apple won't cooperate and provide a reasonable alternative --- I've been considering getting a Mac Mini and a Wacom Cintiq and rigging up a portfolio case and battery pack for it, but unfortunately Wacom has discontinued the smaller models.

Aside from the graphics / annotation considerations Mac OS X would probably be a good choice for the OP. Again, it's a shame Apple won't make it easier to try out.

William

I'd suggest ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... a Mac.

Specifically a 20" or 24" iMac.

Yes, there's tonnes of LaTex/TeX/etc stuff out there for it. And almost all flavours of Linux.

You can even run Windows on it if you want, though of course that would introduce viruses and spyware back into the mix, which seems silly to me.

Ask a friend with a Mac laptop (chances are you know one). Do a little research. I think you'll find the value "ratio" to be superb.

Re:I'd suggest ...

[5pp000]

As someone who has used both Linux and the Mac for years and years, I have to second this. Apple has put a massive amount of effort into making a Unix-like OS easier to use, and Linux is nowhere near catching up. Any app that runs on Linux can also be downloaded for the Mac. For the non-programmer I see no advantage to Linux whatsoever.

Re:I'd suggest ...

[Karzz1]

"Any app that runs on Linux can also be downloaded for the Mac. "

100% Wrong! Please turn in your /. ID at the door.

*If* the source code is available you may be able to port it to OSX, but native Linux binaries will not run on OSX. Keep in mind that while the userland tools are similar/identical in many ways, you are still dealing with 2 completely different kernels.

Many software packages written for BSD or Linux may be recompiled to run under Mac OS X; such software is often distributed precompiled for Mac OS X in the form of Mac OS X packages. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X

Re:I'd suggest ...

[5pp000]

Please read more carefully. I didn't say the Linux binary would run on the Mac -- do you really think someone who had long experience with both would say such a thing? I said the app could be downloaded for the Mac. Between Fink, DarwinPorts, and the fact that most sites offering a particular downloadable Linux app also have a Mac version, I can't recall an occasion when an app that was available for Linux, and which I wanted to use on the Mac, could not be trivially obtained for the latter.

Plus, there are a lot of commercial packages that are available on Windows and the Mac, but not on Linux.

Unless a major goal of the OP is to learn about Linux specifically, I think it's a no-brainer.

Re:I'd suggest ...

[multimediavt]

Let me add to your post and say that not only are you dealing with completely different kernels, you are also dealing with completely different OS level libraries and APIs. Having direct knowledge of Linux to Mac OS X software porting I can say that some applications can be compiled and run (with modest or considerable tweaks to 'make' files), some take weeks if not months to port, and some don't port at all due to their heavy reliance on Linux only libraries and APIs. Oh, and then there's the driver level support for things like network interfaces and the like. COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! in most ways.

gentoo

[neurovish]

Definitely gentoo.

Re:gentoo

[lpcustom]

LFS would be much better for a newbie!

Re:gentoo

[penix1]

Definitely gentoo.

For a newbie?!?!?! Are you stoned!

Then again, no better way to learn Linux than from the ground up....;-)

B.

Disclaimer:

Proud Gentoo user since 2004

Linux version 2.6.18-gentoo-r5 (gcc version 4.1.1 (Gentoo 4.1.1-r1)) #1 SMP Thu Dec 15 21:24:08 EST 2006

Re:gentoo

[Homr Zodyssey]

I'm pretty sure neurovish is joking. I highly recommend that you not waste time with Gentoo if you are a linux rookie. While Gentoo has many many benefits, being newbie-friendly is definitely NOT one of them.

As previous posters have said, Ubuntu is the easiest to set up (IMHO).

Re:gentoo

[EvanED]

Depends... Gentoo docs are generally VERY thorough, so I think that it would be possible to start with it. However, you have to be of the right mentality I think... you have to be a tinkerer, not mind doing some work to get things to work sometimes, be perhaps a bit of a control freak, and you have to have patience. Gentoo is a great distro (my desktop dual-boots XP and Gentoo, and I've been using it for a couple years now), but if you want to pop the CD in and have a working system in 30 min or an hour, you have to look elsewhere. (Even with the Gentoo reference packages I suspect.)

My personal feeling right now is that either Ubuntu or Debian would be best. Like Gentoo, they have excellent package management, but don't have to go through the things that go with compiling everything.

Re:gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried running ubuntu just recently, lasted about 2 weeks before i switched back to gentoo. Its much easier to get things to work on a gentoo system imho. Its like the difference between a new mercedes and a '70's muscle car. The 70's muscle car may not be as easy and fancy to run, but much simpler and easier to fix when something goes wrong.

Re:gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

"Couple" is not an adjective.

"Couple" is only a noun, like "pair".

You've been using it for a couple of years now.

Thanks.

Re:gentoo

[iminplaya]

So if I cross a rookie with a newbie, will I get some nookie? or just a ruby?

Re:gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as you want to be a grammar nazi, "couple" is also a verb. Oddly enough, you chose to associate it with "pair" which is also a verb.

Re:gentoo

[pestilence669]

I second this suggestion. If you don't have a good overview of your system after a full Gentoo install, then you simply weren't paying attention. The available tutorials are easy to read and follow. There IS a lot of manual work, but going through the motions will help burn it into your head. Practice makes perfect (doing not reading).

Re:gentoo

[TeknoHog]

Depends... Gentoo docs are generally VERY thorough, so I think that it would be possible to start with it. However, you have to be of the right mentality I think... you have to be a tinkerer, not mind doing some work to get things to work sometimes, be perhaps a bit of a control freak, and you have to have patience.

I agree. A friend of mine has Gentoo as his first proper Linux system, after trying out some mainstream distros with little success. I had suggested something mainstream, but I use Gentoo myself and I trusted his mindset, so in the end it turned out brilliant.

Re:gentoo

[fucksl4shd0t]

You get a wookie, didn't you know that?

Re:gentoo

[Azuma Hazuki]

Okay...it is possible for a newbie to install Gentoo as her first Linux (I did it). But the thing is, I also printed out the 70+ pages of documentation, read it all, and approached it with an open mind. I have also had some background in programming, computer hardware, and HTML.

Yes, you can install Gentoo and get it working if you follow the directions to the letter (and peruse the forums), but as several people have mentioned, Joe Sixpack doesn't want to do any of that. He wants a CD he can pop in and hit the OK button on a few times.

And just try to imagine his reaction when you tell him it will take, on a modern system (let's say an AMD 64 3500+ Venice CPU with 2 GB of RAM), the better part of a day to install a working desktop, because everything has to be compiled from source. Oh, and let's not forget all the files to edit, the need to partition manually, having to configure the kernel yourself or be stuck with that PoS genkernel, and needing to know your hardware inside and out in order to configure said kernel properly. And the fact that an emerge -e system and then an emerge -e world with a tuned make.conf are recommended to flush and optimize your toolchain. And that's even not compiler-ricing; that's getting the "safe" optimizations Gentoo is supposed to give you over, for example, Debian.

I did install Gentoo as my first Linux, in mid-2004. But that's because I'm insane.

What Is So Sad About This Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that the million different answers will have essentially absolutely no impact on day to day use.

Instead we have silly package management hassles so everyone can throw files where ever the fuck they want and not in something simple and logical like OS X's .app structure.

Instead we have a bunch of different desktops because certain people stormed off in a tantrum or other juvenile reasons.

And so on...

Linux is moving in every direction possible sideways and very little forward.

Re:What Is So Sad About This Question

[Lord Kano]

Linux is moving in every direction possible sideways and very little forward.

That's the problem with freedom, different people have different ideas of what should be done.

If it wasn't for the freedom that is not leading to a certain degree of stagnation, Linux and the underlying GNU system wouldn't have ever gotten off of the ground. How's that for irony?

LK

A Mac

[pdo400]

You'll be able to do all your work AND get laid more.

Re:A Mac

[josteos]

Dammit, I want an OSeX upgrade for my PC!

Re:A Mac

[Lord Kano]

You'll be able to do all your work AND get laid more.

Yeah, but only with other guys.

LK

Re:A Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

AND get laid more.

Yeah...by other guys.

Re:A Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

You're living proof?

Re:A Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

You're living proof?

Yes. When I stopped using a Mac, guys stopped trying to pick me up.

Re:A Mac

[strikethree]

"You'll be able to do all your work AND get laid more."

Yeah, but you only get laid by people of the same gender. :P

(it's a joke, laugh. I have a MBP)

strike

Community

[Cr4wford]

One of the best things about linux is the community... http://www.linuxquestions.org/ is all I've needed to solve many problems. My favorite distribution is Gentoo. It just takes a lot of time and effort put into it to get it running, and then it's smooth sailing. That's not to say that it's difficult--it just takes time, at first. I recommend trying a bunch of distributions (LiveCDs come in handy here) and just choosing one that you like.

Re:Community

[Caesar Tjalbo]

This is very much my recommendation too. LinuxQuestions is excellent even if you don't have any questions; simply looking through old threads revealed so much information that I'd otherwise not had a clue it existed. Trying out various distro's and installing a few for few times can learn you a lot about what's available and possible, http://distrowatch.com/ provides information about which distro's are available and where to get them. Distrowatch's motto "Put the fun back into computing" proved to be true for me.
Be careful when installing a dualboot system and make sure your Windows data is backed up.
My favorite isn't Gentoo, it's Fedora Core 6, but chances are you're more bothered by a choice of windowmanager or software-update-mechanism than actual distribution.
Enjoy!

cygwin

[Lord Bitman]

Use Windows until you have reason to use Linux. Don't use Linux until it's better for you.

Re:cygwin

[Foofoobar]

Honestly, that kind of mentallity can be a larger problem to the workplace. You develop using the easiest platform for what you are trying to do and you develop on what you are releasing for. For instance, a LAMP developer would have an easier time avoiding Windows end of line characters popping up in subversion clients, text editors and a variety of other programs merely by BEING on a Linux platform thus saving alot of worries and hassles. On a similar note, a C# developer would probably find it alot harder to transfer files and connect to shares if he was on Linux or MAC.

The right tool for the job... not 'Windows by default' unless you think a hammer can solve all your carpentry needs.

Re:cygwin

[Junta]

If the submitter never tries linux, how would they supposed to find out when it *would* be better for them? I think the description shows clearly he has reason (working with latex and python, and the platform is popular in the field he is working more into).

If they have the time and resources to evaluate a platform, particularly one that enjoys fair popularity in their field, they should do so.

In fact, I would recommend delaying a Windows license purchase on the new system entirely, unless transitioning his existing license from his old desktop. Leave Windows on the older system and see if Linux can fit the bill more than he realizes. Windows is not free by any legal measure, so already there is benefit migrating to a free platform and save a fair chunk of money (even XP home OEM is 90 bucks right now)..

Re:Cygwin

[dekkerdreyer]

I should have added, if you have used Windows as much as your post implies, you're in for quite a curve. Anybody with some common sense and some computer experience under their belt will find that viruses and malware is really just not an issue, and everything just works with Windows.

The first time you find you have to compile multiple programs and chase down various projects and firmware releases just to get encrypted wireless internet working, you'll be wishing you were back in windows.

"What? WPA requires me to compile two more packages and likely won't compile without modifying my kernel? On top of that, I have to fight with a command prompt everytime I want to change from my personal wireless network to another one without encryption?!"

Re:cygwin

[finalbroadcast]

Wait you mean a hammer isn't the only tool. Well that would explain why my computer makes such awfuk noises.

Re:cygwin

[Lord Bitman]

If you are already used to Windows, and can try out the benefits of Linux without completely abandoning what you have, why would you want to "dive in" and waste what could be a perfectly good system?

Cygwin allows you to try out some benefits of Linux without dedicating anything. That's [my] point.

Re:cygwin

[a.d.trick]

I'm all for being pragmatic about computing and such, but exactly how is he supposed to know which is better if he doesn't use Linux. To expect a switch from Windows to Linux to go flawless is unrealistic, but that doesn't mean Linux is worse. He will have to get use to different ways of doing things, but some of them are better in the long run. The people who say Linux "doesn't work for them" but have never actually used it for anything significant are like the people who say they hate sushi because the idea of seaweed doesn't sound very yummy.

Some things about Linux really do stink (for the end users at least). Most of them are caused by polititians and not programmers, but to the end user, it doesn't matter. Whether he cares to live with those problems are not is his decision. Personally, I love Linux, and I love software freedom; but I would not recommend it to my parents who rely heavily on Windows specific tools (although that's changing :). Every users' story is different.

Re:cygwin

[Lord Bitman]

Way to mention things that Cygwin would allow you to do ;)
It's not "Windows by default" it's "What you're already using by default".

I'm personally used to working on Linux and Solaris, but before I had tried out some unix-style tools on Windows (which allowed me to keep working while getting familiar with the system), it would have been stupid to.. well, just stop working.

Re:cygwin

[Junta]

Admittedly, the subject didn't register with me, and yes, cygwin will give you some of the niceties of a *nix system in Windows. It is a good first step if you want to see what you think of *nix command line interfaces, but may be less interesting in terms of graphical applications which generally already have non cygwin Windows ports that work about the same anyway

He implied a new system purchase, and presumably this is a good time to give an alternative a spin. There are two parts to his question, really. The first and stated part is if there is benefit to be had to transitioning. The second part which is left unsaid but undoubtedly on his mind is what might he be giving up while in linux. On the first part, cygwin doesn't have nearly the software library a distribution would with apt or yum repo, so a lot of the benefits would be unrealized. The second part obviously you won't get a feel for unless you have an environment devoid of the crutch of Windows to fall back on.

Re:cygwin

[Cheapy]

He could simply try out knoppix and see if that's better than Windows for him.

Re:cygwin

[doktorjayd]

Use Windows until you have reason to use Linux. Don't use Linux until it's better for you.

i think thats a grammatical typo, what you probably mean is 'use linux until you have reason to use windows. dont use windows until its better for you'.

esp. given the original query and notes the need for latext, web and some programming.

and cygwin? ewww! why fake *nix on windows when you can have the real thing for free?

Re:cygwin

[fucksl4shd0t]

Well that would explain why my computer makes such awfuk noises.

In my house, it's the user that makes awfuk noises.

Re:cygwin

[jez9999]

Comparing a general-purpose computer's operating system to a hammer is stupid.

Re:cygwin

[Lord Bitman]

While a great /second/ step is trying out a distro on a second system (where the rest of these threads can go), a first step is to get the basics. You dont need a full featured system for basics.

Cygwin -> Dual-boot -> Side-by-Side -> Use Synergy for side-by-side with 2 linux ;D

Re:cygwin

[Foofoobar]

Cygwin isn't installed by default. Text editors on Windows don't default to 'Unix EOL Characters' by default'. Windows versioning control clients don't default to UNIX EOL characters by default. etc etc. I stated 'develop on the environment you are releasing for' not 'develop with tools which approximate the environment'. If approximation could alleviate all these problems that Windows developers continually have porting their code over to a Linux environment and vice versa then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

But the easiest solution for a company is to have developers work in the environment they are releasing for. So people developing applications for Macs work on macs. People developing applications for Windows work on windows and people developing applications for Linux work on Linux. The 'Windows by default' answer is something I would expect my grandmother and a Microsoft exec to spout merely because neither know any better.

Slackware.

[byteframe]

Sound crazy, but with very little work on the part of the guru, it can be set up with something like KDE, and from there they can use the system no problem, however, since it's slackware, when it comes time to fix something or get into the bowelsof the system, the easyness of the internals in slackware should really help the user not only fix the problem, but also learn about Linux system adminstartion due to the fact that Slackware is the least distributiuon specific disitrubtion out there.

Install slack, bump up to a 2.6 kernel (ck preferably), and use either the slack-supplied KDE, or install Dropline Gnome. Flip iniitab to runlevel 4, and your set.

What WOULD make a distro easier? GUI tools? If your telling me netconfig is hard to use, I'll shoot myself in...hmm...the left ankle.

Re:Slackware.

[Who235]

Slackware was my first permanent distro and I loved it.

Quirky, sure, but I learned more in a month than I did with any other distro I tried.

I don't think you're crazy at all. I think you should be modded up.

PCLinuxOS is probably my favorite newbie distro, though. The hardware support is great, and package management is unbelievably easy with Synaptic. Also, the overall configuration is easy - it uses the Mandrake configuration wizard deal - I don't remember what it's called.

PCLinuxOS. Lousy name, but it is really a great distro to learn with.

Re:Slackware.

[mr_shifty]

Another vote for Slackware from me.

It might not seem like the intuitive choice, but I kick myself for wasting my time with other distros before finally trying Slack. It's the most trouble-free, stable distro I've used, and that's why it's the only one I use anymore.

In my opinion, it's actually simpler than other distros because it forces you to learn the basics rather than depending out of the box on some GUI based tools that (in my experience, anyway) aren't very reliable yet in the Linux world.

And let's be serious here... the basics aren't that difficult.

By day I'm an admin in a Windows Server 2003 data center, but at home, I run all Slackware because frankly it's a lot simpler and less of a headache than even Windows is. And it's CERTAINLY easier to install and set up than Windows.

I even have it running on my laptop. The only piece of hardware on the laptop Slack didn't have working out of the box was the wifi, and after installing the MadWifi drivers, that worked too. Contrast that to installing XP on the same laptop: I needed to hold Windows' hand through identifying the sound module, the graphics chipset, the DVD rom, the modem, the integrated wifi, plus install 2+ hours' worth of fricking patches. Ugh.

To sum up:

- Slackware is a simpler, more stable distro than others I've tried (Red Hat, Mandriva, Ubuntu)

- If you can install Windows, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how well Slackware sets up

Re:Slackware.

[byteframe]

Holy shit I got a mod point, and I didn't even have to make a corny, old, esoteric cowboyneal joke that nobody REALLY gets.

In reality, most all disitrubtions try to make themselves easy to use. "It's a PAIN in the ass!" is rarely a catch phrase you'll see when your scouting out for an ISO. I'd be really hard pressed to find someone who started as a newbie on say, Ubuntu, for a while (but didnt quite get beyond the newbie stance), and found fedora, mandrake, pclinuxos, suse, etc hard to use.

Re:Slackware.

[byteframe]

Slackware, as well as other distros, that make it a simple, easy process to compile a kernel from source, also makes it much easier to deal with hardware support issues I find.

Re:Slackware.

[mr_shifty]

You know, I've never even bothered compiling my own kernel in Slackware... the default kernel from the Slackware installation has always worked just fine for me.

Re:Slackware.

[byteframe]

It's probably the funnest thing to do to your computer, other than building it.

Re:Slackware.

[X_Bones]

"but with very little work on the part of the guru,"
"bump up to a 2.6 kernel"
"install Dropline Gnome"
"Flip iniitab to runlevel 4"

...and you're attempting to recommend this distro to someone with zero Linux experience?

I'm not saying Slack is bad or anything (I know several friends who are partial to it), but if I was just starting out with a new operating system and had specific tasks and goals in mind, the last thing I'd want to do would be administrative things like upgrading my kernel. IMO the article's submitter should stick with Fedora Core or Ubuntu to start off, then move to something like Slack when they've got a little more Linux experience under their belt.

Re:Slackware.

[byteframe]

Don't be stupid. The guru would be doing these things, not the user.

Re:Slackware.

[dragonsomnolent]

I agree completely, get someone with a fair amount of Linux knowledge to come over, offer them pizza, and have them assist you in setting it up. Do all the work yourself, but have them on standby to answer questions for you, take notes, and then if need be, you will be able to do it again. Get it set up to boot into your GUI, and go to town. I promise you that unless you log in as root, you won't break much (unless you first type su and the root password).

Re:Slackware.

[byteframe]

I gave 6, no 5 fellow college students, whose computer experiance was nil, Slackware with some kind of gnome to replace their spyware invested windows installations. They never looked back, and when I they needed to upgrade, and I lazily said "yeah ill put windows on it" they insisted they be given the latest linux.
Chances are they'll NEVER be able ot know how to parition a hardrive or fix a file, but really all these people need is g(aim), and a web browser. The only thing holding linux back in the usability department is the lack of heavily adopted distrubtion-inspecific package management suite, with a GUI front end. Maybe just a gui that handles the differances between all the package management suites would be even better. (I wonder whether or not autopackage will ever catch on, could be nice.)
Linux isn't hard to ****USE**** in ANY capacity.

Re:Slackware.

[dragonsomnolent]

Autopackage is slick. I chatted with some in thier camp and they don't think it would be good for a distro, I didn't care to argue with the devs, but I think it would be a great package management solution. If I had the time, I would consider building a distro around it. It just works, and it works well. And as any who use Linux regularly all say, it isn't hard to use, just (depending on distro) hard to set up.

Re:Slackware.

[quarkscat]

Slackware is an excellent choice as a first (noobie) linux distribution, for some interestingly (contrarian) logic that
the parent poster has enumerated. It really IS THE most non-distribution-specific distribution that I know of.
( It is also THE linux distribution that I started out on as a noobie ... )

The graphical but non-GUI installation is reliable and uncluttered for anyone who already has some experience with
the underlying hardware, MS-DOS, and Windows. It is THE only linux distribution that I am aware of that the user
can add an application or a brand new kernel from source code downloaded from the original authors (like kernel.org
or sourceforge.org) and have it work as advertised. With every other distribution, the user is forced to wait until that
particular application (or version of application, or kernel) has been "digested" into that particular distribution's approved
installation format as a binary (RPM, deb, inst, etcetera). Open any standard book on linux (O'Rielly or other), and this distribution's internals, "/etc" structure and filenaming conventions will be instantly recognisable. The knowledge the
user gains from this experience will quickly gain an understanding of linux, as well as other *NIX distributions. After
"cutting my teeth" on slackware, I had little problem digging into HPUX, IRIX, and Solaris.

My suggestion...

[Darundal]

Just download an Ubuntu livecd (I would recommend 6.06, not 6.10) and put it in your current desktop system. Test to see if all the hardware works properly, and then just mess around with the OS. Since you are getting some new hardware, and you want to dual-boot, I would recommend one of the pieces of new hardware be a separate hard drive to put the OS on (you could just partition your first disk, but I find that there are certain advantages to having Windows and Linux on separate hard drives). Nvidia graphics cards generally have better Linux support than ATI cards do, so if you are getting a new graphics card, your best bet would be something from Nvidia. As far as software is concerned, I really don't have any suggestions off the top of my head.

Re:My suggestion...

[nightgeometry]

I'm interested in what the advantages of having the OS's on different drives are?

I have always found that two hard drives are good for the OS on one and data on the other, and that that is the case even when I have multiple OS's (i.e. all my various OS's on hda, and all my data partitions on hdb, hdc &c).

The advantage I have always thought was to separate app / OS access and data access (and move swap file to the second drive too, to take that out of the OS / app access path). All I see the other way is that it becomes easier to pull a drive. Other advantages? I'm always interested on ways I could be doing this better.

Cheers.

Re:My suggestion...

[pizpot]

Just download an Ubuntu livecd (I would recommend 6.06, not 6.10)

That is the 2nd comment like that I see here. What is up with 6.10? I have 6.06 personally, but I just did a laptop for a friend (dual boot) with 6.10 and it was fine. I would love to know what dis-service I did my friend though.

Re:My suggestion...

[fimbulvetr]

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS4828732453.html

The gist is that edgy has many experimental features. It was made known well before release to expect some departures from the norm. Edgy lacks in almost all areas from extensive testing to just plain polish. If you have strange variables like upgrading an upgraded upgrade or wierd combinations of hardware, you may see some issues, and some issues may not be very friendly, though I don't believe there is any dataloss.

A standard computer + fresh edgy install is a good setup, but I wouldn't give it to a newbie because I'd hate to explain how he's running a little experiment. I'd go with dapper and wait for the next LTS version, which is likely to upgrade from dapper very well.

Re:My suggestion...

[Darundal]

The ability to pick which OS boots, or which OS can be affected by an installer or other bootable programs, by merely pulling out the cable for the one you want to be untouched (Vista taught me this lesson).

Re:My suggestion...

[Darundal]

First and foremost, 6.10 breaks support for lots of wireless cards, so if he is going to be connecting to a wireless network, then 6.06 is probably a better bet. 6.10 gave me lots of issues with my video card driver (fglrx, which is ATI) mainly issues regarding 3d acceleration. Plus, a lot of the minor little changes are personally annoying (like the changed permissions dialog in Nautilus) and while there is mostly nothing wrong with them, they seem to be clearer or to work better in 6.10. Plus, if he does decide to actually PAY for support, then 6.06 will be what he needs. And, like the guy above me said, 6.06 is made for stability, and 6.10 is a little more experimental.

Re:My suggestion...

[pizpot]

The gist is that edgy has many experimental features...

