I'm interested in getting into Linux. I'm majoring in computer science and am trying to immerse myself in the genre and expand my horizons! ( ) but really I just want to start using it so I can get a feel for what it's like to use a different operating system and challenge myself a little. I'm going to have to get used to learning different and varried systems/languages/structures in the future, and I figure experimenting with Linux is a good start. Plus, I can install it right now without having to leave my room or putting a dent in my wallet.

I'm planning to install it along side Windows XP