Thanks, hopefully I won't hear from him about it for 5 years like the win98 install I did for him. Amazing. Motherboard finally failed and he said it was hacked and running slow though.

Re:My suggestion...

[Dr_Barnowl]

Heh, Windows 98 taught me that lesson - it loves to utterly destroy any existing OS installs on a given disk. After you've repartitioned the drive and installed Win2k and SuSe so you can play new games, old games and experiment with Linux, only to find that Win98 has other ideas, and they don't include none of those darned new fangled OSs, no sir.

I learned to install Win98 *first*.

Recommended reading

[lazyforker]

This book is a useful reference that assumes you know 2000/XP/2003 but need to know the equivalent commands etc in Linux:
"Linux for Windows Administrators" by Mark Minasi and Dan York
Slightly out of date now, but definitely a good starting point.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ubuntu

[Foofoobar]

I have to say that previously I used to be a big Fedora fan and have tried Xandros and a couple other pre-packaged distributions for the desktop. But Ubuntu is by far the most stable and easiest to manage. I installed it on my 65 year old moms system and it detected her scanner, her new camera, her sound card and everything just fine. I use Ubuntu at work after smeone in IT convinced me to try it and I haven't had a single issue with it since then.

Previous to this, I wondered what all the buzz was about Ubuntu and now I know. If you want an easy to set up and manage Linux desktop, Ubuntu is the way to go.

Re:Ubuntu

[Antique Geekmeister]

And by this point, your hardware was six months older, right? Meaning there was time to integrate the latest monitor, graphics drivers, and other hardware related details into the OS? Have you retried that hardware with the latest "live" CD's of the other distributions, to see if they've worked out the relevant kinks?

Re:Ubuntu

[phrostie]

not what i use, but it is what i recommend for newbies.

it's as close as i've seen to "everything works".

Re:Ubuntu

[Adam Hazzlebank]

Funny, I just received a brand new Dell box at work. Ubuntu install hangs booting the kernel. Knoppix boots fine.

Not saying there's anything wrong with Ubuntu, but it's not magic. Like you say "your mileage may vary".

Re:Ubuntu

[foreverdisillusioned]

I tested those distros over the course of a year or two, I think. From the first distro to the last (Ubuntu) my main box had changed somewhat, but the motherboard/cpu and network card were the same. Out of curiosity, I have re-tried a few of those distros using their current versions, with mixed results. Most do make it through installation (with the exception of Red Hat--CentOS--which still inexplicably hangs), but as I recall most of them had sound issues and several had network issues.

Have I done a scientific study to determine whether Ubuntu really is the most robust? No. This is just an anecdote. However, given that so many other people appear to have similar anecdotes--and given that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution and has been for some time--I do feel reasonably comfortable asserting that they simply do a better job at "just works!" than the rest.

Re:Ubuntu

[mr_shifty]

I've run into Ubuntu problems on Dell hardware as well. At work I use an older Dell Poweredge 600 server as a workstation. Slackware 10.1 is what I have installed as my default OS on it, but when I try booting from any Ubuntu CD, it hangs about half the time, and works the other half. I'm not sure if it's just the optical drive or what -- but I've never had trouble on that machine booting from other live CDs... just Ubuntu.

*shrugs*

Re:Ubuntu

[Antique Geekmeister]

Oh, the kernel on RedHat/CentOS is pretty old, and it's not state-of-the-art by any means: the RHEL 5 beta release is a vast improvement in hardware support. RHEL is for if you need server-grade kernel and system support and don't have it in-house.

Re:Ubuntu

[Rick17JJ]

My two favorite versions of Linux are Ubuntu and Kubunutu. Kubunutu is actually just a version of Ubuntu that uses the KDE desktop environment instead of the Gnome desktop environment. A person can install either one and then just use the Synaptic package manager to download and install the other one too. After that you can choose to use either KDE or Gnome when you are booting up by clicking on the session button on the login screen and choosing either KDE or Gnome. If someone has already installed Ubuntu and has a high-speed Internet connection they can use the Synaptic package manager to also install the kubuntu-desktop package. If someone started by installing Kubuntu they can add the Gnome stuff by using Adept (or Synaptic if it is already installed) to download and install the gnome-desktop-environment. I have both installed on my computer at home and use KDE most of the time.

Either KDE or Gnome would be a good choice although I have a slight preference for KDE. Most Ubuntu books and on-line instructions assume that your are using Ubuntu with Gnome instead of Kubuntu with KDE so when starting out it is easier to follow the directions when using Ubuntu and Gnome.

There is an on-line discussion forum for Ubuntu users here:

Ubuntu Forum

There are also books about using Ubuntu Linux such as these:

• Ubuntu Unleashed
• Moving to Ubuntu Linux
• The Official Ubuntu Book
• Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks

One of my favorite features that the Linux desktop has which Windows lacks is the multiple virtual desktops. What is that? Well, sometimes I have several programs open at once and I want a fresh clean screen to fill up with more stuff but don't want to close any programs or even minimize them. I click on one of the rectangles in the row of rectangles on the taskbar and suddenly, I have another fresh clean empty screen to open more programs in. To return to the other desktop with my other stuff, I just click on the appropriate rectangle. In KDE, each virtual desktop can have its own wallpaper too. Windows doesn't have that, perhaps a barely computer literate Windows user might be confused by a useful feature like that. Sometimes, I have about a dozen programs open at once, all scattered across about 4 or 5 virtual desktops. When using Windows, everything feels much more cramped for space and cluttered without the multiple virtual desktops.

When using a Debian derived Linux distribution such as Ubunutu, Kubunu or Mepis have fun downloading some free new programs from the hundreds of available free programs that are listed for you by the Synaptic package manager. Windows doesn't offer a comparable program that does point-and-click installations of free GPL licensed software programs from the on-line Ubuntu repositories.

Re:Ubuntu

[Rick17JJ]

I made one mistake in what I just said. If you have already installed Kubuntu, you can add the Ubuntu stuff such as Gnome by using Adept, Synaptic or Apt-get to install the ubuntu-desktop package. I had said the wrong package.

If you don't have a high-speed Internet connection it is possible to use the Ubuntu or Kubuntu installation CD as a repository instead. However, the software updates and security updates would still need to be downloaded.

Re:Ubuntu

[Rick17JJ]

Another useful Linux program that I forgot to mention is "CrossOver Linux." It is not free, but is a more user friendly version of WINE that is optimized to allow certain Windows office software programs to be run under Linux. It doesn't work with all versions of all Windows software, but in the past, I have used it to run Microsoft Office 97 and Office 2000 under Linux. I was using an old version of Red Hat Linux at the time, but it should also work with Ubuntu.

Cedega is another non-free version of WINE. It is designed to allow some Windows games to run under Linux. I am not a gamer and have not tried it, so I don't know much about it. I have heard that both products as well as the normal free version of WINE can all be installed at once without interfering with each other. If you know how to use old DOS commands and have some old DOS games that you want to play, you could download the Linux version of the free DOSBox program and run your old DOS games inside that.

One program that a desktop Linux user won't need is a virus scanner. There have never been any actively circulating Linux viruses, that is a Windows only problem. There are actually a few free and a few commercial virus scanners for Linux. If someone is running a Linux based mail server it might be useful to use one of those to protect your more vulnerable Windows clients from infected email attachments.

Re:Ubuntu

[foreverdisillusioned]

Don't forget Xubuntu (XFCE Desktop Environment)--I use it exclusively now. The default look and feel is nearly identical to Ubuntu, but it's got a smaller memory footprint and its default applications are lighter weight than Gnome's. The desktop (as in, the area visible when all other apps are minimized) works a little different and the GUI system setting managers aren't the same (but they're just as easy to figure out and use); other than that the user interface is pretty much identical to (g)Ubuntu's--just be sure to substitute "mousepad" wherever "gedit" is referred to on the forums. Thunar (XFCE's file manager) is actually pretty similar to Nautilus.

If you're using a machine with only 256 (or, heaven forbid, 128) megs of RAM, you should really consider Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu or Kubuntu. The UI is extremely similar, compatibility is maintained, and (at least on lower-end machines) the performance gain is significant.

Re:Ubuntu

[jez9999]

What about a Linux software firewall? Any recommendations?

I've yet to find a Linux 'application level' firewall like you can get for Windows. These (eg. ZoneAlarm, Sygate, etc.) allow you to control which _applications_ are able to connect out or receive connections, popping up a dialog every time a new app tries to. This I find to be extremely useful, far more so for a desktop than just opening/closing ports, which is as far as iptables (or firewalls based on that) allows you to go. Malicious software could, after all, just use a commonly open port to connect out.

Re:Ubuntu

[Rick17JJ]

Guarddog is an very easy to use firewall. The Router/Modem for my DSL connection also has a built-in firewall firewall so, for me, also using the Linux firewall is somewhat redundant, but I do anyway. Guarddog was written for KDE, so it would be better for someone that uses Kubunu than Ubuntu. I have both packages installed, so I don't need to worry about whether a program is a KDE program or a Gnome program. Like most other Linux firewall programs it is actually just an easy to use front-end for the iptables firewall that already comes built in with the Linux Kernel. It is much easier to use iptables. Guarddog doesn't actually need to be running at all times once it has finished configuring iptables.

When configuring Guarddog, select the protocols that you want to allow to be used in the Internet zone such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, POP3, SMTP and whatever else you need. You might also possibly want to allow DNS, ping and whatever chat programs you use. I am not a system administrator so I am not an expert on networking or firewalls. There is also a related program called Guidedog which you probably won't need unless you are doing port forwarding or something like that. To nest your firewall, you might want to go to the grc.com webpage and select "ShieldsUP" and then select "All Service Ports" for the test. It will then tell show you which ports are open, closed or stealth and tell you if your firewall passes the test. Of course if you are behind a router with a firewall it might actually be testing that instead of your Linux firewall.

There are other Linux firewalls such as Firestarter and several others that I have heard of but not tired. Guarddog does not give you pop-up messages about what is going on, it is just used to control what TCP/IP and UDP ports are open or closed on each interface. I am not sure what feature other Linux firewalls do.

Re:Ubuntu

[Rick17JJ]

In addition to using a Linux firewall, learning how to use commands such as netstat or nmap could provide addition information about what is going on. There are probably some GUI front-ends to those tools too, but I don't know what they are called. There is an mp3 of Episode #49 of the "Security Now" show available which talks about using the Netstat command to monitor active connections and listening ports, but it is mostly about the Windows and Mac versions of the command. In one of the Matrix movies there is a brief screenshot of Vanity using nmap to find a security flaw that she could exploit.

I have not yet gotten around to learning how to read security related log files on my Linux computer at home. A serious network administrator would probably do that. I don't have any ports open to the outside world, I install security updates regularly and have only one user so I probably don't have as much to be worried about. All I have is a home network of three computers.

Re:Ubuntu

[Rick17JJ]

Oops, I did not mean to say that it "is much easier to use iptables," that was a typo. I intended to say that Guarddog was much easier to use than iptables.

Re:Ubuntu

[jez9999]

But, as you've acknowledged, this is just an iptables wrapper and so not as useful as an application-level firewall (as I call them) that allows you to actually control network access on an application-by-application (or per-binary) basis. Sadly, I haven't come across one Linux firewall that can do that. I'd love to bookmark one if I could find one.

Re:Ubuntu

[wclacy]

I had problems with Hardware using Ubuntu. Switched to Suse and everything worked.

Also KDE is much better than Gnome. If you don't want to use Suse then you should at least use Kubuntu.

scientific linux, ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe there is a distro called scientific linux (check at distrowatch.com) which (again, I think) is based on redhat/fedora, and includes many mathematical/scientific applications out of the box. Ubuntu would be fine, but I would suggest SimplyMepis first. Both are debian-based (SimplyMepis is actually ubuntu-based now), which gives you easy access to about 18,000 debian packages, including most packages I could imagine you desiring in the math/science realm. SimplyMepis is a slightly easier installation, and includes more proprietary audio-visual compatibility out of the box.

Virtualization

[martyb]

Why dual boot? It seems so inconvenient to me. Perhaps virtualization would be better?

Sounds great, but... I've downloaded vmware workstation, as well as a release of Ubuntu, but I must be missing something. Is there a simple HOWTO that gives a step-by-step on how to setup and use a virtual machine on windows? What information I found seemed to be written at an abstract level. I'm leary about butchering up my system with trial and error. (Yes, I have backups, but would rather not have to go through that time-consuming step if I can avoid it.)

I'd like to be able to play around with, say, Ubuntu in a VMWARE virtual machine, yet keep my Windows/XP home SP2 system up and running without putting it at risk.

Re:Virtualization

[Anonymous Coward]

You apparently have no idea what VMWare is. You downloaded it, but didn't even take the time to look at the site to see what the freakin' software does.

If you would have taken the 5 minutes to do some research rather than post this pathetic question here, you would realize that it would have no risk whatsoever to your existing system.

Step 1: Install VMWare

Step 2: Go through the nifty wizard to install Ubuntu in a VMWare virtual machine

Step 3: Fuck up your Ubuntu install

Step 4: Close VMWare (Click the button with the X on the VMWare Window)

Step 5: Delete your virtual machine (somewhere in My Documents)

Step 6: Start over at step 2...

No, it didn't have to be said.

[IANAAC]

OSX Leopard It had to be said.

No it didn't, particularly when he's specifically asking for a Linux system.

Re:No, it didn't have to be said.

[Bastian]

Well, that really depends on why the person is looking for a Linux system. If it's someone who's looking to get into desktop Unix (or just looking for an alternative to Windows) and doesn't realize that Linux isn't the only player in town, then it may be worth mentioning OS X or FreeBSD. At the moment, OS X is my current favorite desktop Unix in all respects except politics so I think it does deserve mention.

Now if the person needs to have something that works with existing hardware or specifically wants Linux for political reasons, then it's different and it's not worthwhile to mention other OSes.

Rule #1

[eno2001]

Forget everything you know about Windows. Linux is not Windows even if some of the GUI environments are starting to resemble aspects of them. Linux is closer to the Unix ideal of MANY MANY MANY tools that do one thing really well and need to be intertwined with other things to do more. As a non-programmer, I find Linux much easier to customize than Windows in terms of actually building new functionality. This is not something easily accomplished on Windows unless you want to get a Devel kit. In Linux it's practically a survival skill. Take a look through some of my Slashdot Journal Entries for examples of how I accomplished some interesting things with Linux that would have been nearly impossible with Windows.

Re:Rule #1

[Junks Jerzey]

Linux is closer to the Unix ideal of MANY MANY MANY tools that do one thing really well and need to be intertwined with other things to do more.

That was the original UNIX ideal, but it has not survived well into the modern era. Rob Pike claimed it died with Perl, and it doesn't take much looking around to realize that "big tools" are important: Inkscape, Firefox, The GIMP, Ruby, etc. Firefox is not simply and umbrella for a dozen independent command-line tools, for example. Python doesn't shell out to the "sort" utility to do sorting.

Ubuntu or Damn Small or DSLn

[goombah99]

if you have a modern computer and want a full service experience with very little hassle then try Ubuntu. That's what it's good at. Works well out of the box and full featured and runs on most computers. Fully modern Apps.

On the other hand for people using old gear they want to extend the life of then the heavy weigh linuxes will bog. If they also don't know squat about linux and can barely navigate the file browser but want simple functionality (word processing, note taking, web and e-mail) then DSL has a nice interface: all icons on the desk top. minimal screen real estate, a suite of ultra light weight applications, easy package management, and INSANLEY fast boot times. No need to dual boot since the CD boot is ludicrously fast on old computers (under a minute on a pentium 2 133 Mhz).

DSL_not is just like DSL but has more graphics heavy apps. In particular you get a more modern open-save dialog that does not use the old file path navigations styles.

Anything else between these two extremes is more a matter on specialized usage. E.g. want something more full featured than DSL but still pretty lightweight and also want to run Windows Apps in WINE? then try Slackware's killbill edition. Which is a nice compromise.

Want something with lots of security tweaking possibilities, and more enterprise worthy (slower updates of apps), then maybe Debian with it's awesome package management?

Whant something you could get some pay-for-it support? Redhat or Suse? Maybe wnat it for free then fedora? entriprise then Cent--oh heck what's the entriprse fedora called?

Re:Ubuntu or Damn Small or DSLn

[Karzz1]

"entriprise then Cent--oh heck what's the entriprse fedora called?"

I think you are referring to CentOS, however I am fairly sure it isn't an "enterprise Fedora". It is a rebuild of RedHat Enterprise and aims to be 100% binary compatible with RedHat Enterprise. I am almost certain it is not affiliated with Fedora in any way.

As a mathematician

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a Mac - all major sim packages, gcc, latex, the various IDEs, etc. are available for OSX.

Ubuntu Linux is the way to go

[ButteBlues]

Ubuntu Linux for sure. It is: - user friendly - popular - supported - supportive of many hardware configurations - fast - configurable It also has one of the best resources for a new Linux user available. I have a five year old laptop, and Ubuntu is the only distribution which properly supports all my hardware. All of the others had some sort of problem with either the graphics card or the wireless card. The choice is clear-cut, in my opinion. If you want a nice LaTeX-based quick and functional editor as well, Wyneken is something I use for typing up notes.

for Latex..

[Anonymous Coward]

for Latex, stick with MikTex on windows and Winedt32 (shareware, $30 or so, worth every penny IMO ). most userfriendly for writing quickly and previewing quickly.

Re:for Latex..

[dhasenan]

I've used Winedt. I think echo and cat might be more a pleasant editor.

Before shelling out cash, try TexNicCenter and TexMaker. I use a text editor, but at a cursory inspection TexMaker seems decent. Toolbars take up less than half the screen; there's a nice sidebar featuring the structure of your document; click on a section name there and you jump to it. And the current line of text is highlighted.

Now that I've tried it, perhaps I'll use TexMaker for my tex editing.

PCLinuxOS

[bilbravo]

I'm a long time Gentoo user, but recently installed PCLinuxOS on my wife's Acer laptop after doing much searching for a user-friendly, and "everything works out-of-the-box" distro for it. Well, the wifi drivers didn't actually work out of the box, I had to download and go through a wizard and pick the .sys file... then bam, they worked.
 
Great distro, and I even put it on my desktop... sometimes Gentoo is a bit needy, ya know? :-)

Re:PCLinuxOS

[Anonymous Coward]

so what acer is it? I gota an aspire 5670 a few moons ago, and the wireless is crapping out. Considering upgrading to see what happens. I fear compatability issues with a laptop, but if its already been done....

Re:PCLinuxOS

[bilbravo]

Acer 5002 WMli. Google it, you can find all the specs.

Linux Distro and Reading

[Fuger]

Having tried a handful of Linux distributions, I personally recommend Ubuntu. The biggest reason why is the Ubuntu Forums.

Read it before you install to check if other people have had compatibility problems with your intended hardware. Read it during install for work-arounds and useful hacks. Read it after you install for any questions you may have. The user base for Ubuntu is very large and knowledgeable. I imagine there are similiar knowledge forums for Gentoo, etc, but I haven't worked with them.

Basically, the Internet is your best friend when using Linux. Read as much as you can about your intended distribution BEFORE you install it. You can save HOURS of headaches!

Re:Linux Distro and Reading

[rizzo320]

Having tried a handful of Linux distributions, I personally recommend Ubuntu. The biggest reason why is the Ubuntu Forums.

Mod this comment up!!!! No other operating system has a more useful, user friendly, free support system as Ubuntu with the Ubuntu Forums site. Several weeks ago I was configuring a fresh install of Ubuntu 6.10 with tips from http://www.ubuntuguide.org/, and one of the recommended optional repositories (Penguin Liberation Front) was not responding. Within six hours of posting my settings and configurations had been validated, deemed correct, and as the day went on, others were reporting similar issues. Turns out that was the day the PLF repository I had been using had just officially been turned off. By the end of the day, another developer began hosting the repository, the fix was posted in the forums, and the information updated in the wiki on ubuntuguide.org.

As an avid Mac user, even I can't report support issues resolved in a similar manner. It can take weeks for a knowledge base article to be posted on Apple.com, and the support forums rarely provide "official" support, though many great power users there make it happen. As for Windows, it sometimes can take several days to a week for a TechNet article to be posted, and as far as I know, there isn't an "official" forum to post for support like Ubuntu.org (though there are official newsgroups).

Based on this alone I would always recommend Ubuntu first for a newbie switching over from Windows. There will be a lot of questions as you "un-learn" bad habits from Windows, and the support is there at the Ubuntu Forums.

Ideal System

[Ramble]

The ideal system for me is the media centric easy one.

I used to run Gentoo, and to be honest it's probably the best distro I've used to date. Right now I run Vista and that's probably the best version of Windows I've used to date.

A mixture of the two would be great, because I love the customising capabilites of Gentoo, the zero-cost of it and that it's modern and fast. However, the fact that there is no good media centre solution for Linux puts me off a lot. Anyone who has ever used Vista MCE will know what I'm talking about. The day when I can press a button on my remote and record/watch a tv show in a few presses will be the day I switch to Linux.

A few other things need to be changed as well, such as the possible difficulty in installing (Why does the average user need to download a Python library for something to work? I bet 90% of people don't know what Python is).

Hardware is an issue as well. I know that lots of the problems experienced are hardware manfacturers fault, but god damn when I install an OS I expect 3D graphics accel. Or my ethernet card to be working.

Re:Ideal System

[robzon]

The day when I can press a button on my remote and record/watch a tv show in a few presses will be the day I switch to Linux.

Ummmm... MythTV?

Re:Ideal System

[Anonymous Coward]

10% Get real. .001% of computer users know what Python (the language) is. 10% of the Slashdot readership would be a more accurate figure.

Re:Ideal System

[Ramble]

A system that actually works is what I want. I've tried Mythtv on about 4 different distros and not one worked.

I don't want to have to go through lirc to get the remote to work, or to manually choose the place to download tv listings. It should do that for me.

Hah..

[Junta]

No thanks. I grew tired of dealing with obscure broken library dependencies on upgrades on my *own* systems, sure as hell don't want to have to answer someone who, in the process of emerge -upv world (or whatever it is anymore), ended up with applications linked to libraries with changed versions. I know there are utilities to automatically run ldd against everything (revdep or revbuild.. can't remember) and re-emerge, but in the end, big pain in the ass, and ultimately you don't learn that much more about linux like, say, doing a linux from scratch would teach if that were the goal.

Definitely would go with an Ubuntu install. Debian would also do the trick with little hand-holding, but at times Ubuntu is more practical about some packaging decisions while Debian can be more purist. Also, Ubuntu clearly targets a set environment, and Debian endeavors to make sure everything works pretty well, but expects the user to know more about what they want to make choices for themselves. Also, Ubuntu is easier to showcase the newer stuff typically (though Debian Etch and Ubuntu Edgy are about equivalent on that front currently).

From one newb to another

[eclectro]

I recommend PCLinuxos. It has the right mix of ease of use and fucntionality out of the box so you can see what the ins and outs of linux are with a minimum of transfer shock. Then you can try other distros once you have this under your belt.

The only whine I have is that the beta flash player doesn't work well for me as compared to other distros. But that's more adobe's fault than linux's. Hopefully this will be fixed shortly.

I second that ...

[sygin]

Ubuntu is easy to get up and running with, you can always migrate later if you want to. it has great support forums.

OSX

[NineNine]

There's really no reason to waste time messing around with Linux anymore. Just get a Mac. You'll be able to work out of the box, and you can spend a lot more time doing work (and having fun), rather than fixing problems.

you don't need to switch...

[larry bagina]

everything you mentioned (LaTeX, python, web stuff, etc) can be done in Windows. Install cygwin, mktex, TeXnic Center, and you're golden.

I've tried dual (or even triple) booting in the past and it's the worst of both worlds. However, virtualization lets you run side by side and leverage the particular advantages of each environment.

Depends on your expectations

[Cyphax]

I personally have 2 favorite distro's. First there's Slackware. Its tremendous transparancy has always made it easy to configure, mess around with, and it's versatile. What's more: it makes me feel at home. Yes, lots of things take time to set up, but everything will be just about the way you want them to be.

Then there's Ubuntu. It has impressed me with features that make life on the computer easier. At the same time, I don't know my way around it much and I do not want to HAVE to know my way around it. Behind Ubuntu, I have a completely different mindset than when I'm behind Slackware. When something refuses to work in Ubuntu, I cuss it out: why haven't the developers fixed this yet?! When something refuses to work in Slackware, I seek the configuration files out and edit them as needed. It's what it was made for, as opposed to Ubuntu (in my eyes).

Perhaps you find it odd for a person to completely think differently using 2 different distributions of Linux, but that's how it works in my head. Maybe others share this oddity. Either way: if you want a versatile distribution that you want to get to know and that you want working with you, I'd go for something like Slackware, or Debian or maybe Gentoo. If you want something that works out of the box and starts you off with a set-up desktop, go for Ubuntu or Suse, or maybe Fedora. Of course if it comes down to it you can configure Ubuntu to be exactly as you want it, but then I'd start right at the beginning with Slackware/Debian and build your own system. You learn more that way.

Hopefully the rough edges will be shaved off Ubuntu as it is an impressive distro with many a feature that Windows simply doesn't have, or less polished. It also has a large userbase, is supported widely by developers (package-management is good). Of course, the same applies to Fedora and Suse. Try and see for yourself what you like. They can all be installed great with VMWare Server. And speaking of which, Windows runs good in VMWare as well so you won't have to abandon your trusty Windows. ;)

Re:Depends on your expectations

[jez9999]

Suse Linux used to be a popular distro round here until they got bought out and had their soul sold by Novell. I'm worried that if I use a popular distro, it could get bought out by another rich US company and buggered up. How can you reassure me that that won't happen? Is there some list of distroes out there that are more community-owned and less likely to get 'bought out'?

Lots of options

[dsoltesz]

Ubuntu's probably the right answer, but I'm very fond of SuSE. Ask around and see if you can locate a local Linux Users Group (LUG) - they're usually happy to help, can show you various flavors of Linux, and even help you with set-up of the O/S and even installing specialty apps. It is very likely you will need to know how to get around in Linux (or Unix) if you're going into a scientific research field, so my recommendation is to go ahead and learn it sooner rather than later.

You Might Have a Look at SuSe

[NeverVotedBush]

If you are a Linux newbie, I think one of the best ways to go would be with a boxed solution. SuSe is a pretty good distrubution, is backed by Novell, and will give you just about all you could ever hope for on a bunch of CDs or DVD. As a boxed solution, it comes with basic manuals hardcopy and all the manuals plus extras on the CDs and accessible once you have done the install. There is a bit of controversy about Novell's recent deal with Microsoft but that might end up being a benefit to a mostly Windows user. A lot of people will recommend a "roll your own" solution but for most people getting into Linux for the first time, that might not be the best answer. You can always switch later - and that's one of the benefits to Linux - it's free. Only the boxed solutions cost and not very much compared to Windows. If you know how to download and burn ISOs, you can go Fedora, Ubuntu, etc., and are at least a little familiar with GRUB, RPMs, YAST, etc, you may well want to go with the others. But otherwise, I'd suggest SuSe in a box.

I installed Linux on a box 3 weeks ago.

[kiwioddBall]

I used an old P4 1.7 I had lying around... rather than investing in a new piece of hardware you might find it easier to just use something old. It appears you don't want to do anything too computational.

I installed Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop on the box. Troubles I had : Not beiong able to download a version of the distro that would install. It is a big download, and the MD5's never matched. When this happens, the install will just hang in the middle. I ended up getting a disk by mail. The other issue I have is that it keeps forgetting my DNS servers. I don't know why (yet).

I've been a Windows guy since 1995. Ubuntu isn't as intuitive as Windows no matter what anyone says, however it is by far the best attempt made by a Linux distro yet. I'll stick with Windows on my Laptop and Ubuntu on a server in the back room (they talk to each other nicely).

Re:I installed Linux on a box 3 weeks ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a Windows guy since 1995. Ubuntu isn't as intuitive as Windows no matter what anyone says

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Re:I installed Linux on a box 3 weeks ago.

[Knara]

Intuitive? What does that mean? Most often it means "stuff isn't grouped like I'm used to it being grouped in Windows." That's not intuitive, that's habitual.

Good general distro

[kawabago]

Ubuntu is nice but it is set up for a newbie with root access disabled. For the stuff you want to do you would be best off with Fedora Core 6. When you do the install choose only the Gnome desktop or KDE desktop if you prefer but installing both makes administration very confusing. Generally Ubuntu and Fedora Core are set up to run Gnome and now that it is maturing it is a very nice desktop. I highly recommended buying a distribution with support to get you going, it will pay for itself when you start customizing things.

Re:Good general distro

[Junta]

Ubuntu is nice but it is set up for a newbie with root access disabled. That is not a fair assessment. Ubuntu chooses not to give the temptation to always log in as a root user, and opts for the sudo to root only option. OSX also does it.

On serious servers even before OSX/Ubuntu adopted the strategy, in shared admin environments the root password was frequently not set in my departments, to force admins to sudo and provide a better audit trail so you know who to ask about activity when.

There is very little you need the root password for if you have designated admin accounts permitted by sudo to do various tasks. The only complaint I heard from a new admin was 'what about single user mode', to which I would respond if they get such a prompt and need to actually do something, boot a rescue environment. The other objection I could think of which would be valid is if /home is nfs mounted, nfs server is dead and you need to not stat nfs mounts while rectifying the system. This is not the case for most endu ser desktops, but it would be a case where root password being set may be prudent for emergencies.

This is not just a *newbie* thing to do. The bigger risk with having root a direct login is for people to get lazy and type root user/pass into a display manager login.

Cheapo second hand + backup system

[sugarmotor]

With a 500MHz - 1GHz system you should do just fine.

Those can be had for $100-200 if they are not thrown out.

Work out a backup system.

Use a revision control system (subversion.tigris.org). Should be good for your python scripts and latex work. Use make even with latex.

Stephan

Simple

[reacocard]

I am fairly new to linux myself, (I switched just last April), and I have just a few words to say.

1) Use Ubuntu - It is by far the easiest distribution to get started in, supports most hardware automatically, and has a HUGE range of software available. Plus, the forums are superb and have helped me countless times.

2) Break things - Seriously. This is the best way to learn about how your new system works. I've learned many things from the times I've broken my system, most importantly how not to break my system.

Good luck, and welcome to Linux!

Re:Simple

[Puma_Concolor]

I have been using Slackware since 1998 and I find it open and easy to use. You do learn about how it works and fits together and I tried Redhat, and Suse, but I always liked Slackware.Also, use the tool that does the job, I have ONE win2k box just in case it is needed. All in all HAVE FUN!

Linux cheetah 2.4.32 #6 Fri Mar 17 00:15:38 EST 2006 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux

Not scientific linux...

[Junta]

Not recommended, the goal is clearly to be a university or similar workstation/server, adding AFS configuration and such as they repackage RHEL. Not a large community/yum repo, and not oriented to new users without competent administrators to complement them.

Debian and debian derivatives by far have the most rich environment and repositories. I haven't tried Fedora Core except a couple of times briefly, but by now they may have a fair yum repository.

I started with linux kernel 1.2.3 (was easy to remember) on a slackware distro back in the day.... ah the memories....floppy after floppy after floppy....

ease of use

[gkrat]

Pretty much all distros will do what you want them to. From personal experience I would recommend either Fedora Core or Mandriva (this is the distro my gf uses, and she had no linux exp until i loaded it on her system). Both use rpms to install software, easy configuration utilities with them, and very easy installations.

Try a live distro first.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the commercial version of Suse for Newbies. If it works on the system then there's nothing else to do. I just installed Ubuntu on my wife's machine and it was necessary to install 'stuff' (java runtime in particular) before Ubuntu would do things like watch YouTube videos. OTOH, Suse couldn't cope with the video card (all the obvious tricks didn't work); hence the advice to try a live distro first. You will then know whether you have a working solution before doing something like reformatting the hard drive. (Once upon a time, Mandrake would install to unused space on a Windows partition but I suspect that NTFS has put an end to that.)

I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

If he's using mostly python and LaTeX, he might as well use a system that has those integrated out of the box. I have used both Python and LaTex on Win32 and I have to say that both seem better on a Unix-like OS.

best recommendation for newby Linux

[Quenyar]

As a newby Linux user, I'd go with the majority and suggest ubuntu - except that the tetex debian package that is available for download onto ubuntu is flawed. Fedora has a better standard load of LaTeX it works better out of the box for LaTex. I really like Kile (GUI front end to LaTeX available in both Fedora and ubuntu) and it is a time-saver that doesn't automagically break things, like most GUI front ends. There are some long-term weirdnesses you should be aware of with Fedora - when you install it, choose as your user some other ID than the one you want to use for yourself - the opposite of the ubuntu advice, where you want to be the install-user.

Another alternative - you're probably a TUG member. You can very easily install LaTex from the TeX Live CD/DVD. It's easier than installing MiKTeX in Windows (from that very confusing PDF) - this gives you the advantage of a dead stable LaTeX set on your computer - rather than one that automatically updates and might become temporarily unstable with respect to your personal custom code.

So, I guess, I'd suggest a best of both worlds approach - installing ubuntu and then installing LaTeX manually. You'll be really happy. It's so simple to do things - such as dvi2pdf - you'll never want to go back to Windows. Which reminds me, do go and get the Acrobat reader for Linux and install it - it works better than the standard app (in Fedora). In ubuntu the standard reader works OK. Drop me a line if you want assistance.

Re:best recommendation for newby Linux

[frisket]

I just moved from FC4 to Ubuntu, and the first thing I did was rip out the Ubuntu-installed TeX and install it from the TeX Collection CD. Otherwise Ubuntu is doing just fine, and much more up to date than FC, and it recognised everything I had...with the exception of CUPS, which still plays sillybuggers with the printer defs.

Re:best recommendation for newby Linux

[zsau]

Warning with using TeX Live:

Debian/Ubuntu packages often depend on TeX. So if you install TeX Live from the DVD, you'll probably end up having TeX installed twice: once TeTeX, once TeX Live. So make sure you know which one you're executing (usually /usr/local/bin is in the search path before /usr/bin, so you'll almost certainly be executing TeX Live's version of pdflatex or whatever you use).

TeX Live now also has Debian packages available (in Etch, at least), which are supported for every Debian architecture (including PPC-GNU/Linux, which has no support form TeX Live as distributed by TUG, much to my dismay). If you use these packages, beware that while most packages depend on either TeTeX or Debian TeX Live, many still don't. And if you install one that doesn't, it'll uninstall your Debian TeX Live distribution! So if you're install TeX-related packages, always make sure it doesn't say 'removing texlive-blah'.

Try vmware

[astrashe]

Try vmware first. It will let you run a virtual system in a window on top of windows, so you won't have to reformat your drive, or repartition, or do anything like that. It's a very inobtrusive way to get started.

The virtualization penalty in terms of performance is very slight, and you don't have to worry about drivers at all, which is huge, especially if you're new to linux, and haven't selected your hardware with linux in mind.

Which distro depends a lot on the specific apps you want to run. As you probably know, linux doesn't have universal installers the way windows does -- packages have to be rolled up for your specific distro. (They don't *have* to be, but it's a lot easier if they are.) I don't use TeX often, but I think it should be pretty widely avaialble on most distros. Python is ubiquitous, you won't have any trouble anywhere.

I tend to think of apt as the "killer app" of linux. You just ask for an applicaiton, and it downloads and installs automatically. Not all distros have it -- it's something that exists in distros that are part of the debian family tree. Ubuntu is a debian based distro, and so it has apt.

So Ubuntu is really the safe answer.

There's a fair amount of stuff that doesn't work out of the box in Ubuntu -- almost always for licensning reasons. Software to play multimedia files often falls into this category, and it's sort of a pain to get all of that set up, and things like flash for your web browser don't work out of the box either.

So my advice to you would be to do virtualization for your math stuff with unbuntu, and to stick to the host layer windows install for multimedia stuff. Once you know your way around linux, you can take the plunge and go all linux. But this way, you never have a machine that won't do whatever you need it to do.

SuSE is in disfavor now for political reasons (fights over licensing, and I'm pretty down on them myself), but if you want a really slick desktop, it's hard to beat. It's better for multimedia after the initial install, and it tends to work better out of the box generally. There are lots of little details that are handled better.

My main problems with SuSE are mostly ideological now, and those problems are severe enough that I wouldn't use it. So I don't want to downlplay the political stuff, it's real, and it's important, and I think that Novell is on the wrong side of it. But one of the reasons the fight with Novell is so painful is that very shortly before the problem emerged, they came out with what were pretty much the most beautiful linux desktops ever.

My other problem is the lack of apt, the package manager, which you really, really want, even if you don't realize it now. Life without apt can't really be called living.

Finally, if you're in a math department somewhere, ask around and see what other people are using. Because the single most valuable thing for you as a new user will be someone you can ask for help.

How much you want to tinker with the OS?

[sleepdepzombie]

If you want an easy, out of the box solution go with Ubuntu or one of it's variants. http://www.ubuntu.com/ http://www.kubuntu.org/ http://www.xubuntu.org/

If you want to tinker with the OS a bit I'd suggest Slackware. http://www.slackware.com/ It isn't as easy to set up or maintain. However, you will have more of an opportunity to actually learn what is going on with they system.

OpenSuSE

[FreeFull]

Use newest version of OpenSuSE, you will know how to use it. (PS. Don't use internet install, its terribly slow)

Re:OpenSuSE

[armchair99]

Unfortunately Novell has chosen to align itself with the Dark Lord of Redmond but the OpenSuSE 10.2 DVD is the only distro I have tried that recognized, initialized and made available all the hardware in my Dell Latitude D610. It simply worked right out of the box.

Easy to administer... Mandriva.

[waferhead]

I have been a "Linux on the desktop" user since ~1993...
But I'm still only an advanced user, It's just a tool.
(Sorry to the Ubuntu folks, it just isn't all that, yet)

After trying _everything_, I always end up back on Mandrake... ...Now known as Mandriva.

TIP:
Esp. if are installing on old/weird hardware, do an install from the Mandriva-ONE-KDE CD.

This installs a basic system, then google for "easy urpmi" and get all your sources configured right. Also has Nvidia and ATI drivers built in. Works nice.

Re:Easy to administer... Mandriva.

[ErroneousBee]

Me too. I am getting suspicious of the ubuntu cheerleading going on here. It sounds a bit too much like other 'distro du jour' cheerleading we have seen previously, particularly the gentoo stuff.

Suse has great hardware support, a reasonable install, a good system configuration tool, and a nice enough desktop. Its let down by an enterprise focused package selection, and poor network based repositories.

Mandriva has good hardware support, excellent installer, a good system configuration tool and a good desktop. Its let down by rushed testing before major releases (2007 is OK, but 2006 had several flaws), and a weak website. You can subscribe (I.e. pay money) to Mandriva to get access to a distro with alot of free-but-commercial distro. It installs acrobat, realplayer, flash, nvidia drivers, and other software. Also check out Easyurpmi, a website that points you at the urpmi repositories for community packages.

I found ubuntu had good hardware support, but the installer was limited, the configuration tool poor, and the desktop came with a very limited set of default options. Online support is excellent. The basics (OOo, The GIMP, etc) were intalled by the installer, but stuff like Inkscape and games had to be installed from the command line. Before installing, check the web for tips, as there are some packages and things to do that make things alot easier (such as setting up big list of repostories in /etc/apt/sources.list)

I havent used redhat, but I understand its very much like SuSe.

What I would do is create a tri-boot system. Put windows in a partition, and then create a 50Mb /boot partition, 2 6Gb partitions for two system install root directories, possibly a 10Gb /usr/local partition, and a /home partition. Then you can install 2 distros and compare them, I would select Mandriva 2007 and Ubuntu 6.06 for the tests. Install Mandriva first, its partition manager is best. If you decide to go to a single distro, use the other 6Gb partition as a backup.

Anyone suggesting you try gentoo, debian or slackware is , quite frankly, an idiot.

Re:Easy to administer... Mandriva.

[dchamp]

I'll put in another "me too" for Mandriva.

Mandriva is the best "everything works out of the box" experience I've had with Linux, and I've run just about all of the common ones. I just updated both my desktop and my laptop to pretty much cutting edge hardware, and everything works. The laptop, a Dell D620, is working great under Mandriva 2007. I'm a Mandriva Club member, so using the PowerPack DVD is sweet - the nVidia graphics card drivers, Intel wireless, Broadcom ethernet and such get set up and work on the first boot.

I won't lie and say it's perfect, but it's pretty good. 2 bugs I've run into are:
- The "drakroam" wireless tool gets an error when you try to change between networks you've already configured. I usually just re-configure the wireless card when I switch networks.
- A lot of problems with sound. Seems like a conflict between ALSA and OSS apps. Dammit, just choose one and go with it, people! (More of a general Linux issue than just Mandriva).

Ubuntu is OK, but IMHO not as easy to use. I usually go for Kubuntu (not a Gnome fan). For one thing, they use the goofy upside-down desktop layout like RedHat - with the menu bar on top. I don't know who thought this was a good idea, or if they just do it because it's different than Windows, but dang, it just seems un-natural.

Re:Easy to administer... Mandriva.

[waferhead]

Excellent points.

Personally, I use 2 identical 8G partitions for the system (/, /usr) and stuff that I want to have always consistent (/home, /mythtv ) live on different partitions.

This allows for easy "snapshots" via partimage, of the working systems, and the backups can be restored on either system partition.(partimage will not restore to a smaller partition, even if the data fits)

"Fixing" lilo typically consists of (at worst) booting a Knoppix disc, manually mounting the partition, cd there, "chroot ." and running lilo, possibly having to change the target drive in the lilo.conf. (depends on where you put the restore image)

SUSE is very nice, the only 2 reasons I go with Mandriva are the package selection is MUCH better under Mandriva (easy urpmi rocks) and my machine (relatively) feels filled with molasses under SUSE, never could figure out why.

Virtualisation

[Mostly a lurker]

If you are upgrading your desktop anyway, I would suggest a VMware (or possibly Xen: with modern hardware, Windows is a supported guest OS) solution rather than multiboot. Just make certain you have enough RAM. The host OS can be Windows or Linux with a virtual machine taking care of the other OS. Considerations on choice of host OS are

• a Linux host will perform better, will be more malware resistant and, perhaps, be more robust;
• if you are buying a brand new system, driver support may be better under Windows (Linux in a virtual machine will not care about the host hardware drivers);
• if you go 64-bit, Linux is the best choice of host OS.

As others have suggested, Ubuntu is a sound choice of Linux distribution. I am going to blow my karma by noting that SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is even better if you are willing to give Novell some money.

Re:Virtualisation

[MrWGW]

Thanks to the LXF85 coverdisc, I installed SLED 10 on one of my older (2000) Dell Pentium 4 desktops, and it runs quite well. I'm using VMWare Server to run PCBSD and Mandriva One on it (more or less for the sheer heck of it), and they run at a usable, if agonizingly slow speed. SLED is a wonderful distro, although installing VMWare Server on it was challenging (it forced me to beef up my knowledge of the command line, for which I am thankful). I am also using VMWare on several of my Windows machines, and am a major fan of virtualization as a tool for escaping dependance on any single operating systems.

my $0.02

[Chris Snook]

Hardware:
1) A CPU with hardware virtualization will greatly expand your options for using Windows and Linux together on the same box. Any Intel Core chip or AMD Socket AM2 chip will work.

and

2) Anything from a top-tier OEM is going to be much easier to make Linux work on than something you pieced together yourself.

and

3) Spend your money on RAM, not CPU.

Distro:
a) Ubuntu, as it benefits from the vast repositories of Debian software, but is better targeted for your use case.

or

b) Fedora Core, as it benefits from the vast repositories of RPM software. For out-of-distro software, you're more likely to find RPM downloads than .deb downloads, so with Fedora you'll be less likely to have to compile software yourself. The downside of Fedora is that older versions aren't supported for very long.

If having to do a major upgrade every year to be able to keep getting updates scares you, use Ubuntu. If having to compile your own software scares you, Fedora might be better, and Gentoo is definitely out.

There are plenty of other perfectly valid choices, but Ubuntu and Fedora Core are the obvious first two to mention for someone who's probably going to be spending a little time searching Google and browsing the user forums.

Re:my $0.02

[suranyip]

Beware that hardware virtualization requires BIOS support as well as CPU support. I've come across a number of laptops that come with virtualization-capable CPUs that you can't make use of due to lack BIOS support for. See http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_disable d_VT for some more info.

Re:my $0.02

[Anonymous Coward]

2) Anything from a top-tier OEM is going to be much easier to make Linux work on than something you pieced together yourself.

Absolute FUD. I challenge you to provide evidence.
OEMs use hardware because they have a deal with the manufacturer, not because the hardware works with a real OS or has documentation available.
OEMs often use cheap hardware for which only buggy binary only drivers are available.

The fact is, it can be difficult to find out what chipsets are used in OEM stuff and thus it can be difficult to verify its compatibility. Whereas if you are buying the parts yourself, then identifying the chipsets (still not easy for, e.g. wifi) becomes a more reasonable undertaking.

Re:my $0.02

[Chris Snook]

I should have put more emphasis on top-tier. All the top-tier vendors sell Linux workstations, and the hardware in their mid-range consumer boxes is generally similar or identical to what they put in the low-end engineering workstations. They actually have engineering relationships with Linux vendors and employ developers to fix up the drivers if they have problems.

Outside of the top-tier OEMs that actually sell boxes with Linux preloaded, all bets are off.

A few months ago, I bought a new box, from parts. I thought I knew what I was doing. I inadvertently bought an Asus M2V board with an Attansic L1 gigabit chip on it. One thing led to another, and now I'm spending a lot of time fixing the vendor driver for upstream submission. It's certainly educational, but I wouldn't recommend it for newbies.

I don't question that you can do a better job of finding compatible parts than an OEM that doesn't care about Linux (and most of them don't), but I know a lot of Linux professionals like myself who have made similar mistakes, so I don't want to lead a newbie down that path.

So, to clarify my earlier recommendation, buy from a company that sells Linux, even if you're going to be buying a Windows box to dual-boot. The odds are much better that way that stuff will work with Linux, especially if you're not entirely sure what to be looking for otherwise.

n00b too.

[uglybracelets]

I myself started using Linux at the behest of my boyfriend about a week ago, and I would have to say Ubuntu was really easy. He walked me through some stuff, but I am really comfortable with it already. But this is the only thing I have ever looked at, and it may be hard if you don't have someone behind you helping you, but I like it.

Re:n00b too.

[Lord Kano]

I myself started using Linux at the behest of my boyfriend

Hmmm...?

it may be hard if you don't have someone behind you...

I REALLY hope that you're a female.

LK

Re:n00b too.

[uglybracelets]

Wow....yes. female. quite.

Ubuntu

[foreverdisillusioned]

Before Ubuntu, I tried Red Hat (this was pre-Fedora), SuSE, Debian, Knoppix, Gentoo (with the help of a friend who knew what he was doing), and Mandrake (as it was then known.) All of them had serious issues--mostly unrecognized hardware, but a couple couldn't even make it through installation (for example, Knoppix would hang no matter what I did.) I was a newbie, but I wasn't utterly helpless... I knew my way around a shell. With each distro, I spent several days troubleshooting the problem and got nowhere. I *wanted* to use Linux, but I simply couldn't afford to invest so much time making the basics work. There's a huge difference between a little tinkering in my spare time (which I was looking forward to) and trying to live without a functional network card.

And then, along came Ubuntu and EVERYTHING JUST WORKED. Obviously, your millage my vary (some people say that Ubuntu has given them nothing but headaches yet e.g. MEPIS is a dream) and I'm sure Ubuntu's improvements have since been incorporated in all of those other distros I tried, but Ubuntu's philosophy and their large community of helpful users has me sold. Virtually every single niggling little problem I had in 5.04 (the first Ubuntu release) has been resolved. I've installed Xubuntu on my mom's old laptop and she loves it (and unlike Windows, it's virtually maintainance-free.)

If you do encounter problems after installing Ubuntu, just check out ubuntuforums.org--I've installed it in half a dozen computers now, and virtually every problem I've ever encountered has been easily solved by following a step-by-step guide some kind soul has posted.

Ubuntu really is "Linux for Human Beings."

Kubuntu, anyone?

[dbneeley]

I think the KDE interface makes more sense for the Linux newbie, and the Kubuntu distribution has many advantages as well. As mentioned above, tremendous online resources and a very active community for advice and support are substantial advantages.

For LaTeX, I suggest Lyx...available for your Windows side as well as in Linux. See http://www.lyx.org/

I would also create a separate partition for those things you will need to share between both windows and Linux. I'd probably format this as a fat32 partition, since that is somewhat simpler to use for Linux and will appear transparent to Windows. The occasional glitch in the handling of NTFS partitions is not worth the hassle, yet you are bound to have a fair amount of information that it would be helpful to have available in either side.

David

I am biased...

[Lord Kano]

In favor of Mandriva. I've been a big time advocate since I tried Mandrake 6.0.

The configuration tools are second to none. You can accomplish most of the common tasks while in the GUI. Eventually you'll likely encounter a problem that will force you to fix it with a command line, but until that time a newbie can learn a lot with the included tools.

LK

Name of Journal

[Anonymous Coward]

In Latin, the noun "nihil" is indeclinable. Thus the usage "Ex Nihilo" is a common error, which, in its corrected form, should stand as "Ex Nihil."

I've repeatedly suggested Linux...

[mark-t]

... to my wife to run on our family PC... every time we have to reinstall Windows.

The reply is something to the effect of "Nobody else knows how to use YOUR computer, do you want nobody to use even the computer that is supposed to be for the whole family?"

Re:I've repeatedly suggested Linux...

[pizpot]

My particular wife can't tell the diff between firefox and thunderbird on windows or linux. Hint, hint. Dual boot the family pc, but set the default boot to windows. Then when it gets hacked, change the default boot to ubuntu. Then take your sweet time... If they are real gamers, they will fix windows themselves. If they don't, they will learn to use linux.

Re:I've repeatedly suggested Linux...

[rohan972]

The reply is something to the effect of "Nobody else knows how to use YOUR computer, do you want nobody to use even the computer that is supposed to be for the whole family?"

Of course, if you are regularly reinstalling windows, they obviously don't know how to use that either, so what's the problem? I don't recommend actually saying this to you wife, I don't want to be responsible for any unintended consequences :)

If you are the house admin, do a dual boot install without asking, using the windows boot manager. Don't get them to use it, but copy bookmarks, IM accounts etc to the linux side as much as practicable. Set it up as much as possible so that you can say "click that icon to do that, etc, etc". Then when time comes to reinstall, be too busy, and tell them to boot linux for anything urgent. When they can't do something, reply "Yes, I'll get windows up {in an hour/tomorrow}". This way, they will not be intimidated by it (after all, they're getting windows back soon) and using it is a convenience, not a chore (that is, more convenient than having nothing working)

Re:Virtualization (IS EASY AND RECOMMENDED)

[dilute]

It is REALLY easy. The easiest thing to do is install VMWare Player under Windows - it is a little simpler to deal with than VMWare server (which is also a free - as in beer - download). Then go to http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/ and pick out any one of the many pre-packaged Linux VMs that they have up there. Just open the VM in VMWare Player and you're off to the races. You mayt want to play around with the screen resolution after you get into your VM, but otherwise, it should be good to go.

The easiest distro to play with is probably a Ubuntu Dapper (6.06) one from this month. After you start it up, you can upgrade it to the latest "Edgy" version of Ubuntu (by changing your repositories in the Synaptic upgrade tool from Dapper to Edgy). You can alos create VMs from scratch (go to www.easyvmx.com)

Other distros you'll find up there include Debian Etch (the latest, still-in-process one), various Fedora Core versions, Knoppix. It is pretty sweat-free (except for the download time and the disk space) to DL a bunch of these and see which one (or ones) you like best. In truth, they are all very similar, except for their upgrade mechanisms and the places they stash system files.

If you go to the Mono web site (a completely separate web site), they have a VM with a recent version of SUSE Linux. Though their version is slanted toward setting up Mono (.NET-style) services), it is very nice.

To do this stuff smoothly you should have at least 1 gig of memory (preferably 2 gigs or more), and a BIG hard drive. Be sure to delete VMs you are not going to use.

After you get used to this, you may indeed want to go to VMWare Server, because it has more opearation options and a very nice snapshotting capability that allows you to make wild experimental changes and easily revert to the last good running state of the server, if things go bad.

Me? - I go the other way, and run Linux on my real hardware, and Windows in a VM (using VMWare Server for Linux). I find I don't need Windows that much, and it runs fine from a VM (you do a full install from a CD, same as with a real machine).

Fair enough.

[IANAAC]

But keep in mind what he was asking:

He wants a system that will dual boot Windows and Linux, which suggests to me that he wants to use existing hardware, otherwise I'm betting he'd have said he was looking for new hardware to put Windows and Linux on.

And every single suggestion of OSX fails to take this into account. The only way you can legally get OSX is to buy new Apple hardware. Sure, you can run Maxxuss' Tiger under VmWare, but from first hand experience, it's dog slow. A great way to test out OSX, to be sure, but I certainly wouldn't want to run it that way on a daily basis.

Re:Fair enough.

[Bastian]

Understood that the original question was asking about dual booting, but my opinion on Ask Slashdot is that the disucssion might as well be for everybody, not just the person who asked. Since it is a public forum and all.

And I'm not so sure that suggestions to try OS X don't take into account that you have to buy a Mac to use it. It's more that there's an implicit assumption that that detail is obvious enough that it doesn't need to be mentioned.

This one:

[goombah99]

Fink install TexMac

Okay it's not "out of the box" but it's nearly all drag and drop (if you use fink commander) or the mac package installer.

Basically fink is a major chunk of Debian . Thousands of packages.

The best part is that fink is all self consistent unlike the package managers on linux which seem to always get all twisted around depending on which linux or which compat-lib you are using.

So Unix package management in my experience is a lot easier on macs than on linux.

Best part is this: unistalling the packages you installed to get back to zero again is one drag and drop to the trash. Try that on linux.

Re:This one:

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Debian users have higher standards than Fink users.

Fink's guide for upgrading from the 10.4-transitional branch to 10.4 is a good example. To upgrade, they recommend removing fink and reinstalling from scratch . I could not believe my eyes at this!

Can you imagine if the upgrade guide for moving from Debian sarge to etch read, "uninstall sarge, then install etch from scratch"? Debian users would not tolerate this. Honestly, what is the point of apt if this is what upgrades boil down to?

For math users, check out Quantian Linux

[mmadsen]

Most of the comments here seem to be more about the Linux distro than Spiffyman's domain-specific requirements. Speaking from that perspective, I'd check out the Quantian Scientific Computing Environment (http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html). It's a complete Knoppix LiveCD distro, pre-loaded with every FOSS math and science app around, including a fairly comprehensive TeX/LaTeX set of tools, IDE's, etc. The best part about Quantian is that you can run it as a LiveCD, boot it on an existing Windows system while you get up to speed and learn the toolset, and you don't have to immediately reformat/repartition/dual-boot your existing box. Personally I'm a big fan of Ubuntu, and especially Edgy Eft, but I still boot up a Quantian VM anytime I'm sitting on Windows or Mac and need to use R for stats, or use some math libraries. Hope this helps. Good luck!

Re:For math users, check out Quantian Linux

[LynnwoodRooster]

Thank you! That is a wonderful suggestion, and I've already downloaded the install... Perfect!

WPA is horrible in Ubuntu

[Rob Simpson]

I guess you don't care about encryption if you have an old enough laptop, but it makes Ubuntu a pain with a new one. I'm using SUSE 10.2 because wireless isn't as horribly broken as it is in every other distro I've tried. And before anyone says anything about the package manager bug - that was fixed. WPA has been a thorn in the side of Ubuntu and other distros for years.

Re:WPA is horrible in Ubuntu

[mevans336]

apt-get install network-manager-gnome WPA problem fixed.

Re:WPA is horrible in Ubuntu

[Rob Simpson]

Not quite so easy. Hardly impossible, but something so basic should be automatically configured when installing in the first place.

Re:WPA is horrible in Ubuntu

[mevans336]

It is that easy in Edgy Eft. (Ubuntu 6.10) I just converted my laptop last week. I had to do none of what that article suggests. http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edgy#How_to_Con figure_Ubuntu.2FKubuntu_with_WPA_using_Network-Man ager

Re:WPA is horrible in Ubuntu

[Rob Simpson]

Wow, they finally fixed it? Well, "fixed" in that you just have to enter a line in the console mode, after you've found out what that line is. And this apt-get install of network-manager-gnome...that doesn't actually require an internet connection to install the necessary files to...connect to the internet...right?

Re:WPA is horrible in Ubuntu

[mchallis]

For my laptop (IBM X-31) I have to agree. I had WPA working with Kubuntu three versions ago, then the next version came out and it was broken/hasle. I switched to SuSe 10.1 and everything, EVERYTHING worked. Suspend, WPA, videos, sound. I just wish Novell wouldn't be so cozy/stupid with Microsoft. But for my laptop OpenSuSe is the bee's knees. IMHO, with KDE SuSe is slicker than Windows or OSX as a productivity workstation.

Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[Colin Smith]

It may not quite be a OSX killer, but it really is easier to set up, easier to use, easier to administer, more consistent and prettier than Windows. It's an elegant desktop.

It simply works out of the box and has 20,000 packages available at the click of Applications -> Add/Remove.

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, Windows works with my KVM switch, while Ubuntu seems to go into epileptic seizure mode upon being switched back to.

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[Karzz1]

If you are serious and not just trolling (I have never experienced that behavior) you may try to ctrl-alt-f2 and drop to a command shell before switching away from Linux. To restore your desktop, simply alt-f7.

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[dc29A]

On the other hand, Windows works with my KVM switch, while Ubuntu seems to go into epileptic seizure mode upon being switched back to.

I use a simple Trendnet USB KVM. Works like magic with Ubuntu. However with Windows ... it takes ages for the mouse/keyboard to get "active" again. As soon as I switch to Ubuntu, keyboard and mouse are operational. Also, every time I switch back to Windows, I get 2-3 second freezes when Windows activates the mouse/keyboard. Something that does not happen in Ubuntu.

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[brenddie]

try the following after switching back using the KVM.
echo -n "reconnect" > /sys/bus/serio/devices/serio0/driver
you may need to adjust the path. This works on redhat/fedora
Next time don't buy belkin and dont go thinking windows works. Your KVM is sending garbage and windows don't even care. The cursor will just jump a couple times around and eventually works. I guess sometimes being ignorant/dumb is good.

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[Klaidas]

Ok, I like Ubuntu... I use Ubuntu on my computer... But a "Windows killer"? Don't be ridiculous

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[Zontar The Mindless]

Who uses a KVM anymore, when there's VNC?

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[Anonymous Coward]

try the following after switching back using the KVM. echo -n "reconnect" > /sys/bus/serio/devices/serio0/driver

This is why Linux will never conquer the desktop market. The answer to every simple problem seems to be something like "Oh, just drop to a shell and type 'florp -7 | xargs eflorp -gbm', then open etc/diddly with emacs and change the third line to '[opts=4,8,3]'."

A claim that any Linux distribution will be able to take the place of Windows or OS X in the desktop market is simply ridiculous.

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[slapout]

I love Ubuntu. But if you're on dial-up, it needs work. It doesn't include Gnome-PPP. So you have to get on the internet and download it. But first you have to figure out how to get on the internet without Gnome-PPP.

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[Cstryon]

I don't agree. I'm a windows user, and always have been (Honestly, most of the time my windows is Pirated because it is so Fricken expensive.) With the release of Vista, I want a working alternative so I don't have to keep stealing software (Plus Vista is just going to make it harder to steal anyway.) So whilst switching over, I tried, Ubuntu, Freespire, Fadora. So far, I haven't been able to use them, just because, I can't ever figure out what's missing. I always have trouble installing video drivers, and sound drivers. I'm a gamer, so I try wine (For steam) and can never get that working. I'm getting alittle nervous because it looks like I'm going to have to stop at xp and wait 5 years till a linux distro that is all set up with everything I need comes out. It would help greatly if it was just easy to download my nvidia driver, double click (Or right click and open) the file and have it start downloading. To install Wine in the same manner and have a list of windows based programs in alphabetical order that will work with wine. Basically, windows it cut and dry. I need a Linux Distro that is just that. Cut and Dry. Any Suggestions?

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[SiChemist]

I would recommend going back to Ubuntu Edgy (or try the KDE version, Kubuntu, my favorite) and run automatix (http://www.getautomatix.com/) to get the esoteric stuff. I would also recommend buying (yes actually pay for software!) a subscription to Cedega (http://www.transgaming.com/) for your windows gaming needs. It's not expensive and it has worked great on several of the windows games that I had lying around from before.

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[Cstryon]

So automatix, (I guess I'll click on the link and find out what it is/How it works.) with this I can get all my basic drivers and software for the various hardware I have and use? Hehe, I could pay for software, it's just windows, way to expensive, and I have the selfish thought that if I don't pay for it, atleast corporations that have to do honest business will. So it's not like MS will die if I steal myself a copy. Oh yes, I have heard of Cedega, it's like a wine alternative? Would you say it's the most up to date? (I play Dawn of War, and use google earth mostly. Steam is a definate need, and I would perfer being able to install some windows programs that aren't always games.)

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[MrHanky]

Yes, and you can get things working by fixing it yourself.

Yesterday, I became fed up with Windows only giving 60 Hz refresh rate (I only use it for my gaming needs), and decided to do something about it. Googled for '60 hz' something, clicked the first hit and downloaded the app without looking too closely. Now I had a new Explorer bar that I didn't want or need, and my problem was still there. Luckily, this particular version of the spyware had a working uninstaller(!). Then I found a different app that actually worked, but not without a reboot.

So what do you prefer: having to install proprietary apps to fix even the simplest problems, and getting malware installed in the process, or dropping to the shell and pasting a line into your terminal emulator? I know which solution I can expect to work, and I certainly prefer that to fantasies of "world domination".

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[LandGator]

Why not use VNC?

1. Convenience. Mash a button, and you've switched.
2. Having the full screen to use, 100% of the time.
3. Slowness
4. Irregular refreshing

That's over a crossover cable to the other machine, BTW, no other traffic over the wire, so don't blame the LAN.

I really liked the concept, tried a copple of VNC variants, but went back to a KVM .

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[SiChemist]

Automatix can install various hardware drivers as well as de-CSS (for DVD playback) and proprietary windows video codecs. It also installs a number of other software programs. It is possible to manually install everything that Automatix does just by selecting the correct repositories and using apt or synaptic. Automatix just automates the process with a nice GUI. You check boxes to select software to install.

Cedega is based on Wine and is developed specifically to run games. Every so often, much of Cedega's software is folded back into Wine. You can safely install both Wine and Cedega without them interfering with one another.

Google Earth has a native Linux version (it might be in beta still) that works very well indeed.

Re:Ubuntu is a Windows killer

[Cstryon]

Thanks SiChem. Now I don't expect Linux to be exactly windows. But it's nice to know that there is a way I can jump right into using linux right from an OS that automates everything. Eventually I'll be able to use the CLI and apt or synaptic yaddi yadda, but untill then, atleast I know I can be a newb and still use my linux box.

Everyone's going to give you a different answer

[Adam Hazzlebank]

...and here's mine.

First of all, don't dual boot. You end up staying in whichever operating system your most comfortable with all the time (which to begin with will be Windows). At some point your linux install will break, you'll be too tired to fix it and after a few weeks you'll end up dumping it. Seriously I've tried dual booting many times, it never worked out.

So, my suggestion would be buy a system specifically for Linux (if it's an upgrade, keep the old windows drive in a draw and buy a new disk for Linux). Make sure the hardware is well supported under Linux. As far as which distro goes, seriously any of SuSE, Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu (and probably others) will have the packages you need. I'd check what other people in your department are using and go with that, it helps to have people who can help you out and you in turn can help out, in Academia it's a good idea. My personnal choice would be Ubuntu or Debian. I've worked in groups that have been SuSE based before, it was fine but I wouldn't use it by choice.

Re:Virtualization (IS EASY AND RECOMMENDED)

[Shneids]

If your a newbie to Linux, then using Vmware makes a lot of sense. One of the technologies it has called Snapshots, which allows the user to preserve the state of the virtual machine. Before making any changes to your virtual machine, take a snapshot, make any changes you wish, and if you decide that your better off without the changes or want to try something else, revert back to the snapshot and start all over again, its that simple. You will save a lot of time using this.

two choices

[oohshiny]

You can order on-line from one of the Linux vendors.

Alternatively, you can take a live Linux CD to the store, boot from it, and see what works.

Personally, I have found Ubuntu to be a great all-round distro and highly recommend it for general use.

centos is a good one

[Anonymous Coward]

centos is compiled from redhat enterprise linux sources.

make sure your academic advisor is on board

[ufnoise]

If you are pursuing a PhD, make sure that your committee chair is on board with your decision. He (or she, or it) may often need to exchange files with you. If he is predominantly a windows user, you may have a difficult time, unless you make it easy for him to see your stuff. I preferred to use latex and linux, while my advisor preferred windows and word. It was not fun helping prepare presentations or figures for him from my work. In the end, I am sure he was pretty pissed off by my decision. My colleague used Miktex and word together on windows, and it was a mess for him to keep synchronized with revisions from his professor.

In addition, you may not need to have linux installed if you are free to use the department computers. Better yet, use the same distro that they do, since you may get some IT help from the support staff.

Re:make sure your academic advisor is on board

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, your issue was with the app you used (latex) not the OS (Linux). You could have used Linux and OpenOffice.org's Writer software (equivalent to MS Word), and sent your committee chair Word files, not Latex files.

Easier than Dual Booting

[shareme]

With your lack of experience I recommend something else.. In my own situation I was away form using Linux for awhile so I got an usb external drive downloaded VMWare VMServer thna anet install image of a linux distro..in my case Debian.. Works like a charm even on the external usb hard drive at 7200 rpm.. and you do not have to mess with dual booting..

Why I chose Gentoo

[Phoenixhunter]

Loaded up Redhat, Unbuntu, Suse, Knoppix, and Slackware, before I settled on Gentoo recently. Basically as a command-line heavy using NT user, I found most of the distros didn't compel me rightly or wrongly to really get up to elbows in the nitty gritty that really relates the true benefit of working with Linux, the UNIX underpinnings and the ability to tap into a vast numbers of great open source programs.

Thanks Gentoo!

Obligatory MEPIS plug

[rbrander]

Seems to be my job in these threads to mention that MEPIS is based upon the Ubuntu libraries and repositories, but in addition defaults to KDE - probably better for a Windows-emigre - and comes with codecs, playing MP3s out of the box and so forth.

A lot of thought has gone into its "packaging", i.e. the selection and setup of packages, the menu defaults, etc. By far the closest thing in the Linux world I've seen to "it just works".

Also has a fanatic user base, google "mepislovers" for the fan/support site that's separate from the vendor's.

Re:Obligatory MEPIS plug

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to say that after trying close to 30 different distro's that there is absolutely
  >>no not here on this machine anyway, easier and completely successful install and set-up and easy for your grandma to use distro than SimplyMepis6.
  And this from a total never wrote even one line of HTML ever or ever used a command line if there was a GUI around moron who figures that if I have to know how to use it, then I don't even want to know about it.

Re:Obligatory MEPIS plug

[fill1]

Mepis is great, if you've never tried it you should. It comes as a live cd also

Cygwin

[dekkerdreyer]

I would recommend Cygwin as the best solution. Cygwin is the bridge that provides access to much of the bulk that makes linux attractive on a desktop (GNU utilities, mainly) with the ease of use that you're used to (keeping Windows).

Unless you have some particular need where you really need a linux OS (busy web server, robust firewall, etc), you'll find that you are better off sticking with Windows. Cygwin will allow you to access most of the benefits of unix, including Xwindows if you're into that sort of thing. Most of the basic linux apps you're looking for will run fine with Cygwin.

I have numerous windows machines and only two linux machines. One is a RAID array, the other is the house workhorse (ssh/ftp/web/rsync server and firewall). Both linux machines are headless.

Windows may have numerous shortcomings, but on the desktop there's nothing linux really has to offer.

Virtualization

[Anonymous Coward]

What I found worked the best when switching from Windows to Linux.

1) Install linux as your only booting OS
2) Run windows in vmware under linux

When dual booting I found myself not using linux as much as I could of been simply because windows had an easy solution. Then I just stayed in windows because I didn't feel like rebooting back to linux again.

Vague question

[siwelwerd]

Any math department worth anything will have a set of Linux computers in the lab. I know we have at least 4 or 5. If you just want to tinker or use tex, it's easy enough to use SSH or VNC for that, so that's a good way to get exposure without the chance of rendering your computer temporarily unusable.

I also think you need to clarify the question: Do you want to use Linux or do you want to learn Linux? If you just want to use Linux, go with everyone's favorite suggestion of Ubuntu. If you don't need to tweak it much, it's easy to use, and can set up a dual boot for you in something like 5 steps and 30 minutes. If you really want to learn Linux and understand what's going on, go with Slack or Gentoo.

MEPIS

[Rob Simpson]

SimplyMEPIS is great for desktops and comes as a LiveCD/installer that allows you to try it out first. It's easy to try, and easy to install if you like it.

A few moments thought.

[TheCrawlingShadow]

The obvious answer would seem to be Fedora or Ubuntu at first glance but from my own experiences I'd say maybe start with something like Debian or better yet Slackware, coming from a background where all I've learned is self taught I personally found the stripped down and straight forward nature of Debian and Slackware to be rather refreshing.

LaTeX solutions

[EngMedic]

with the caveat that this might spark a Real Text Editor flamewar, I have found no better way of handling all forms of LaTeX than the emacs package called AUCTeX (http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/).

It is simply the most competent, sane, and complete way I've found to manage LaTeX. I use it for everything from a one page quickie lab writeup, to my thesis.

Re:I concur.

[smilindog2000]

Heck, mod parent up! It's a simple answer for a simple question. RedHat always catered to advanced users, Suse went evil recently, Fedora rocks in may ways but is highly unstable and in the end not quite as easy as ... Ubuntu. Did I read someone pushing Slackware?!? Great distro, but no way for the noob. Debian rocks, but again, for the noob... Ubuntu.

Get a Mac!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get a Mac. It's unix under the hood and its a fantastic environment for LaTeX. TeXShop (http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop) is an excellent open-source application for composing LaTeX documents (though still not as good as Emacs+auctex IMO) that comes with its own, very good previewer. And if need be, as long as you have 2GB of RAM, you can run linux in a virtual machine with Parallels at near-native speeds. I run Ubuntu in such a VM and its great -- though you still have to compile Emacs yourself if you want anti-aliased fonts, unlike Emacs under OS X. (I strongly agree with the numerous Ubuntu recommendations already given; it is a snap to install and keep up to date.)

Multiple Distros

[Inmatarian]

As long as you place /home in it's own partition, and make a partition for each distro, you can try out as many as you want. Well, in theory. But, the practice in trying to get several distros to cooperate would teach you tons about linux.

Must-have book

[mkiwi]

You will need Unix in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition This book is absolutely must-have for anyone who wants to learn anything about *NIX systems.

This book is so important that several ComS professors recommended it for their students who use Linux. You may not use many of the commands in there now, but soon enough you will be plugging away and you will want to know how to add things to your $PATH, etc. This book is a great starting reference for such learning material.

Re:No Experience? How about vmplayer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of dual booting, you could download the free vmplayer from www.vmware.com. install it on your windows box. Then peruse the free vm appliances and you'll find a number of Linux virtual machines, including fedora, ubuntu and even gentoo linux. Download one and run it in the vmware player.

Sure, your math/science/other apps will run faster in a non-virtual environment. But what i like about this setup is:

1.) you can run both windows and linux at the same time on the same box
2.) you can easily delete the linux virtual machine if you don't like it.
3.) you can setup a virtual network between your windows box and the virtual linux box, then use SSH, or use SCP,FTP to move files from one OS to the other.
4.) Your virtual linux can have its own net connection, so you can use the web, get updates, whatever.

As for which Linux, I would hope that you'd use gentoo, because you seem like a smart dude and I think you'd get a real good sense about what the pros and cons of other distros really amount to once you've used gentoo.

Btw: the gentoo vmware appliance is a "download, unzip, then run" sort of deal. There is only a command line at that point. From there, if you want a standard desktop environment, you can either:

# emerge kde
or
# emerge gnome

Or download the fedora or ubuntu virtual appliances and see that they just work.

FreeBSD

[Bluesman]

I know you asked for Linux, but since you sound like you're interested in learning and capable of reading documentation, I have to recommend FreeBSD.

It's like a Linux distribution done properly. Everything works together properly, and EVERYTHING is well documented.

Not only that, but while package managers are great when you know what you want to install, if you don't know what you want, FreeBSD's Ports system has a categorized listing of every software package available for the system. Installing programs is just two simple steps from there.

Re:FreeBSD

[Junta]

It's like a Linux distribution done properly. Everything works together properly, and EVERYTHING is well documented. This I never got, BSDs and OpenSolaris brag a whole lot about the wealth of documentation compared to linux, but in my experience, finding documentation on what you need is by far easier on linux systems than others. It's hard for it *not* to be the case given the relative user populations. Linux alternatives have their merits, but harping on documentation seems a weak point that can easily be disproved with simple google searches.

Besides, FreeBSD you'd have to pit against a particular distribution if you want to exclude unofficial-like user contributed documents. Most distros nowadays have Wikis that cover pretty much whatever you want.

On the ports system, I've not tried Fedora since its inception, so I don't know how yum repoes are, but definitely gentoo portage and debian apt repos are nicely searchable (apt-cache or something like synaptic for GUI stuff). The ports tree was an impressive advantage, but now linux distros are out there that are even easier to pull and install stuff without compromising some of the benefits of binary package management (fast installs, ability to quickly determine which package owns a file, etc...)

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to go that way, then it's worth looking at DesktopBSD for newbies. It's FreeBSD with KDE, a graphical installer, and a ports GUI.

Re:FreeBSD

[Bluesman]

The problem with Linux documentation isn't that it isn't there, but it's not in any single, readily accessible format.

There are two things you need to know to learn everything about FreeBSD: how to type "man command" and how to open the FreeBSD handbook.

With Linux, I've found a common problem to be that the documentation is either out of date, in a different format depending on who distributes the app (info, man, html, etc.)

I use Ubuntu on occasion, and it's great, and the people on the forums are exceptionally helpful, but many of the frequently asked questions and common problems would be much easier to solve if they were cataloged in a single place.

A good example is how Ubuntu loads the open source kernel-mode driver to my wireless card by default, rather than use NDIS. That's fine, except the open-source driver doesn't work, and there's no way of knowing that it's there unless you know what bcm43xx is. You also have to know that you have to unload that from the kernel in order to get NDIS working.

Yikes.

I found the answer to this problem on the Ubuntu forums and via a helpful mailing list entry, but it took hours. I've never encountered a similar scavenger hunt using the FreeBSD handbook and man pages. It's all right there.

What is your goal?

[Savage-Rabbit]

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

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

Re:What is your goal?

[IHateAllofYou]

The problem with this is with the ultra friendly desktops the learning curve is not steep its almost non-existant. I personally jumped ship from Windows XP over to Slackware overnight with a little bit of prior experience in Slackware from so long ago it doesn't really count. Now my machines are all Sun RISC and X86 running Solaris and Slackware with no windows whatsoever.

This is not the ideal solution but it helps illustrate that the ultra friendly desktops aren't always it either.

I tried Ubuntu and I hated it I couldn't stand how it looked and it just felt wrong, Fedora feels the same way as do most of the others save FreeBSD, Slackware and, Solaris.

I know my personal preferences do not work for everyone and neither do my distro's of choice but it never ever hurts to suffer a little bit while you learn.

Don't forget liveCD versions are a nice way to test how things feel for you on the UI side before you make any more permanent changes.

MOD PARENT +5 IRONY

[Joe U]

Please mod parent to +5 to balance out the "Just run linux" posts whenever there is a Windows question around here.

FLAMEWAR FLAMEBAIT

[tacocat]

This article is a flamebait.

What's the best distro for a newb? No fucking clue. Depends on what you want?

RedHat is a great installation if you want to support the vendor management model.

SuSE is great is you are a Microsoft Bitch.

Debian is very popular with people who don't mind an older installation if it's going to remain stable and working for months on end.

Unbuntu is great if you have to have the bleeding edge of every installation, even if you don't mind a little blood on your thesis projects.

Slackware is awesome if you actually want to learn what the heck is going on with Linux.

Get em all and try each one for a couple of days and see what sucks and what doesn't and then please don't bother telling us about it because we don't really care.

Linux, use whatever the heck you want.

Fedora user, would recommend Ubuntu

[quixote9]

I've used RedHat distros back to RH6, and Fedora Core 3 since two years ago. All were on dual boot systems with Win98, Win2000, WinXp, as the case might be. I haven't updated to Core 5 (6?) because I have a customized laptop and it would be more trouble than it's worth. But that does mean I may not be being entirely fair to Fedora.

I've used Ubuntu Dapper and Edgy on a Dell Inspiron, and I am wildly impressed. It installs and just works out of the box, but if you want to play with stuff, it is *nix, and you can go as deep as you want. (The stumbling block there is that Ubuntu makes it complicated to act as root, but if you get tired of that, go to Ubuntu Community help: root-sudo on how to do things your way.) Ubuntu also has much more active and useful help forums and wikis, in my experience, that the things I've found on Fedora. That may be my fault, because I'm not searching for them right, but even so, that means Ubuntu's are easier to find. I tried to collect useful info and links on dual-boot install of Ubuntu, but there's heaps of help out there.

Good luck!

Latex Publishing

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want an easy to use latex frontend then give lyx a try. You can always export to latex if need be but if you have a ton of equations lyx makes the job faster.

Almost all Linux distro will do the job!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Sir,
for the needs you described, almost any "mainstream" Linux distro will be fine. Ubuntu was a pleasant discovery for me, but Suse, Fedora, Mandriva etc. etc, will be just fine. You will be satisfied.
You really do not have to do all this exhausting research work some readers are suggesting, unless you have the "virus" of testing sw environments. For a common user it is not a necessity.
In case you decide to go Linux there are a couple of things to take care of:
1) HW peripherals (mostly web camera, scanner, sometimes even some printers). Told not very precisely: almost anything in the PC box works automatically with Linux, but this not always the case for hw out of it.
2) In an any kind of Linux, be prepared for adaptation in some new habits:
- Naming case: drivers called C:, D: etc. are now HDA, HDB etc.
- position and hierarchy of important directories
- A lack of a simple install.exe, but only for some apps not provided directly by the distro.
My best wishes.
komnik

I thought....

[Z1NG]

I thought mathematicians did it with a pencil. The link you gave is for an undergraduate philosophy journal, and so I assume you will be more concerned with pure math as opposed to computational or applied. So, I don't think it really matters what operating system you use. You can find some type of Latex software for pretty much any OS (I like lyx, which has both linux and windows releases.)

Ubuntu, or something equally GNOME based

[bluefoxlucid]

I love Gentoo, but I use Ubuntu because it's easier. For a hard-core administrator, editing 12 text files and typing 500 commands is still a pain in the ass; anything that smooths my ride is essentially a plus. My few gripes with Ubuntu include that you still have to install 2 packages and edit 4 text files to do LDAP authentication; but unless you have an Active Directory server holding your username/password you don't care.

If not Ubuntu, then I recommend you pick something else with GNOME and working HAL and udev. Some systems amusingly don't ship with working HAL or good udev setup scripts; in these systems, drivers don't always load their firmware (so hardware doesn't work without tinkering) and newly inserted devices don't instantly get loaded (i.e. USB flash drives). Systems like Ubuntu have all this, so hardware either works when you put it in or it's just not going to work (at least, not without experimental drivers that will probably crash your computer); there's no "well if you edit these 4 files and load this module and put this firmware file in this directory..." to speak of.

KDE is blah. The only real reasons I hear for KDE being recommended are "it looks like Windows" and "GNOME is crap." A lot of good software on Linux is GTK+, and fits in better with GNOME; KDE only looks good with KDE apps, otherwise you get windows that look like they're from different OSes and save/print/open dialogs that are completely different from application to application. When choosing between "GNOME and SOME_POPULAR_APPS" vs "KDE and K*" I typically steer towards GNOME because I can install just about anything and have it look and feel right. (plus GNOME uses way less memory and CPU, and it's going down every release now).

Re:Ubuntu, or something equally GNOME based

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is blah. The only real reasons I hear for KDE being recommended are "it looks like Windows" and "GNOME is crap."

I'm guessing, then, that you've only bothered to read flame wars and not any intelligent discussions. The slightly more educated argument for KDE is that GNOME hides so much functionality that it is incredibly hard to get it to do anything other than its default behavior. KDE is incredibly customizable, and there are even convenient GUIs for doing most of the customization, although they can be fairly complex. From a purely subjective standpoint, I also like the layout of KDE's menus much more.

A lot of good software on Linux is GTK+, and fits in better with GNOME; KDE only looks good with KDE apps, otherwise you get windows that look like they're from different OSes and save/print/open dialogs that are completely different from application to application. When choosing between "GNOME and SOME_POPULAR_APPS" vs "KDE and K*" I typically steer towards GNOME because I can install just about anything and have it look and feel right. (plus GNOME uses way less memory and CPU, and it's going down every release now).

If you swap "KDE" and "GNOME", and substitute "Qt" for "GTK+", that argument is just as true. And, actually, KDE is capable of forcing GTK+ apps to use the current Qt theme; admittedly, that doesn't fix the incongruity of open/save dialog boxes. It will, however, at least make your buttons all the same shape and color. If that's not enough for you, there's also an experimental wrapper script called "kgtk" that can (for some applications) replace the GTK+ open/save dialogs with Qt ones. I've seen no meaningful figures on how much "memory and CPU" KDE and GNOME take up; no matter what you do, somebody can always tune something to make it more efficient. They're equivalent, in my eyes. Oh, and KDE has also been getting faster with every release.

Ubuntu + virtualization

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was doing my undergraduate thesis, I used a 2GB usb flashdisk with qemu and ubuntu-server. Put putty, winscp and your text editor of choice
onto the disk(i used portable gvim) and you suddenly have a system you can take *anywhere* that will allow you to edit documents, run python, compile latex and serve webpages (a wiki etc). Obviously this does not replace a good home linux installation (I used ubuntu of course) but it does allow you to usefully do work at the university.

In addition I wrote a python script so that when i browsed to localhost:8080/~thesis/getLatestVersion.cgi it would compile the work I had done and serve it up via apache. This approach also allows you to run a cvs/svn server which allows you to version control your documents.
It takes some setting up, so I am considering writing a howto guide or a script to set it up for people, If anyone is interested let me know.

The downside of this system is that obviously it is fairly slow. However this probably wont matter if your workflow is mainly edit documents, compile latex, view pdf file.

Re:Ubuntu + virtualization

[hotzeyboy]

Argh, I wrote the above, did not intend for it to be posted as anonymous coward.

Drop windows like a bad habit

[ensiferius]

I've found that if there is something that you want to do, somebody has built software that will do it under Linux, and most of it is free as in beer. Every distro ships with more libraries and development tools than you can shake a memory stick at.

As for a distribution, I personally have used Red Hat based distros since 5.1. If you want the bleeding edge, you can try Fedora Core, but plan on upgrading frequently. If you want a solid system that you can continue to update for a long period of time, try CentOS. It is a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Yum is a handy package management and updating tool for both of those, that allows you to add extra software repositories to get packages that were not included with the core distribution.

I tried Debian and Mandrake early on, but liked Red Hat better. Recently, I've tried, Mandriva, Ubuntu, and Suse and have not particularly cared for them. Suse was particularly irritating. YaST just bugs me, and the system update utility was broken when they released it, it's like they're trying to out windoze windows. However, with all of the proprietary software included, it did run my new laptop hardware right out of the box, so they've got that going for them. It's a love and hate relationship at this point, which sort of feels too much like windows.

I recommend choosing one distro to handle your daily work and then leaving an extra partition of two to install some others to test drive them.

For extra software that you don't want to be with out, make sure you find amoroK for listening to music, Xine (with libdvdcss) for playing DVD's, and K3B for burning CD's and DVD's.

As for hardware, in my desktops I've had good luck with Gigabyte mother boards based on nvidia chipsets. I would choose nvidia gpu's as well, they have updated drivers and a nice x-config utility available on their website. I personally buy AMD 64 bit chips, since 64 bit is the next step in architecture, and 64 bit Linux is solid.

As a final note, if you ever get in to network administration or troubleshooting, you will never want to be without Linux.

Suggested reading

[massysett]

If I may be quite immodest, please take a look at the piece linked in my sig. It is in progress, but what's already there should be helpful. I can also use your comments!

flavours?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why stick with linux? Silly question, you sound like a smart enough person to know that there is no one solution. Every tool has its own specific function be it a Thermometer, MS Windows or a condom (please ignore unintentianal sublime additions).

Jack of all trades - master of none?

The Most Simple Answer

[Odiseo70]

Is Mandriva. Is one of the most friendly and easy to "Install and Use" distro I've ever seen. Perhaps there are more popular distros in the U.S., but in many countrys in Europe and LatinAmerica is wide known. And there are many reasons: the very huge software repository in both, free and comercial versions, the easy use of special programs for software and hardware configuration, called drakes, the wide hardware diversity recognized at installation time, the different kind of desktops you may use (KDE, GNOME, ICEWM, etc), and of course, stability.

I try this distro since Mandrake 9.0 and finally when Mandriva 2006 comes, I bought a comercial version: Powerpack +. It covers not only needs for an average user but it is useful too for advanced user, like software, web or database developers, Graphical Designers, Engineers, Enterprise Desktop and even it is posible to obtain a Database, DNS or mail server. You can read more about it in http://www.mandriva.com

Why on earth ask Slashdot? :)

[jopet]

You will get 100 different answers here, and most of them will be mere fanboyism.

Ask people who do tasks similar to what you want to do on Linux about their experiences. Depending on what your background is you will probably know people or web forums where you can ask this sort of stuff.

My personal opinion is that it nearly does not matter. Use any of the "big" Linux distros -- the differences are much overrated, especially on /.
The differences about "ease of use" are even more over-hyped.
LaTeX & co can be used on all distros easily.

One difference that might be significant for you is whether you want choice or whether you want a distro to make the decisions which program to use for which task for you.

Ubuntu is leaning more towards the one task - one program philosphy while e.g. OpenSuse is more about giving you all the options.
Ubuntu makes basic things very easy for beginners but does not provide a GUI for more advanced configuration options. OpenSuse has one configuration GUI for everything from installation to keyboard, network card configuration to configuration of your firewall or an Apache web server.

So, it is basically a question of details and for those it would be essential to know a bit more of what you want to do or what your preferences are.

Re:I concur. (and try xubuntu)

[noigmn]

Yep Ubuntu, and if the standard Gnome version seems too heavy, I've found xubuntu is a joy to use and almost more user friendly out of the box.

Actually I'd probably recommend beginners at least give xubuntu a try. Especially if they are finding the Gnome or KDE version not to be what they wanted. I found xubuntu far less troublesome than the Gnome version, and very no fuss. A very well put together user friendly package.

This might be a good choice:

[urbanradar]

Personally, I'm a great fan of PCLinuxOS. Its hardware recognition beats even Ubuntu in my experience. Programmes and drivers are easily installed using a graphical user interface (Synaptic), the package repositories are great and very complete. The "PCLinuxOS control center" is a user-friendly graphical system administration tool that beats the Windows ones sideways to hell and back. The PCLinuxOS community is extremely friendly and helpful. Should you find a programme missing from the repositories (although that rarely happens), ask on the forum, and often, the maintainers will add it for you. By default, it comes with KDE, but GNOME/Xfce/etc. are available to download.

The only major downside I can think of is that the default theme looks a bit ugly, but that's easily fixed!

Also, PCLinuxOS .94 should be released soon, which should make the distro better than ever!

YMMV, of course, but that's my opinion.

Re:This might be a good choice:

[JayAEU]

Well I hope their website is going to be released soon as well. All I get from your URL http://www.pclinuxos.com/ is a redirect to http://rubens.hmdnsgroup.com/suspended.page/ where it says that the page is not available.

Re:This might be a good choice:

[urbanradar]

Well I hope their website is going to be released soon as well. All I get from your URL http://www.pclinuxos.com/ is a redirect to http://rubens.hmdnsgroup.com/suspended.page/ where it says that the page is not available.

Yes, unfortunately, it appears there website has gone offline due to technical problems. It should be back soon. It was still online when I posted the link.

User SuSE

[Helldesk Hound]

SuSE is arguably the friendliest distro of all the RPM based distros - and it's KDE based.

Do you want to learn how linux works?

[partenon]

If you wanna learn how Linux works, I'd suggest Gentoo. Read the handbooks while installing and try to understand what you are doing. Do it from Stage 1. It'll help you to have a good understanding on how Linux works. And patience. Lots of patience. It may take a full week to get everything working properly. And you may need to install it more than once :-) When we are starting, it's easy to mess everything up.

If you just want a box up and running, Ubuntu or Fedora will work. I'd suggest Ubuntu, but Fedora is OK. Both have tons of customizations to make it easier for a newbie, both have a great community, both have pre-scheduled releases and both have "install from repository" softwares (but I prefer Ubuntu's one).

Good luck!

Ideal Linux System for Newbies?

[fill1]

I don't know about ideal, but, I run Ubuntu on a desktop, and Mepis on a laptop, and Mepis in my opinion is better. things that took me a long time to configure with Ubuntu worked out of the box with Mepis. Ex. Wireless card, flash player etc. And Mepis uses KDE by default. Both Distros are based on debian, and as a matter of fact since the last year or so the Mepis has been based on Ubuntu. both excellent distro, but I prefer Mepis for several reasons, not just the few that I mentioned, but mostly because stuff just works.

Mandriva... Seriously

[Odiseo70]

I've read almost all answers to your question... But Consider this: I'm living in LatinAmerica, and I can't get (many reason I can give you) the ultimate PC as I Wish, but I'm using right now a Compaq presario SW333: 512 Mb RAM, Intel Celeron at 800 MHz, 120 GB HD. I'm Dual Booting Mandriva Linux 2006 Powepack + and Windows 2000 SP4. Mandriva Linux 2006 was cheaper to me that the preinstaled Windows 2000 I get with the PC, and it gave me 0 problems. It was INCREDIBLE easy to install and Recognized 95% pc's hardware (Yeah... winmodem requires aditional work). My sons (9 and 13 each one) likes mandriva more than Windows 2000. They say W2k is bored, and WinXP is Ugly... As you can see, facts are talking

By the way, There are many software for mathematicals matters for the distro !!

Depends on the final goal

[sasha328]

If the goal is to learn how Linux works, then stay clear from Ubuntu. It's too user friendly. In this case, I'm not sure what to recommend. Never used Debian, I used Slackware for about a week, and I think it is a good choice in this scenario, or Fedora. I know it is possible to "learn Linux" with any distribution, but the tendency is to use a shortcut when it is available than to go the long "unix" way about doing it.
For an excellent learning experience, try Linux from Scratch.

Ofcourse, if all you want is to just use the PC to do stuff (assignments, internet, and such) then like most people are recommending use Ubuntu.

Re:Depends on the final goal

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it is possible to "learn Linux" with any distribution, but the tendency is to use a shortcut when it is available than to go the long "unix" way about doing it.

The shortcut often fails to work for obscure reasons, which can leave the user confused due to lack of reasonable error messages.
Additionally, the shortcut may not be flexible enough to perform the desired operation.

I find editing text files to be simpler because it works on any distro and I don't need to learn yet another tool which is merely a wrapper around a simple operation. These tools tend to use differing nomenclature which is unfamiliar and confusing.

Re:I concur.

[snilloc]

Debian really isn't that hard - even the install. Ubuntu's main advantage that I can see is newer and more frequent stable releases. I had a serious upgrade issue with Ubuntu (freezing gui) that I eventually reinstalled over. This was after attempting to avoid known upgrade errata. Running Debian unstable I only had a minor upgrade/dependency issue that was solved with a peek at the bboards, requiring only about three "apt-get" commands from the prompt. (iirc, "remove a", "upgrade b", "install a"). Heck, even the X11 to X.org switch was relatively simple. Not that ubuntu is bad, but I think there is a trade-off between usability and "stability" (in multiple senses of the word).

Re:FLAMEWAR FLAMEBAIT

[WormRunner]

Debian is very popular with people who don't mind an older installation if it's going to remain stable and working for months on end.

Debian is also very good for those who want up-to-date software. Just run Sid.

(This comment is irrelevant to the topic. So sue me.)

perfect distro

[hitest]

For me the perfect distro is Slackware, Debian, or FreeBSD. If you're new to Linux some good choices are: Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora, or Mandriva. These distros all have great hardware detection and work out of the box.

My experience in converting..

[Arceliar]

Sometime during late 2000, I started my gradual switch to the free unixes. I began with Zipslack, a part of the Slackware project, because I could install it on my fat32 partition without needing to repartition. At the time, working off of a 7GB harddrive, I wanted to avoid splitting the partition, as I had so little to work with.

Over the years, I've distro hopped probably two dozen times, both linuxes and bsds, but ultimately it's all come down to two things: efficiency and ease of use. That being said, Gentoo wins in my book by a wide margin when it comes to efficiency. It's _ALMOST_ as good as Linus From Scratch, but the sheer amount of work saved by using portage (for me at least) wins over the slightly even more optimized results from Linux From Scratch. That being said, I don't use Gentoo on my desktop. Portage (gentoo's package manager) downloads source and compiles it--a rather time consuming process for one who doesn't have distcc installed on several networked computers to speed things up. Because of this, I'm currently working off of Kubuntu (though any Ubuntu version is more than adequate in my opinion) because it is the fastest of the easily updateable distributions I have used. I'm honestly not just jumping on the ubuntu train here--I honestly disliked the distribution until about Knot 6 of the testing stage for Dapper, where I came to realize that it was approaching the speed my gentoo install had achieved at the time, but without the need for long compilations every update.

In summary: I would have to say Ubuntu is best if you're new to things, don't know every minute detail of your machine inside and out, or want things to be mindless to maintain. If you're a performance junky, Gentoo is best IMHO because of how easily you can create a highly optimized system--and in the long run this may be better for what you're describing, particularly if the software you'll be using or writing need not update more than once a week or so and involves a lot of number crunching.

Gentoo is however quite a bit more difficult to install on it's own right, I would suggest starting off using one of the derivative distributions, such as Vida Linux or Sabayon. I myself prefer Sabayon out of the two, once the ridiculous amounts of orange and red are taken out of the theme. Much like Ubuntu in it's default install, Sabayon is almost painful to look at if you don't absolutely love orange and red.

As far as virtualization goes, I would say this: virtualization is a great thing, but I myself think it's nowhere NEAR at a state that it can even attempt to replace a native install. There's just too much of a performance handicap with so much overhead still, in my opinion, to warrant regular use. It's a great way to test out a distro before deciding to burn a cd/dvd of it and install, or running the occasional application which only works on Windows, cannot run through Wine, and doesn't warrant a full install.

Re:My experience in converting..

[JayAEU]

Gentoo is however quite a bit more difficult to install on it's own right, I would suggest starting off using one of the derivative distributions, such as Vida Linux or Sabayon. I myself prefer Sabayon out of the two, once the ridiculous amounts of orange and red are taken out of the theme. Much like Ubuntu in it's default install, Sabayon is almost painful to look at if you don't absolutely love orange and red. Well that's not the end of it. I gave Sabayon Linux a shot and was pleasantly surprised. The installation process along with the hardware detection was the best I've seen in a long time, everything worked, including 3D acceleration, Xgl, Compiz, etc.

Problems came up once I tried to make the damn thing update using emerge --sync && layman -S && emerge -uD world. There was lots of breakage, because Sabayon is partly based on their own special versions of some libraries, but otherwise depends on the portage tree of Gentoo.

In any case, I thought this was a good time to try out their "Get Live Help" button on the desktop (which I find to be a very cool idea!). I was taken to an IRC channel, seeking help there. In a nutshell, I was told that Sabayon could not be updated other than installing the next release. After I wiped my hosed installation, I was surprised to be told by a senior dev that Sabayon can actually be updated, but it would take careful considerations, mostly "masking" some unstable packages.

Sabayon could be a terrific beginner's distro thanks to their really awesome installation routine. They are held back, however, by deficiencies in day-to-day use. This, so I was promised on IRC, will change with their next release, 3.25 if I recall correctly.

And yeah, the emphasis on yellow-orange-red in their themes only serves to enfuriate when things don't go as planned.

Shouldn't the question be which *nix OS for noobs?

[aristotle-dude]

If it was that question, the obvious answer would be get a mac and run OS X. If you really want to install linux software, you could always get Fink but newbie users would not really care about that. What they would care about is usable software.

Linux operating systems

[kb6vdo]

I am an aged retired professor of EE, who started using Linux about a year and a half ago. In my considered opinion the best Linux system for a rank newbie, in Linux, to start is to download Knoppix, any version later than 3.0 will 'find' all the hardware on most, if not all, PC systems (yes! no downloading drivers). Put Knoppix on your hard drive, leaving windoze there, use either GRUB or LILO as a boot-operating-system selector (search the Internet using how-to 'task', but be careful not all Internet articles are cool). You are smart to keep your windoze system running until you can safely shift completely to Linux. Use the Internet for any questions (feel free to ask questions of any tested Linux user). A single source of information which helped get me started was Carla Schroder's 'LINUX Cookbook', O'Reilly, isbn: 0-596-00640-3, which may be a bit dated by now, but a very good source of Linux 'how-to' information. (There are several articles on the Internet by this author which you will find very helpful, also O'Reilly books has a cool on-line service.) I started with Knoppix went to Slackware, then to Mandrake, Mepis, then Ubuntu, (to name only a few) finally shifted to just plain good old Debain Linux. Debian, in my considered opinion is the very best of all Linux operating systems which I have tried. Its 'apt-get' and "aptitude" operated from the console (command line) give you the best selection of free software available for Linux operating systems. This software is free for the download, and these two commands, see'~$ man', will connect, using sources.list (/etc/apt/sources.list), then download any or all software for you. Linux operating systems always have manual (~$ man 'command-name') avaiable to help us newbies learn to speak Linux. (There are also 'alien' to convert pkg.tgz to pkg.deb, and '~# dpkg -i pkg.deb' to install non-debian software packages on Debian.) (note: 'aptitude' and 'apt-get' both use 'dpkg' to complete their work, I am told.) Slackware is my, kind of, second choice Linux operating system, however, it tends to maintain some of the older Unix tradition. I have 'tailored' my Debian Linux systems to suite my needs, keeping my home directory separate (on a not-to-be formatted partition but use as /home/kb6vdo, for example) so that all my favorite settings are not disturbed when the urge strikes me to add a later or different version of Debian, or any other, Linux operating system to my collection of running operating systems on this box. Mix other Linux distros with care! If worried use a new alias user name instead of your choice a redo all your gui settings. Knoppix, Ubuntu, and Mepis, when I used them, were all three based on Debian Linux, but tend to modify the source code to suite their own needs, not mine. This source code change makes distribution upgrades dangerous for newbie linux folks. Linux is wonderful, it has more and better free scientific software as well as highly specialized free publishing software avaialble, I dare say, than you can even purchase for windoze. Linux is virtually unlimited in its scope of useful possiblities; it is, practically, the modern day Unix which was and is designed for both academic and research use. As far as I know the only area where windoze out shines Linux is in its graphical interface, in that higher optical resolutions are atainable in windoze. This does not matter to most of us, but to gamers this is very important. I keep Knoppix 'run-from-cd' Linux on hand to help me get out of trouble or fix some friend's computer software problem. Knoppix is probably the best Linux of this variety ever and gives quarter to none, to the best of my knowledge. About the PC system, it really does not matter until you get into areas such as wireless Internet, sound and such. Any old or new PC works well, at least for me, with Linux of any variety which I have tried. Thus, what ever PC or laptop you have will accept Knoppix Linux. Most, if not all, will run faster as well. Just remember, as my freind Jerry Sharp used to say: "Linux does not have its 'hood' welded shut", a mechanic can fix it, more than can be said for windoze.

Hey Boss, check out my new Ubuntu server!

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh..better run CentOS ;)

The Great Linux Experiment of 2006

[el_munkie]

I did an experiment recently. Someone I vaguely knew through a friend had come across a laptop that he thought was "hot". As the only nerd he knew, he wanted me to wipe off anything that the hard disk might have had on it. I was amused and thought he was just paranoid, but I humored him.

To be honest, I was the one that alerted him to the existence of programs that phone home when the laptop is stolen. I don't think any normal user ever uses these, but they exist. However, the license number on the pre-existing XP install could probably be matched to the computer it was sold on and maybe to its rightful owner.

The computer looked like a fresh install, complete with with all the worthless bullshit that big-name PC laptop manufacturers bundle with their machines. The goddamned system tray must have had 15 icons in it when expanded, and they all were about to expire. It was 15 or so inches, a widescreen, some year- or two-year old middle of the line model. Nothing to sneeze at.

I told him that I had no version of Windows that predates XP, and the ones I have are legally licensed to me (thank you $5 University copy, it's almost worth it). So he had two options: I could blank the hard disk until he could scare up a copy of XP (he won't, not for normal prices), or I could install Linux. After some explaining, he chose Linux.

I don't think he's ever owned a computer or had access to a family machine, so I figure KDE should be just as easy to learn as Explorer for a first timer. He only wanted to get on the web and play DVDs. The only modern implementation of Linux I've used has been Gentoo, and it has always worked flawlessly, once you get it set up. Portage is amazing, and if things compile, they'll work. Before that I had used Redhat 5, but the RPM system annoyed me to the point that I switched back to Windows for years. It could be because I was using it on an old laptop from 1996 that had a winmodem, but it was a pain in the ass.

I wanted to see if a normal person, a Kaspar Hauser of computing, would pick up on KDE. But not bad enough that I want to toil for days making Gentoo work on his machine. I opted for a precompiled distribution, instead.

I'd heard good things about Ubuntu, but I hate Gnome. So I got Kubuntu. It installed out of a LiveCD, which is much slicker than Windows XPs primitive installation process. Wireless seemed to work, but I wasn't letting this guy on my network and I live in the only complex in the world where everyone has renamed their routers, changed the channels, encrypted, and MAC filtered their wireless. The laptop picked up the neighbors, though, and it sure seemed to be working. DVDs kicked up some error about a decss library and quit after the FBI warning. I tried to install the required library through the graphical upgrade interface, but it didn't work. Very annoying.

So I gave him the laptop and he didn't figure out that its functionality had been severely decreased since recently, when I was out of town. I heard that he was having trouble watching his movies and needed help, but I'm rarely home and he doesn't, and won't, have my numbers. Also, he moved to another complex while I was away, so he's pretty much on his own.

Will he sink or swim? He'll have to hit up the message boards to get things to work, and I think Kubuntu left a way to get there from the desktop or K menu. He's a smart guy in fields outside of computing, and he could learn Linux the hard way and become the greatest programmer ever. Or he could hock it for a few ounces of dirt weed.

Re:The Great Linux Experiment of 2006

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha. I had a colleague come up to me a couple of weeks ago with the exact same situation. He _knew_ the laptop was "slightly warm" and it had a copy of Pro-E on the blasted thing, and seemed to be less than a couple of months old. You know, the kind of laptop that winds one in PMITA _jail_ if caught with it - between software and hardware, this was like stealing a car or receiving one as stolen goods. I told him that I was not going to do any tech work on it, but I also told him that he'd better not connect it to the net, ever, without wiping it clean. I suggested that he nuke everything and put Linux on it, so he doesn't get arrested (I wasn't going to compound the stupidity by giving him a Windows disk).

The greedy idiot wanted to keep the Pro-E. WTF.

He never asked me for a copy of Linux.

I haven't talked to him recently. Maybe I should ask him about it.

Maybe he's in jail. That would be funny.

To be on topic for the guy asking the questio: Any of the top three Linux distros would be fine. I would suggest Mepis or Ubuntu with the Automatix2 script, to make a fully functional computer that even plays encrypted DVDs.

Cygwin?

[ignorent]

I made heavy use of Cygwin throughout college for most of the tasks you listed(mostly programming and LaTeX). It worked well for me since I commuted and would rather do my work at home. I was too lazy to put a true Linux OS on my box. Cygwin could work well for you as well since it lets you work in a Unix environment through Windows, and setup is a breeze for the most part. Once you get comfortable with using it then you could go dual-boot, but Cygwin would be a nice way to get your feet wet. I'm sure most of the readers here will trash this idea, as a lot may see Cygwin as "impure", and heck maybe it is, but it also might be the right choice for you. Just make sure to use the Xwindows version of the shell, it's much nicer, use the "startxwin.bat" in "\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin" to launch it instead of the shortcut it puts on your desktop. I really liked being able to run Unix and Windows apps concurrently. The biggest drawback I can see is that you would have to recompile any code you wrote if you wanted it to run on a true Linux box since cygwin binaries only run on cygwin, but you shouldn't have to modify the source at all to do this.

Re:I concur.

[JackieBrown]

I always recomend Debian

Pick one

[backwardMechanic]

Don't try three or four distros unless you have time to kill. They all work, and all do virtually the same thing - pick one. Use what somebody helpful nearby uses - the person you'll go to when you get stuck. If you really like Linux, you might try another distro in a few months time, but out of curiosity rather than need (that's what I did).

I think the question is interesting. You give us some examples of what you want to use your computer for. Any distro can easily do all of them, but I didn't find that obvious until I'd been using and reading about Linux for a while. There is less difference between distros than a lot of discussions (e.g. here on /.) would lead you to beleive.

Try one and have fun.

KUBUNTU, not Ubuntu.

[kwilliam]

NOTE: Whether you use Ubuntu or Kubuntu, make SURE you install and run the EasyUbuntu script. It installs things that make life easier: Flash plugin, Windows media codecs, etc. You can find it on the Ubuntu forums.

My opinion: For quasi-smart people like yourself, you might be happier with the KDE interface that Kubuntu uses, rather than the sparten GNOME interface used by the default Ubuntu distrobution. KDE uses less memory, it's graphical user interface is better looking and reacts quicker, the KDE software is more integrated, and KDE exposes more options to the user. GNOME tends to disable anything that might be "too difficult" for stupid people. For instance, Ubuntu's options for dealing with removable devices, such as thumb drives and CDs, is one checkbox: automatically mount them or not. KDE lets you choose what actions you want to take place for what media. Examples: When CD's are inserted automatically (play them? | rip them? | present a popup asking which to do.); When Flash_Drive_A is inserted, automatically (Open a file explorer window. | Run a custom command. | etc.)

LaTeX work

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out LyX.
A simplified easy to use interface to LaTeX.
What You See is What You Mean document processor.
Not as flexible as LaTeX, but a lot simpler.

No need for Linux if you don't want

[Anonymous Coward]

You could use Linux if you like, but for the things you've stated it's far from essential. Using MiKTeX for LaTeX and a frontend (there's dozens to choose from - TeXnicCenter and LEd are well regarded), and the Windows binaries for Python, you certainly do not need Linux for the things you've listed. If you do want to use Linux, use whatever distro you like the look of since they don't differ hugely for what you wanna do. Ubuntu is generally recommended for beginners.

Maybe try the Live CDs first

[bl8n8r]

A nice way to test-drive a distro before installing it. Check out distrowatch.com. Since your inclined to torment yourself with Advanced Math, you might be interested in Scientific Linux.

1) Debian == Knoppix, Ubuntu
2) Redhat == CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, Scientific Linux
3) Slackware == Slax, Vector Linux
4) SuSE == Microsoft (see: techp.org )

Re:Maybe try the Live CDs first

[gatzke]

And check out LyX for a decen LaTeX front end. Works on XP pretty well too.

kvm, Linux, and Windows

[falconwolf]

On the other hand, Windows works with my KVM switch, while Ubuntu seems to go into epileptic seizure mode upon being switched back to.

Maybe your KVM switch is an old one or there's something wrong with it (more likely maybe?). I'm typing this on a PC running Windows while I have another PC running Linspire Linux running as well and all I have to do to switch between them is "flip the switch". I haven't had a problem with either one. I got the switch about two months ago after I got the PC running Linux and my old switch didn't work. The old one I had had for about 8 years and didn't have a problem with the OSes I ran.

Falcon

Re:kvm, Linux, and Windows

[fishbowl]

>Maybe your KVM switch is an old one or there's something wrong with it (more likely maybe?).

I've seen PS2 KVM's really confuse the XFree mouse driver. When I used one, GPM with a "reconnect" setting helped, but complicated the XFree config.

Re:kvm, Linux, and Windows

[falconwolf]

>Maybe your KVM switch is an old one or there's something wrong with it (more likely maybe?).

I've seen PS2 KVM's really confuse the XFree mouse driver. When I used one, GPM with a "reconnect" setting helped, but complicated the XFree config.

I don't have enough data from a significant number of kvm switch users to know or say which experience, your's or mine, is more typical, other than I have had a bunch of people say they use one and you are the first one where I've heard of any problems. Maybe you won't have a problem with the KVM I'm using, it's an IOGear 2 port PS2 KVM switch from RadShack. And because the cables are builtin you don't need cables for each computer. The one thing I didn't like was that it's only 2 port not a four port switch, I have three PCs. Two of them are old, one is 6 or 7 years old and the other is 9. Because they are old I've been thinking about either making them donaterware and give them to some organization that can use them or let someone at Freecycle take them.

Falcon

Re:Virtualization (IS EASY AND RECOMMENDED)

[Overzeetop]

I can tell that most of those words in your post must mean something because they seem to make sense, in a sentence construction sort of way. But I'll be honest that my eyes just glazed over when I hit by changing your repositories in the Synaptic upgrade tool from Dapper to Edgy. It didn't get much better after that.

This is a big problem for those that may not have oodles of free time; maybe the OP does. I have tried (and, I admit) given up on several packages, including RedHat (before the break), Ubuntu and Knoppix (both LiveCDs, admittedly), and Slackware.

What I've learned in the process is that
    1. I don't run much server stuff.
    2. I can't afford te time to "mess" at the office - real work still has to get done
    3. Everything at home is multimedia, and practically no server stuff exists
    4. Server stuff at home is so simple that peer shares are more than adequate
    5. There's nothing _I_ do that requires the "cool" stuff in linux, unless you count TiVo hacking, and I don't do enough to justify a whole box
    6. There is just too much technical software in my field (structural engineering) for Win only

I will happily admit that when I have to mess with my TiVo I get my nipples get hard when I work from the command line in a telnet session. There's just something "right" and "pure" about it that takes me back to my roots. But I've learned the dirty little secret of MS, which is not really a secret to anyone. Using MS day in and day out, you pick up the OS operations and gather your personal favorite apps - and how to use them - in the course of business. At nearly 40, I've got well over 25 years of tweaks and standards and process and training built up. Even worse, it's been 10-15 years since I've really had the free time to play with OS components and know the ins and outs. I came of age before the internet "existed" - and there has been so much that has gone by since that gaining a comfort level in a new OS is truly a daunting task. Gaining that knowledge without a manual is even worse. In defense of Linux, I would be loathe to switch to MS if it weren't my current platform of comfort, and OSX, I'm certain, would be little better.

Anyway, for good or ill, it's posts like your that remind me just how much I'd have to learn to switch. Maybe most people aren't as bubsy as I am, but I'm not sure where I'd find the time to learn everything I would need to to be comfortable, much less "productive".

Re:FLAMEWAR FLAMEBAIT

[louden obscure]

Linux, use whatever the heck you want.
that would make a great marketing slogan, if there was a marketing department.

XPressLinux

[mike3k]

I'm developing a Kubuntu-based distro, XPresslinux, designed for Windows switchers. We pre-install WINE, VLC Media Player, Firefox with MPlayer plugin, and Java (free GCJ), so users can play most common media files and run many Windows applications. OpenOffice, which is included in Kubuntu, already takes care of MS Office documents.

Let me guess

[idonthack]

Gentoo?

Re:Let me guess

[FunkyELF]

I'm a Gentoo user and its sad to say that I can't argue with that. Until recently when Gentoo's install CDs started coming with a live environment I always used another computer to set up. With that said, I'm very pleased w/ Gentoo and I use it on 3 machines at home and I'm planning on rotating some machines around and using Gentoo on the new ones too.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo is set up and maintained easily, if you know what you are doing.
However, compiling takes some time...
I use Gentoo with all my favorite hardware.
The hardware I don't use or care is driven by Ubuntu.

Mandriva, (K)Ubuntu

[3vi1]

I've tried four or five distros myself, on multiple occassions. Mandriva and K/Ubuntu tend to have the most success discovering all the system components. That is, of course, not including Knoppix.

I wouldn't recommend Knoppix for your situation, although it's definitely worth keeping on a thumbdrive as a recovery tool. Knoppix is Debian based, like Ubuntu, so it really doesn't give you much advantage and is missing the K/Ubuntu system administration tools.

Mandriva (previously Mandrake) had the easiest to use system tools back when I was using it. It made most things very easy. Still, don't expect to not be editing system config files in a text editor and learning the hard way the first time you mess up a bleeding edge video driver upgrade ... as with any Linux distro if you're not using pre-built packages for everything.

Mandriva was not keeping up with their 64-bit versions in a timely matter, so I moved to Kubuntu back when dapper was coming out of beta. I chose that version because I prefer the KDE desktop over Gnome, but you could go with Ubuntu just as well (Gnome may be the easier desktop to step into cold). You can always install the KDE packages later too, if you change your mind.

I'm very happy with Kubuntu - especially the pace at which it and the other Ubuntu distros are evolving.

What I recommend is to download every live CD you can find: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mandriva, Suse, Fedora, etc... and see what works best for you and with your hardware. See how the packaging systems of each work and find out what the main differences are between the ones to which you narrow the field.

-J

Re:Virtualization (IS EASY AND RECOMMENDED)

[dilute]

So don't read it - the details are not that important. The slightly older Ubuntu-Dapper image you can get off VMTN is more than good enough to get going.

All you need to do is download VMWare Player from www.vmware.com, and download a Linux image of your choice, and should be good to go.

dual boot Linux and Windows

[falconwolf]

I'd try to avoid the dual-boot solution for the reason that your best Linux reference is the internet, which no workee if your new Linux install barfs!
Being able to refer to the web while you are installing is also nice.

Unless you have two or more PCs the reasons above are exactly why you want to dualboot. If you're installing and using Linux Linux for the first and you don't have a second PC then by dualbooting you still have access to the internet, unless you trash the OS already installed, so you can try to find solutions to problems that you run into while installing Linux. Until you can competently install Linux you should duaboot.

Falcon

Re:dual boot Linux and Windows

[couchslug]

I didn't hose my mbr, but Linux forums often have tales of woe from people who cannot access their Windows install after a Linux install problem.

The ghetto method of drive isolation is to use a second hard disk for Linux, and either unplug or select a different boot order in BIOS.
Swap racks are under 20 bucks, scrounged hard drives often free, so I recommend those for someone with one desktop and a free full-height bay.

Sure, I'd be comfortable dual booting if I had to (or on a laptop) but when someone has a term paper on their Winstall they can't get to, all the explanations of Linux goodness fall on deaf ears...

Re:dual boot Linux and Windows

[dbcad7]

I agree with you that duel boot is the way to go, especially for new users., although there is also the live CD option for Internet access... In fact, I just had a friend at work who's hard drive crashed on her Windows machine. I gave her an Ubuntu CD to run until she got around to getting her new drive. This worked for her for about 2 weeks and then she brought me the box in to put in her new drive. Of course she had DSL, a modem connection "might" have worked too, but a lot of variables there that could put a kink into it. AOL dialup would not of worked.. certain modems would also be problematic. Anyway, she was happy just to be able to surf the net and check her email with the live CD. I installed duel boot XP -Ubuntu on her new drive, and she's happy. Her impression is that Linux is faster.

Re:dual boot Linux and Windows

[falconwolf]

Sure, I'd be comfortable dual booting if I had to (or on a laptop) but when someone has a term paper on their Winstall they can't get to, all the explanations of Linux goodness fall on deaf ears...

I'm tempted to say anyone who does any experimentation when they have to do a mission critical task deserves to fail unless the experiment is the task. In situations like this either they should make sure they have enough tyme to reinstall Windows and Office or whatever they're using to do the term paper if they only have one computer to use or they need to wait until the paper is finished and ready to hand in if not have already handed it in.

Falcon

Suggestion

[MBHkewl]

The first Linux distro I started with was Slackware 9.0. It took me 3 weeks to get it up & running, with the help of a lot of people from LinuxQuestions.org; But as they say: "Once a slacker, always a slacker"

I tried other distros, but none give me the freedom to manipulate my system like Slackware.

In short: If you like (not mind, but like) reading manuals and changelogs before using a new utility and program, then you'll be able to pull it off with Slackware. Otherwise, go with Kubuntu (It's Ubuntu but with KDE as its Desktop Environment instead of GNOME).

The Fedora Core project has a life cycle of 6 months and is a test ground for RedHat; What ever is new, is thrown there for tests; Once stable, it's moved to the Enterprise & Advanced server editions (not free).
And it's really sluggish and you'll face some weird conflicts with some applications.

I recommend KUbuntu, as a free distro. If you want a commercial one where support is ready for you whenever you want, go with Suze, Mandrake or Linspire.

If you'd like to work with both Linux & Windows at the same time, without rebooting each time, consider using Windows as a virtual machine (VMware).

===========

For your all-in-one needs for programming & web-design, I strongly suggest Eclipse. You can use it for Java, PHP, C++, HTML, CSS, ...etc.

Good luck.

For whom does the bell toll?

[RickRussellTX]

I've been working university computer support for a long time, and questions like this really give me hope for the eventual doom of the Microsoft hegemony. Tomorrow's decision makers are learning Linux, and MS operating systems aren't even in the decision tree. The most common question I hear from scientists and engineers these days is, "Linux or Mac?"

I recently interviewed for a support position at a major university physics department, and Windows support wasn't even a factor. They had already evolved past Microsoft products; none of the critical applications in physics were running on Windows. Their platform distribution was 60% Linux & Solaris, 30% Mac, and 10% "other", with Windows buried somewhere in the bottom 10%.

Ultimately, I suspect that Windows will be relegated to executives and administrators who must run "mission critical productivity software" (that is, Excel and Access), while the desktops in R&D, marketing, the factory floor and the retail store are all running some variant of Linux or MacOS. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft makes _any_ attempt at corrective action to slow this "brain drain" in the sciences and engineering schools.

Anyway, back on topic, I recommend Fedora. Although I use Ubuntu and find it very approachable for somebody that doesn't want to spend lots of time under the hood, the fact is that RedHat and RPM packages are sort of an industry baseline for math, science and engineering. You'll find most big open source projects are precompiled for RedHat, while Ubuntu will be stuck with some old version out in the Debian Multiverse or worse, you'll have no choice but to compile it yourself.

Rick R.

Its not worth it

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are already running windows (i.e. paid for it) there is no reason to run linux. Every useful utility for math (Mathematica, python, tex) or really just about any useful utility period is available for windows. There are many pieces of software and hardware that only work on windows, and despite what people say there is no distribution which does not require extensive use of the command line and arcane knowledge of the way linux is configured. This includes distributions such as Ubuntu/Fedora, which require 20 minutes of googling, enabling non-free distros, and loading packages to enable mp3/video playback for example. And after all this you'll upgrade your packages one day to find that X crashes or some such thing. This is really not meant to be a flame linux is free and its great if you really like interacting via a command line, and scripts. In that regard it crushes windows, and it can run (with certain distros/configs) on old hardware nicely. Much of the software (especially servers and programming languages) are centralized in a convenient way. However nearly every utility/program is available on windows and its not worth dual booting unless you just want to play with linux, which is fine. If that is the case just install a distro every 2 weeks and fool around that's the most fun part anyway.

Re:Its not worth it

[fishbowl]

>If you are already running windows (i.e. paid for it) there is no reason to run linux.

I have reasons. One of those reasons is that I prefer to use the framebuffer console, at least on my hardware, over any other console environment I have ever used -- and I cannot duplicate this in Windows. I'm not interested in hearing about how I can "almost" do the same thing in rxvt or whatever, because it simply is not true.

Other reasons involve the easy availability of many types of software that either require work to put on Windows, or else, Windows versions are not as well-developed as linux versions.

Given the choice, I want to have a linux box as my primary desktop, I like for it to be bootable into Windows, and I also like to have a VMWare license. Along with this, I like having a Windows XP notebook, or these days, my Macbook. The main aggravations with Linux have been the inability to send faxes (I've never had a built-in modem with linux support, and I totally refuse to buy one just for this, and even more totally refuse to carry one around while travelling), and also, I find it to be a bit more pleasant when dealing with stuff like hotel Wi-Fi.

So basically, I need my Linux box (might literally kill you if you try to take it away), but I also need a mainstream machine; preferably a portable one, preferably a Mac notebook.

new pcs

[falconwolf]

Yesterday was Xmas. A whole lot of n00bs just got computers. How many have Linux? I would guess none. Someone used to Windows would be lost with any version of Linux, except maybe Linspire with Click and Run, as soon as they tried to install new software. They would then be berated as idiots if they went online looking for help.

One problem in getting more people to use Linux is that most PCs don't come with Linux preinstalled. If a person looks they can find some, about 3 months ago I bought one. For a newbie one with Lispire preinstalled is a good choice, that's what was installed on the PC I got. And with CNR, Click-N-Run, it's easy to install software from the CNR Warehouse, that is as long as you have broadband access to the internet.

Falcon

dualbooting

[falconwolf]

Why dual boot? It seems so inconvenient to me. Perhaps virtualization would be better?

Why dualboot? One reason is that unless you screwup Windows when installing Linux you still have access to the internet in case installing Linux goes wrong. Dualbooting also gives you an opportunity to tryout Linux without getting rid of the OS you're currently using. Virtualization is only good after you've got Linux installed and working.

Falcon

here ya go

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

http://www.newegg.com/

http://www.tigerdirect.com/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/

A few reservations about Ubuntu

[shanen]

My recent Linux experience has been Ubuntu and Fedora, but currently I'm only using Ubuntu. Mostly Edgy Eft, but one machine still has Dapper Drake on it.

The main problem I've run into in all of the Linux environments has been enabling the Japanese input modes. It has always been possible, but it rarely works right out of the box. This is obviously a big problem if you need to work with Japanese, and it's the main area where the Ubuntu experience comes up short of the Windows experience for general users.

Other than that, I'd say that Ubuntu is delivering about 85% of the real-world functionality of Windows, and Fedora was a little below that. Of course, that's a very subjective evaluation, but it addresses the main goal of the Ubuntu project. (I don't know so much about Fedora, and only used it for a few weeks.) The de facto Microsoft monopoly on office data files continues to be my main hindrance to abandoning Windows. Another significant problem is with Microsoft's cursed DRM (which is being used by many websites).

My other ongoing problem has been disk space. Ubuntu says you can live with a few GBs, but I don't recommend going below 4 GB for the Ubuntu partition, and I don't think I'll do any future machines with less than 5 GBs.

One concern about Ubuntu is that I think the new Edgy Eft isn't as good as the Dapper Drake. They need to make sure that they are getting better and better, not just being different on an arbitrary schedule. All in all, I think it was mostly a mistake for me to go to Edgy Eft so soon. Not enough of a hassle to justify the hassle of downgrading any of the machines, but...

Best Distro?

[cbolton]

I am not an admin, just an average home user. I started using Linux years ago and I still use a dual boot system (MS & GNU Linux). I started out using Red Hat 5.1 up to....(Fedora), Liked it. Tried SuSe(a few times), liked it. Tried Mandrake(a few times), liked it. Tried Debian (a few times), liked it. Tried Ubuntu (a few times), liked it. Tried BSD, missed Linux. Tried Solaris, missed Linux. Tried Mandriva, not impressed. Currently use Freespire, like it but, will probably go back to Ubuntu, or Kubuntu. I installed Mandrake on my 78 year old Mothers computer 3 years ago and she will not boot to MS ever (her choice). I got tired of viruses and she did also. Installs are now easy and Linux detects most hardware. It's nice to use a computer instead of fixing it.

A journey home begins with a single step

[tbg58]

It's been about two years ago now that I embarked on a similar journey to your own. I wanted to find a good Linux distribution that met several criteria:
1. An installation routine that would allow me to dual-boot with Windows easily. My wife still uses Windows and is not yet ready for the transition, and since I earn my daily bread as a Windows sysadmin, I still need to keep it around for some of the things in my job.
2. A community which would be as newbie-friendly as the distribution itself. In the past I had bad experiences with some Linux experts who thought that Linux was, and should remain, the exclusive province of uber-geeks. In non-newbie-friendly support community forums, one may post a question, no matter how well formulated, and one of these fellows will offer helpful replies such as, "what a n00b- if you can't read the man pages, maybe you should go back to window$ or get a commodore64."
3. A reasonably good set of apps and tools built into the distro do to the things I need to do, and a reasonably good package manager to add new apps.
I loaded Mandrake (just prior to the change to Mandriva), looked at Suse, and Fedora. All of them met criteria 1 and 3, though correspondence to criteria 2 was a bit spotty. At that time I heard about a new distribution that was gaining a lot of popularity that had an African-sounding name: Ubuntu. I downloaded the then-current version, and loaded it with no problems. The forum users were hospitable and winsome, and welcomed me home to the distro, and the community tries to live up to the ethos of the word Ubuntu, which is used in several southern African languages, and means something like compassion for fellow human beings (very loosely paraphrased.) Where my previous experiences had been technically adequate and interesting, Ubuntu felt like coming home.
Since one of the reasons I was loading Linux was to join the free software community, I also decided that I would limit myself to obtaining whatever manuals and documentation I could also find that was free and open, in the same spirit of the Free Software Community, and here are some links that I think you'll find helpful:
The first stop on your documentation journey outside of the forums of your chosen distribution and the help guides and wikis therein should be the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.tldp.org/
Full length guides are here: http://www.tldp.org/guides.html Especially helpful to me were Machtelt Garrels Introduction to Linux: A Hands-On Guide and his Bash Guide for Beginners, but all the docs here are worthwhile, freely downloadable and printable.
Another good guide is RUTE: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition Very well written and thorough. The author writes, "You can find out what book a person needs by asking the question, "Do you want to be a Muggle or a Wizard?" (1) If they answer "Wizard", then you give them Rute. (2) If they answer "Muggle", then you give them "Linux for Dummies." (3) If they answer "What's a Muggle?", then you give them "Harry Potter". I had just finished reading the first few Harry Potter books to my kids, and so this tickled me. RUTE is a great starter manual: http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html
Bruce Perens is one of the brighter stars in the firmament of the Free Software movement, and his publisher, Prentiss Hall, has a number of books in the Bruce Perens Series available in PDF format for download here: http://www.phptr.com/promotions/promotion.asp?prom o=1484&redir=1&rl=1
No list would be complete without including the O'Reilly Open Book page. This page includes books such as the Linux Network Administrator's Guide, but also some books on the history and philosophy of the Free Software movement such as Eric S. Reymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Which KB/Mouse?

[B4RSK]

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro, my first Mac in 15 years.

I'd really like to hear which keyboard and mouse you are using and what you think of them.

Thanks in advance! :)

Re:Which KB/Mouse?

[boner]

Logitech Cordless Desktop Pro (USB)

Bluetooth Ergonomic keyboards are not in ready supply, so I stick with USB.

When I travel and can't bring the keyboard along I use a Macally BTmouse (bluetooth) works like a charm.

KILE!

[log2.0]

I have been doing a PhD in Maths for almost 3 years (should finish in March....in theory). Anyway, I use Kile on a Gnome desktop and its the best latex setup ive ever seen. It has forward and backward searching with KDVI. I have a dual monitor setup so that my tex is on the left and dvi preview on the right. I would say it has saved me months of time compared to the losers using winedt ;) As for distro, Ubuntu is ok for a beginner but I use Gentoo....whatever, it doesnt really matter that much.

Gentoo + Ubuntu

[Laebshade]

Put Ubuntu on your new computer, and Gentoo on your old one. Make the Ubuntu your desktop and the Gentoo one a server. Install whatever you want except any GUI components (using Gentoo on a modern desktop is a headache). I use a similar setup here, except I have Vista on my desktop (and yes, I did setup Gentoo on my server). The Gentoo will give you an outlet to learn about linux without screwing up your desktop (and also forcing you to learn a CLI). You can even get a stage4 backup cron setup (after you learn how) so if you hose your server you can always restore it.

Re:Gentoo + Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

You got modded down, by me with an "overrated", but I have to tell you why you got modded down.

He asked for a newbie setup.

You gave him an expert setup. He's supposed to buy another computer for this, so he can watch Gentoo churn away compiling programs? For what?

Other people came up with far more valid answers, like suggesting that he use a live DVD distribution such as Knoppix or ZipSlack which uses umsdos for people who don't want to repartition their hard drives.

Gentoo is _never_ for newbie users. Indeed, in many cases, it's not for experts either. Gentoo serves as a tool for building custom setups and as a learning tool. That's it. Outside of that, you're talking about the people who are the equivalent of Ricers that think the Type-R sticker makes you go faster.

So you didn't get modded troll, because you weren't trolling, but if there was a "dumbass" moderation, you would have received it. Since Slashdot doesn't have one, you got "overrated".

Have a nice day, and pay attention next time.

Re:Gentoo + Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Start with Ubuntu to get you up and running. The consensus seems to be that they're the easiest to get started with off the bat. Once you're a little comfortable in the Linux world, and you have an extra box to play with, try putting Gentoo on it. The Gentoo install forces you to get to know some of the gritty details of the Linux system, and the installation guide does a great job of walking you through it. You'll learn a lot of useful stuff that you can later use to troubleshoot, upgrade, or customize your other system.

Worked for me.

NOT a Mac

[JoeCommodore]

If you want to learn Linux and not Fink or whatever bottleneck app you need to run to get your Linux stuff working don't get a MAc. While OSX is all nice and fluffy trying to get stuff running on Macs via X11 w/fink or whatever will add a whole new level of frustration.

Go with Linux, Ubuntu is nice, Centos is good too. (If you don't have high speed internet, go with something that has all the whistles pre-loaded on a CD/DVD like the retail SuSE, as you won't have to wait and download all the goodies.)

Get some books, I reccomend the older "Red Hat Linux Bible" for its completeness of covering wall that is GNU/Linux is in general (regardless of distro) as well as grab more in depth tomes on getting skilled in specific areas (especially for programming,) do browse your bookstore and peersonally check out the books for yourself, some are real dogs. Get used to using Google, google groups and hearing a lot of "Read the ####ing Manual" as you start, it's not really hard, just different.

As for hardware get something Intel/AMD with at least a Ghz of speed (I would not worry about 64 bits if you can't afford it right off, the support of 64 bit apps is still a bit behind 32) and at least 512 MB RAM, Nvidia Cards have some of the best performance for low prices and are not hard to configure, some ATI cards super right out of the box (careful on many other manufacturers video cards your experience may be really bad when starting with the wrong video card). A really good keyboard and mouse are helpful too (
lots more typing in Linux).

An external drive for backups is a nice thing, and if you are dual booting consider getting a second hard drive for Linux to live on (so you don't have to futz with Windows repartitioning).

SLED - Novell Linux Enterprise Desktop

[FlyingGuy]

This is SUSE

It comes in the box or downloadable from Novell SLED

$50.00 Gets you a year of updates, patches etc. This also includes phone support for install.

As to hardware... As others have said, RAM is the biggest issue, get as much as your budget allows. Make sure the video card you get has linux drivers as well as the mulit-media system.

The install is pretty painless and the defaults are pretty solid and have security uppermost in the priority list.

OS

[firesquirt]

I recommend trying MEPIS Linux it is based on UBUNU but with the KDE desktop, as a windows user you will find it comfortable and easy to manage. Yes it duel boots as with several distros, you can run it from CD or DVD before installing it on your system which is easy in of itself. Using synaptic you will be able to install vi; MEPIS comes with OpenOffice.org already installed which has the application MATH for advanced mathematics. as well as several applications for programing and compiling software etc. UBUNTU is great but you may have trouble with the Gnome desktop manager.

Same answer as always

[houghi]

Buy an average machine with not all the latest hardware. The OS is Linux, but I asume you mean distribution.

That one is easy to answer as well. Use the one that the person uses that you will ask your questions. Basicaly once installed all distributions can do the same thing.

I personaly use SUSE becase of its ease of installation and completeness of packages. Others will use something else for their own reasons. It is as if asking what the best car for a person is.

Get a 'puter with Linux pre-installed.

[chris_sawtell]

By buying one from somewhere such as these folks:- http://system76.com/ They offer Ubuntu, but if after using that particular distribution you want to try another one you will _know_ that all the hardware works properly with Linux. For a hassle free Linux experience, that's the secret of it. IBM ThinkPads also run Linux very well indeed. Now you should get the distribution your favourite helper uses. I installed Gentoo on a ThinkPad belonging to a friend of mine who, as far as computing goes, is a compleat nitwit. Gentoo lasted longer than than any other distribution before he needed a sky-hook to pull him out of the deep, um, quicksands. However I do not recommend it for total beginners unless they have competent helpers to get them going, because the installation can be a bit of a baptism of fire.

For your publishing activities, you might like to install both Scribus and LyX in addition to the TeX and LaTeX you mention.

While the suggestion to buy a Mac is marked 'Funny', and was, I'm sure, intended to be such, it's actually not such a silly suggestion because Macs do run Linux very well, and if you find you don't like Linux, which while being superbly user friendly, it does tend to be somewhat pickey about the friendships it makes. If you and Linux just do not get on, you still have a very good piece of hardware and software in your possession. Macs will also run the software I have mentioned using the X-11 server from either Apple or Fink. That's in addition to all the proprietary software offered by Apple and their ISVs.

Get Slak

[PenGun]

Then learn

Best/easiest Linux

[ismism]

Ubuntu, hands down. You can get under the hood as much or as little as you want and both are much easier than Red Hat and I would guess other distros.

Re:I concur.

[wwwillem]

Fedora rocks in may ways but is highly unstable

An option nobody mentioned so far is to go with one of the RedHat Enterprise Linux clones, like Scientific Linux, CentOS, etc. Maybe not the most cutting edge, but definitely stable as a rock. Hey, CERN runs on it, doesn't that tell you something? And if you hate the default Gnome (I don't), you simply switch to KDE when installing.

software recommendations

[zippthorne]

Well you're probably covered with distribution advice, I'll just recommend heartily that if you're going to be doing a lot of LaTeX , You should get a nice gui front-end to take care of the mindless task of tag insertion.

LyX simplifies things to such a degree that it's almost not worth editing LaTeX files by hand anymore. It's just so much more convenient, and has the most efficient and stable equation editing environment I have seen. The only downside is the danger that you'll forget LaTeX markup or never learn it.

Whatever distribution you choose should have a fairly recent version of it in one of its repositories. There is a windows version out if you have a LaTeX installed already(miktex for instance) and want to try it.

MINT: Ubuntu killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Version 2.1 "Bea" just released. I say it's an Ubuntu killer only because it *is* Ubuntu--but with blue artwork (rather than loose-stool orange); latest apps (FF 2.0, OOo 2.1, etc.); "dirty" codecs for commercial DVD playback, MP3, DIVX, Flash, Quicktime, Real, etc; extra repositories; all the stuff you end up doing to Ubuntu anyway. A real "Bea-uty!" :D LiveCD/installer just like Ubuntu. You will love it unless you're a "freedom" extremist.

coupla thoughts....

[Sfing_ter]

Test your hardware first with a boot cd:
Try slax; ubuntu; kubuntu; mandriva-move; free-spire; vector; knoppix;

1) maximum out of the box windows compat: xandros
2) good capabilities on older hardware: vector, slax
3) debian based distros - (ubuntu; kubuntu; freespire; knoppix; xandros), I cannot say enough about apt; it rocks; it works: updating or installing on bleeding edge unstable it sometimes has issues but is mostly rocksolid.
4) Realize that you are using an os that is ideologically against proprietary software/codecs and on some of them you will need to take extra steps to play mp3s, wmvs et. al.
5) do not play the comparison game. the os' are different and approach the same ideas from different angles. In linux you don't need to login as root/admin in order to install software etc. that is what the 'su' (superuser) command is for.
6) create a seperate partition for the /home; the reason is, that no matter what distro you use, you can use your same data folders without having to tweak things to find your data :)
7) make sure you use the ext3 file system to create your home partition as that will be mountable from windows (since you will be dual booting)
8) programs that are not os critical can be installed into your user folder; I like to keep more recent versions of azureus, sun java, firefox and tbird than most distro's have time to get to so I install from the software creators sites to my home folder and then when I need the latest version i just update them no need to su or anything.
9) when you do find something that is working, stay with it for a while, and don't listen to the "but x distro can do this!!!" there is a tendency to play with all the "new" distros/versions but if you need the machine for day to day work keep it stable and keep it simple.
10) no matter which decision you make it will be right/wrong depending on who you talk to, so go have fun.

Commander Data - Engage Flame Drive!!!

you should use

[Syber Phreak]

well so far alot have said Ubuntu, why not to Linspire or Freespire, its great for new people. Im getting it cause im still trying to get used to linux, ive used Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu, and Suse 9.1-10.0 and im still not good with it.

your wish

[zogger]

http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/torrents/Zod-live cd-1-i386.torrent

Re:your wish

[smilindog2000]

Very nice, but there are additional reasons I recommend Ubuntu over Fedora for newbie home-users. Fedora tends to be less stable, and average unskilled computer users will take their computer back to Best-Buy to have Windows reinstalled if they run into any problems. Most of the Linux-savy guys where I work run Fedora, and for good reasons. In particular, it's nice to be mostly compatible with RedHat, since Enterprise is so pervasive in business use.

Obviously, we'd need more info about the user to make the best call. That's one of the cool things about Linux. It's kind of like Starbucks... I can have my Vente Skim Latte with stiff foam and a shot of vanilla.

Re:I concur.

[Chandon Seldon]

I always *consider* recommending Debian, and then recommend Ubuntu instead. There's really no advantage to desktop Debian over desktop Ubuntu, and with Ubuntu they're 90% less likely to call me and ask stupid questions about getting their wireless network card working... it'll usually just work out of the box.

Notice

[cool_arrow]

I just reported this thread to The Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Dead Horses.

Re:I concur.

[smilindog2000]

I agree with your point of view, and I use and recommend Debian over Ubuntu on servers, for example, or for guys who are going to make solid use of apt-get or do lots of open-source development. However, the post seems to be asking what's good for a typical Windows user, new to Linux. I feel this has been Ubuntu's monomaniacal focus, and that they edge out a slight advantage over Debian. All the Debian based distros are very similar, and the really good work is done in Debian. However, the additional contribution made on top of Debian helps focus it for particular applications. I find Ubuntu less frightening to Windows users, partly because of the live-CD, partly because of the pretty picture on boot, etc. Frankly, I wish the distro would smile at users, like the old Macs use to do. The other interesting area Ubuntu seems to be going after is users who want a company they can call at when things don't work. While I can get excellent Debian support, there's not a single company that I can point to as the default go-to-guy. I know it would turn off us open-source guys, but I think it would be wise to advertise Canonical's phone number and web site during the install for anyone who feels they want to pay a few bucks to figure out how to log-in and start Firefox.

Prior to Suse going evil, I would have strongly considered Suse for newbie Linux users. I have a Windows sys-admin friend who recently told me he felt Suse was the best distro for those comfortable with administration of Windows servers. He says it tries harder than the others to look and feel more like Windows. It's a huge shame they decided to turn-off the open-source community, but on the bright side, it's one less distro for us all to waste our time on. Well before Ubuntu came along, we already had waaaay too many distros. Of course, it might be fun creating one, and I'm a pretty good hacker... maybe I'll cone Debian and call it Bill-ian ;-)

Linux is not for you

[harmless_mammal]

If you are doing advanced work in math, you have no business learning how to maintain a Linux system. This will distract you from your studies and research. The only reason a math major should learn Linux is if they plan to fail as a mathematician and need a second career option. But who am I to talk, I failed as a physicist and have been a sys-admin for 20 years... :-)

Buy a Macintosh. Everything you want to do in Python is possible on the Macintosh.

Buy Textures. This is a commercial TeX/LaTeX system for the Macintosh published by Blue Sky TeX Systems. It costs money but is worth every penny. There is student pricing. I have used it since 1987.

Focus, dammit!

Re:I concur.

[smilindog2000]

Good call, but why not just recommend RedHat Enterprise? Also stable, and it gives newbies a warm fuzzy feeling to pay $150/year for free software and poor support :-)

My own feeling is that RedHat has always pushed an expert interface for IT professionals, rather than dumbing it down for Windows newbies, but if you're talking about a newbie who is installing it at work, sure RedHat (or Derivative) is natural. Again, Suse was also natural here, until it went evil. I recommended RedHat Enterprise just two weeks ago to a client that has difficulty making decisions in the Linux area.

But for home use, I still push average unskilled computer users to Ubuntu.

Buy a Mac

[thatjavaguy]

I just converted from a Windows machine to a Mac. I bought Parallels and run Windows in a VM. If you have speed problems run Windows in Boot Camp.
The latest beta from Parallels offers great speed improvements. You can run Linux in a VM too.

If you need to stick with a Windows machine because of cost try using VMWare (they do a free version) to run Linux. Dual booting is crazy these days when you can choose whatever distro you want and have it running in a VM. Speed is very very good.

Sailing in the same boat.

[Ramesh Bhaskar]

I'm planning to switch over myself. I've used Slackware in the past and am very impressed by the amount you would learn in trying to tune the system to your needs. However I also took a look at Ubuntu and noticed that it is a clean out-of-the-box solution. My plan is to go with Ubuntu first, and as and when I get more comfortable with Linux, switch to a system wherein I have more control by prodding around.

90% of a good distro is in it's community

[delire]

90% of a good distro is in it's community, in the knowledge base it produces and maintains. No matter how technically good a distro is, it's less useful if there isn't documentation in your language, if a bug isn't noticed by a user, the forums aren't lively, or if people aren't packaging for your distro because no-one's using it - if it doesn't attract developers +/or package maintaners for all these reasons.

For this reason Ubuntu is the winner, hands down, despite being extremely sensibly put together. I'm a Debian user but would never suggest it as a starting distro for a newbie. I have pointed many people at Ubuntu that have very little computer experience, with great success. Some of these people have been running Ubuntu exclusively for over a year now.

Re:I concur.

[UED]

Ubuntu is great for newbies. The best thing about it is the community. openSUSE used to be my favorite. Why did they ruin it?

Decent article here...

[rantingkitten]

This article explains why Ubuntu is ideal for new users, using criteria that users actually care about, instead of the usual holy wars surrounding distro of choice discussions amongst geeks. Check it out.

OK, how does he dual boot that?

[jotaeleemeese]

Inquiring minds want to know.

Unless you think an additional computer is just a small inconvenience....

Re:OK, how does he dual boot that?

[Bastian]

Macs can dual boot OS X and Windows with Boot Camp.

And yes, buying a new computer does cost money. That would admittedly be very prohibitive for me. But I don't know if that's the same case for anyone else around here.

You are a mean bastard.

[jotaeleemeese]

http://www.debianadmin.com/playing-encrypted-dvds- in-ubuntu.html

it took me 30 seconds to find that.

I second this.

[Dr_Barnowl]

I chose Gentoo in the first instance because it was the only distro I could get my TV server hardware working properly on ; but having played with SuSe, Ubuntu and Mandrake in the process I would probably still choose Gentoo, because Gentoo has taught me so much about Linux. At the time I first used it you were required to dive under the bonnet and get your hands dirty with a text editor and the command line, although I gather this has become rather easier in recent times.

Usability is another question - I still can't find the GUI to change the screen resolution in KDE or Gnome. Such a simple setting should not have an experienced user and programmer hunting and cursing for up to an hour before giving up entirely and just changing the text file. My TV server has forsaken any kind of window manager altogether - it just uses a raw X server to run MythTV under and that's all I need.

the ideal linux system...

[Anonymous Coward]

is one that doesn't exists.

Pre-installed

[pedestrian crossing]

The ideal solution for a newbie comes pre-installed.

Absolutely.

The whole difficulty with Linux is getting it set up and working. This is where Linux's reputation for "requiring a PhD in computer science" comes from.

From what I've seen, once the system is up and configured, it's pretty easy for just about anyone to use.

I would say that there is an advantage to something like Debian, where the concept is to get -all- software from a central repository. I think a lot of "dependency hell" comes from getting your programs from all over the place, instead of one consistant repository.

That said, I think a live distribution (ala Knoppix) is a good start for the newbie, as long as they don't want to install anything else.

Re:Virtualization (IS EASY AND RECOMMENDED)

[Hobbex]

But I'll be honest that my eyes just glazed over when I hit by changing your repositories in the Synaptic upgrade tool from Dapper to Edgy. It didn't get much better after that.

I think a bigger problem is that of misinformation. In fact, changing the repositories is the absolutely wrong way to upgrade Ubuntu - there is a program called update-manager which will handle the process correctly, and as it happens, yes it has a GUI.

Don't you feel a little silly about your long rant now?

Ideal, it depends on the experience of the user

[rkollman]

I myself prefer Slackware as a Linux, but for inexperienced users I installed both Ubuntu and Red Hat Fedora Core.
Out of the box both of these systems work fairly well, maybe Ubuntu works even more easy considering dependencies and already default (out of the box) known software repositories.

It's really about those software repositories. In-experienced users (or users who don't want to be bothered with repositories) want to have those repositories setup for them and just point-and-click the software they want to use.

My girlfriend (inexperienced with Unix/Linux, but experienced with office applications) now users OSX, but also Ubuntu worked quite well for her.

Many options

[extern_void]

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

Before you decide take a look at the following links:

Slackware
Debian
Ubuntu
Gentoo

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

Keep It Simple Stranger

[tashammer]

Have you thought about making lists. Switch on the iPod and listen to some algorithms. (Little computer joke there kids). List 1 would have the software you absolutely need to run (i noted that you had needs for higher math). List 2 would contain software you would like to have. List 3 would have a little fun stuff to play with e.g. tensor math puzzles and games. Costs. Make a list of all the possibles suggested, perhaps start with Ubuntoo, Slackware, Suse, SimplyMepis. Compare with the first 3 lists.

Re: no experience

[solo6]

Stick with Windows. Desktop Linux is ridiculously lame in comparison, and Windows is compatible with almost everything.

If you are a geek, then try Linux, if you are not, then stay away from it. Why waste the time and effort to learn entirely new technology just to compensate for Linuxs' shortcomings.

Try several, and not just Linux

[jimstapleton]

Someone already mentioned using VMWare, which I'd strongly recommend. Given your background, I'd suggest you try the following initially to see what you like:

FreeBSD - Lots of "ports" (software you can install), relatively simple to use, robust and reliable, but not necessarily the most cutting edige - it sacrifices some advanced stuff for reliability and no-hassle. I use this myself, as I have had less than happy experiences with Linux. Also you can (reliably) compile apps on your system for your hardware, getting significant performance boosts. There are math and science sections in the ports tree that will probably make you happy.
Gentoo - You get a lot of control and customisation with this, much like FreeBSD, except I found it's variant of ports (portage) is not quite as reliable/robust, but it also has over 10k more packages...
Ubuntu - It simply works, until it doesn't. I've had it break when using the package update tool, and make my system unusable. Also, it's not as easy to compile-and-run like FreeBSD/Gentoo, so you won't get as much of a performance boost.
??? - There is a scientific variant of Linux, based off of Fedora I think, you might want to give that a try. I think it was mentioned here also.

It's good to try several variants, give each one 2-3 months, if possible a year. This will allow you to really see what you like. I personally (in order) did:
2-3+ years: red hat/fedora, and quit after...
6 months: FreeBSD, before trying...
4 months: ubuntu, before trying...
1 month: Gentoo...

FreeBSD caught me within two weeks. I love it, and it works quite well on my system, though it is somewhat picky on hardware, but getting better. In terms are hardware, it's got compatability to modern hardware like Linux had compatability to modern hardware (of the time) circa 2001-2002. Linux however, has made huge strides since then. FreeBSD seems to be on the upward swing with hardware right now, but still not near linux. You have to do quite a bit of reading, but the documentation is good, and the community is one of the friendliest I've dealt wtih.

Ubuntu/Kubuntu seemed nice, but didn't quite work reliably enough for me. They had small bugs, quirks and issues on my machine that didn't make me feel comfortable. There were a lot of 2D graphics artifacts on my i950 based notebook, which made me nervous as it has a shared memory arch - memory leaks in the graphics could corrupt data. Also, updating KDE (using only the stable trees) caused KDE to break on KUBuntu, giving me a royal hassle there.

Gentoo: Linux with a BSD feel. It acted a lot like BSD in terms of maintenance, and worked quite reliably. I was again hooked almost immediately. It doesn't always handle things like BSD would (FreeBSD will generate a SSL key for you, Gentoo won't). I had some troubles and could get some things to compile, which drove me nuts, though I could use similar tricks to get most stubborn packages working that I used in FreeBSD. The community was second only to FreeBSD in my experience for both friendliness and helpfulness.

Re:I concur.

[jellomizer]

Debian is too pure of GNU only system. And Not for newbies. The first problem is support.

New Users especially need a lot hand holding and explaining even ones you have experience with Computers and Non-Unix systems. The Debian user group is not at all friendly towards new users, a lot of them feel superior to an other person by making fun of their lack of knowledge they are trying to gain. Even though this person may have been a VMS expert. The CRAP about RTFM is stupid. If you don't understand the concept then you can't even look it up. If you don't understand the concept of mounting drive on the path what are you going to do? man -k d: ?

Secondly Debian does a lot of really STUPID Stuff that makes it hard for Unix and other Distro trained people, to use the system.
Apt-get yet powerful and easy to use is a different method of getting an application, most people think in terms of downloading a file and installing it. Not Install it then download it. It is an easy concept but for a new user they may not think in that approach and then they will need to go the pre-mentioned Debian User Community and get insulted.

File Locations: Repeat after me folks (even many who do make other Distributions. VAR IS NOT FOR APPLICATION-VAR IS NOT FOR WEB INFORMATION-VAR IS ONLY FOR LOGS AND SYSTEM INFORMATION. THE VAR PARTITION SHOULD BE THE SMALLEST PARTITION! and other crazy things like cgi-bin in /usr/lib? That is stupid Lib is for library files. web CGI are self executing code at worse they should be under /usr/bin/cgi-bin

Third Being GNU Pure means a lot of non-GNU (Or GNU CLose) stuff never makes it in the APT-GET program. This creates a problem because there are applications that are not GNU that people want to install. And Debian just makes that process a little bit harder because they dont like non-GPU you should count yourself lucky that you can get firefox because they trademarked their logo.

xubuntu + cygwin

[thingsidontdo]

Keep your windows desktop, install cygwin on it. Build a dead quiet system (eg VIA box) that can run 24/7 (I guess you have to sleep in the same room). Xubuntu is very good for a slow system. Play with it. It will serve you well as a web server, file server, development system, entertainment system etc. If your software runs well on this system, it will fly on a faster system :) You can control the linux system through cygwin (ssh, X) or VNC, and get the best from both worlds.

App support, long life

[PapaZit]

I doubt this'll be read by many folks (after all, the article was posted -hours- ago), but I haven't seen anyone else mention it.

I think that there are two things that should affect your decision.

The first is application support. Open Source stuff isn't a problem. You can just assume that it's available for any distro that you like. If you're going to use any commercial software, you should check with the makers of that software to see what distros they support. A lot of academic software expects Redhat Enterprise (or a clone like CentOS) or Suse.

The second thing you should consider is distro lifetime. Many linux distributions stop offering support and upgrades for old versions after a year or two. A lot of us -like- to wipe everything and reinstall, but if you're trying to get work done, it can be really annoying. There are a few distros that offer a longer support window, though. Ubuntu offers a "LTS" ("Long-Term Support") version, and Redhat (again, and clones like CentOS) offers support for their products for several years.

Re:Virtualization (IS EASY AND RECOMMENDED)

[Overzeetop]

I never feel silly for long rants. :-)

I work in a small office, and nobody else has a clue about computers. Coming from the corporate world, I'm used to having somebody else with better knowledge to collaborate with - even if it's just a peer who knows different parts of the systems better than I do. Bootstrapping is hard in a vacuum, with limited time. I'm always happy to rant about that!

VMWare, LiveCD, etc

[stalker145]

In light of the advantages of Linux and FOSS in the area of science and mathematics, I want to convert from a Windows system to a dual-boot one with Linux.

Welcome to the world of Linux.

All of the methods for testing your system with Linux have their merits, and their drawbacks. Make sure that you consider each of them, and possibly try each of them in turn.

VMWare: While this is RAM intensive and will give you a good feel of the system itself, this method is, by no means, a good way of checking to see if your existing hardware will work with the particular distro that you've chosen. VMWare uses it's own magical way of connecting the guest OS to your hardware. In other words, you are not testing your wireless, sound, or anything else. The guest is connected via software to the host, which we assume works already. Snapshotting is available so if you hose your system you can just turn back the clock without needing to reinstall.

LiveCD: This will test out all of your hardware, though this is quite possibly the most RAM-intensive of the bunch. Everything is run from RAM with the CD being accessed only for new information. There really isn't, to my knowledge, a physical swap being used. Everything runs much slower than if it was installed and all of your work is lost once the machine is rebooted. That said, there are ways of making a persistent LiveCD by either using HDD space, a rewritable CD, or a USB drive. I've personally never gotten it to work, but have heard from people that it does work nicely.

Dual booting: With this you have full access to all of your hardware. The only real drawback comes with partitioning an existing system. (1) Make sure to fully defragment your Windows drive prior to partitioning or you risk losing all of your data. (2) Make sure if you are doing two new installs (Windows and Linux) that you install Windows first since it prefers to be the only OS on your system. (3) Separate HDD's are the way to go with this method.

Separate HDD's: This one is my personal favorite. I only use my laptop if I am dual-booting so I have two separate drives that I can swap out; one with Windows and one with Linux. The only drawback to this is being unable to share info between the two. For desktops, the method is similar in that you can have two separate HDD's installed for the different OS's. As mentioned previously, be sure to install Windows first or you will be unable to boot into Linux.

All of the different distributions mentioned, and the million others that haven't, all have their uses. I would suggest that you look at the community involvement (forums, tech support, etc) that comes with each one before commiting. My distro of choice is Ubuntu 6.10 with Gnome as the Windows Manager. It works perfectly with my old Micron GX2 (1GHz, 512MB RAM, 16MB ATI Radeon) and much faster than Windows 2K that came on it originally.

Beginning Linux

[jvlb]

Try this article, it is a cogent discussion of the most approachable distros for those coming from other platforms: http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT2914026253. html

Re:Beginning Linux

[jvlb]

I should add that two newer distros offer some compelling qualities, but are relatively unknown: Sabayon Linux is based on a Gentoo core and is a very cutting edge distro, but a bit demanding on hardware and still a little rough around the edges. PCLinuxOS is also an up-and-coming competitor, based on Mandriva. (As I write this the PCLinuxOS website is down as their host deals with some preformance problems. It should be back up shortly.) Both of these distros are worthy of consideration. A consideration that the many Ubuntu enthusiasts overlook is that while Ubuntu is an excellent distro, it is probably better suited to new computer users more than to those moving from Windows. There is a paradigm shift moving to Linux that is cushioned by SimplyMEPIS, Xandros, Freespire or, to some degree, SUSE. Ubuntu makes little concession to this consideration. Bear in mind that the Debian-based distros tend to have the best and easiest to use repositories and package management software. I would suggest "test driving" the live CD's of some of these distros, then install a couple in a multiple boot arrangement. Find the one (or more) you like and keep it/them.

Non-technical users?

[ryuo]

A few months back I posted a question in a couple Linux forums to the effect that:

I can get some of my non- and semi-technical clients to install Linux on their laptops, but they'd be stopped dead by the lack of drivers for Broadcom wireless cards. Is there a distro or method that a non-techie can use?

What I got back was answers which are what I've done myself, but which would be gibberish to most non-Unix people and especially non-techies. That's extremely annoying to an open source advocate.

Last year I had a corporate client ask me if it was feasible for them to switch desktops from Windows to Linux, and I had to tell them they could not do it without doubling their IT staff. Some of that was minor but unavoidable stuff like finding OpenOffice menus, but the killer was installation woes, all of which are avoidable if we start accepting that we're no longer a club of hobbyists.

Fedora Wins For Me

[iowaporter]

I tried several, and settled on Fedora Core 6. Primarily because networking was easier. I had to add my Linux box to a Windows network and connect to a wireless hotspot for Internet. Some distros never worked. Fedora worked instantly. I like K desktop, because it has some affinities with Windows. I am running it on a leftover 766MHz machine with 512MB of RAM and a 100GB Hard Drive. I'd certainly bump up the CPU if possible. Otherwise, it does the job.

Mac OS X

[akepa]

Mac OS X is probably the ideal UNIX-based system for newbies. Linux is nice (I've tried various distros and currently use SimplyMEPIS), but I've run into too many difficulties with hardware driver support, wireless network setup, and several other issues to recommend it to anyone other than the technically savvy.

OS X

[Phred T. Magnificent]

First choice: Mac OS X, and install MacTeX.

My next choices, in order, would be FreeBSD, SimplyMEPIS and KUbuntu. Your mileage will vary, however, and you'll get different responses from pretty much everyone you ask. My neighbor who's a math professor, for instance, prefers SuSE.

Re:Gentoo - Ubuntu

[smadasam]

I don't think Gentoo is only good for servers. I use Gentoo for everything, and in fact I am using it right now as my laptop/desktop machine. Honestly it was much easier to get things like Nvidia drivers to work on Gentoo than Ubuntu. To get a desktop to work in Gentoo is actually simple: specify the drivers you want in your make.conf file, emerge gnome, and start X. You just have to follow the howto the first time. I think that picking a distro has more to do with how much you want to know about your system. If you really want to learn how your Linux box works, Gentoo is a great choice. It is a lot harder to set up in the first place, but you will learn a lot about Linux while doing it. And when things break, as the invariably do, you will actually be able to fix it. Anther great thing about Gentoo is that they have really good forums and howtos which are essential for noobs to get things started. So, if you really want to get in there and know how things work, try Gentoo or maybe Slackware. If you want an easy to install and use desktop kind of like Windows, try Ubuntu, Suse, or Fedora. These are good choices if you you don't want to know or mess with the details. Distros are more a matter of preference. Try out several and see which one "fits" the best for you. At the end of the day, they are all really the same under all those GUIs and package managers.

Agreed

[chucklinart]

Fedora works well, but the speed with which it goes from one version to the next can be a real PITA. Seems every time I get my system working the way I want it, it's time to upgrade. That being said, the upgrades are fairly painless so long as you don't skip a version (i.e., don't go straight from 3 to 5).

O/T

[Anonymous Coward]

> The United States: Democracy is our greatest export.

What a pile of shit -

a) the united states doesn't even have a democracy system in place - it has a republic - and don't try to argue about Democrat / Republican parties, etc... The system in place is a Republic.

b) Bullying other countries into running their country the way you think their country should be run is just plain despotic.

Re:O/T

[sherpajohn]

Maybe you should look into importing yourself a sense of humour?

Good point

[chucklinart]

Fedora does make networking a snap, especially with Windows networks, BUT I would be surprised if Ubuntu hadn't made some progress on that front.

gobolinux ;)

[hitmark]

while not designed to be user friendly, its so logical it may as well be user friendly.

want to see whats installed? no need for a dpgk or rpm dump, just get a tree view of the programs dir.

and it even handles install of source nicely, just aim "compile" (a script thats part of the base gobo toolkit) at the tarball. 9/10 it will compile fine, install it into the programs dir and even pull down any non-obscure libs needed, either from source or package.

the odd problem comes from hardcoded paths and similar.

ok, so it uses kde. but from my understanding this comes from gnome being haunted by lib spaghetti or whatever you want to call it.

Partitioning

[bastardblaster]

Personally, i would use fedora, or maybe ubuntu. But one important thing is going to be partitioning your drive. If you only have one hard drive, it may be a good idea to have a small system partition for windows and a small partition for linux, then a swap partition, and finally, a great big fat32 partition. "FAT32 you say?" yes. Both systems can read this partition out of the box, making for a good grey area to store data to be used by both OS's. Also, install windows first. Configuring a dual boot after windows screws everything can be a pain.

Slackware, hands down...

[petrus4]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:for Latex. - not WinEDIT

[Anonymous Coward]

dude,

you are confusing the editors.

http://www.winedt.com/about.html, it's a latex shell.

P.S.

[multimediavt]

How is a Live CD going to help the OP? He wants a distro he can install and use as a primary or secondary OS. He doesn't want to waste time trying out sixty bazillion (yeah, that's a lot!) distros on Live CDs. He wants an easy to use distro that does what he wants for the sector of work he will be engaged in. The bottom line is, any of the currently available, stable distros from Debian, Mandriva, Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu, etc. will work fine for his needs. There are no specific distros for science or research to my knowledge. If someone knows of one and can refute it, I'll be certainly happy to retract my assertion. There are two distros that are used more commonly in the science and HPC sector and they are Suse and Red Hat (Fedora). You will find a lot of science apps that are precompiled and tuned for those distros.

As a secondary concern the OP may want to evaluate the dual-boot v. virtualization options. Having used a dual-boot AND a virtualization solution in a daily work environment I can say that dual-boot is a pain in the ass! If you are inclined to PC gaming, it is a good option, but if your primary goal is to get work done on the machine it's a hideous productivity and data management nightmare and virtualization is a much better option. There are performance and device issues that may crop up in virtualization, but most VMs are peppy enough on today's hardware to overcome the performance hits. Yes, RAM is also an issue with VMs, but if you're going to be doing science and research on the machine you should already know you want a large RAM footprint to get work done.

OK so

[swisswuff]

.... stop being a newbie.

I am also using LaTeX and working with software to calculate results, and after using Macintoshes since 1985 or so, then OS X when it came out, mostly for desktop publishing and some visualisation and statistics software, I started to switch to both Windows and Linux in the recent years.

First of all, any "relevant" software on the Mac invariably runs only under X11, or is cross-platform; really, any X11 stuff is best used under Linux (much wider choice, easier installation, sturdier environment). Windows is a industry norm that we must tolerate, so there is no way of not running it even though you may wish to avoid it. Also Windows offers far too many good specific applications in order to ignore it.

Seeing as for scientific math work, OS X is nice to have (but by far not a must), but good and cheap hardware and robust 64-bit are very good options (ever tried working on your 5 GB dataset on a Mac?), Linux is by far the best option today; if anything, Windows can run under VM Ware, on a cheap PC pizza box, or as dual boot. My preference is having Windows somewhere on a small PC - more convenient and accessible than dual boot or VM Ware.

So, stop being a newbie and::

1 - first set up regular and frequent backups. Have each machine run dual harddisks that you mirror once every day, every two days or every week (depending on how much stuff you get done). Do that first, it's really important. You see why in a second.

After you did that,

2 - make sure you have more than one computer for the same job. This gives you redundancy. No computer - as you will find out eventually - will be available when you truly need it, so redundancy is required. Components INVARIABLY fail. If anything is a constant, hardware and software failure is. With regular data backup (forgot 1 already?), you will have no problems switching over to another machine once there is a slight problem on a particular machine. If your budget is X, you will buy a machine for 0.4 X, another for 0.3 X, for each one get more RAM than fast CPU speed, but read the benchmark reports for your specific applications really well. Or even better try to run your own benchmarks (floating point array math may be faster on AMD 64 bit processors than on Intels), and spend the remaining 0.3 X on backup solutions. That won't get you the fastest or latest machine but a pro setup that'll keep you trucking, and you'll be more than ready for the next step.

After you did that:

3 - The best Linux for beginners is the one that works out of the box. Since that is dependent on the type of hardware you have and since there is no way of telling ahead, there is NO way of telling which distro to get. It means that you have to try out - live CDs, or just full-on installation cycles (the latter is better). If I was you, I'd get the latest Fedora, the latest Suse and the latest Ubuntu and start testing them systematically. Remember: after step 1 you can not lose data, and after step 2 you have another machine to run mission critical stuff and check Google for Linux problems. You should take your time trying to get the best Linux system setup for your machine, but also try to find out conditions that may make it fail. Document what you did, so you will know what to do or not do later. With recent versions, the Linux distributions that I mentioned seem to be really easy and straightforward to set up. I would not trust a system setup that I had no chance of giving full load tests, tweak tests, for about a week or so, and that I did not have a chance to re-install for at least two or three times over, with different options, some may be risky.

You may only have the capacity to really evaluate Linux if you have a separate machine to test it and install it on - which is required to get it to run real sturdy, and that requires you being proficient. Dual boot is not bad, if you don't require lots of harddisk space; but being able to spend longer time on a learning curve helps you getting the hang of things rather

You forgot two things..

[cheros]

I loved your article - I've been messing with PCs systems since DoubleDOS and have been using Linux since Slackware came on floppies (remember those? :-) so been there, done that. I hate working on Windows - especially when you have to change out a motherboard..

Two things I'd suggest you add (IMHO, of course):

(1) You can try before you 'buy', well, install. Demonstrating Windows is a destructive activity. A demo of whatever distro you fancy is quite easy these days: get a LiveCD version. Ubuntu is that by default. You only discount the speed, but a LiveCD will allow you to work out if you like a distro and, most importantly, if it will work with your hardware. It's also an excellent rescue tool - NTFS has an ugly corruption habit, and my experience is that Linux can still grab files from an NTFS partition long after Windows has give up on it (and 'repairs' the disk which is the best way to zap whatever is left).

(2) You can copy it and share it with friends. There's no reason why end users cannot become ambassadors too..

As I said, excellent article!

Fedora isn't unstable

[bill_mcgonigle]

Fedora rocks in may ways but is highly unstable

No it's not, unless you happen to rush out and install it the day it's released. Give it a month to get out of its 'public-beta' period (calling a spade a spade) and it's quite good.

I've been running Fedora releases that way since FC1 and never found one to be "highly unstable".

Don't FUD linux distros - it's way uncool.

What's the most standard distro?

[serutan]

I've personally tried Mandrake, MEPIS, and most recently Debian. I found Debian easy to install, but as with MEPIS (though to a lesser extent) I am frustrated by things being missing or being in non-standard locations. The "command not found" message gets old fast, and so does looking for config files that aren't where all the how-to's assume they are. So one thing that I think would help a total Linux newbie is to know which distros are the most standard in terms of how they are laid out. Which ones give you the best chance of trying something from a web article and having it work as read?

/. Needs Polls

[cjb110]

Slashdot need's polls for questions like this...
reading through the replies, and most of them are bashing each other, not really useful!

Heh heh

[Slashdot Parent]

Saw that one coming from a mile away.

So true. So true.

Re:I concur.

[laptop006]

No, it follows the FHS not it's own things. Take a look at the wikipedia entry.

It's just that Debian are more anal about following it then most other distros (Ubuntu also inherits this). Debian's strong policy is one of the things which makes Debian so much more maintainable then almost anything else.

Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the Christmas break, I gave my mom the Gentoo 2006.1 x86 Live CD that I had been using to run memtest86 on some of her old computers, and she got it setup all on her own. She said the first time she tried installing it failed, and then she went back and actually read the instructions, and it installed without a problem. She's using it on an old P3 400, so not the fastest machine, but it's working well for her.

Get Linux for Dummys

[El_Oscuro]

Get Linux for Dummys

In addition to a good book on desktop Linux, it comes with a DVD with 7 distros. The DVD also has a bootable Knoppix distro, so you can try it on your computer without installing anything.

I currently use SUSE, which comes with Open Office and a ton of other applications on the DVD. Its YAST tool is the equivilent of Windows Control panel, and is about as easy to use.

I have not used Ubuntu, but from other posts it sounds like it is worth trying.

I have also used Linspire which also has a large library of software, like Ubuntu. It can be bought preinstalled on a computer from Fryes, Walmart, Microcenter and other places. Most of these systems cost about $200-$300 dollars. If you do buy one of these preinstalled systems, make sure you upgrade the memory to at least 512m.

I have found the installation of these distros on a bare-bones system to be easier than Windows, and it has never taken more than about 1/2 hour with any of them. In most cases, hardware (sound cards, network cards, cameras, etc) is recognized by the O/S directly, without having to install drivers for it. A notable exception is the 3D video cards, which are a PITA. If you want to play 3D games, make sure you get one from Nvidea or ATI, which provide Linux drivers for their cards.

Re:I concur.

[JackieBrown]

I started with SuSe and moved to Debian within two weeks. The hardest thing for me as a noob was setting the fstab. If I had paid more attention to the installer, it would have been a lot easier.

But I usually install Debian on my friends computer and then let them maintain it. I have never had any problems (except people complaining about the lack of flash 9 which is now available (and in the Debian repos.)

Edubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick perusal of the replies didn't show Edubuntu. I know that Edubuntu is usually thought of in terms of grades 1..12, but that is very limiting thinking. Think instead, of things like LTSP availability as well as easy server setup/maintainability. Think of it as Ubuntu++ (sorry Bjarne ;-)).

As others have stated, 'personalities' are great for people who value that attribute over others, say ease of installation/use. Then, again, maybe ease of installation/use is a 'personality' many do value ;-). Another under represented choice is Kubuntu.. simply Ubuntu with KDE (a somewhat more powerful/flexible Desktop Environment (please, no vi/emacs type wars.. ;-)) then the Gnome of Ubuntu) added. You can add KDE to your Edubuntu/Ubuntu installation with a simple choice.. System-Administration-Synaptics Package Manager. After entering your password (sudo is great)
choose Settings-Repositories - check (enable) at least the top two (Community & Canonical supported)
close, hit Reload (upper left) & go looking thru the list!

  Either way, Enjoy & Welcome to the world of Options!
    bobby

Dual booting is COUNTER PRODUCTIVE to Linux

[keithcybin]

Get a KVM switch and another box of hardware. This way, while you are pulling your hair out dealing with Linux for the first time, you can google your needs on your windows machine and multi task. You can also download all the software you need for your Linux machine on to your windows box. It's really a no brainer. The dual boot promotion from the Linux community is killing the movement. It's OK to tell people that they will need to spend some more money on hardware! If you really want to make the move to Linux (which you should) get nice fast hardware for your new Linux machine. You're going to have to reboot 432 million times (if you are lucky). I'll someday make a GPL guide to using computers. The above is step 1.

linux distro chooser

[IrishMASMS]

From the Wikipedia page regarding Linux distros, the paragraph 'Choosing a Linux distribution' you will find the following helpful links:

Linux Distribution Chooser 0.4
http://www.tuxs.org/chooser/

Linux Distribution Chooser
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

A good GTFG would have brought those same links:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=linux+distro+ chooser&btnG=Google+Search

[wink wink nudge nudge]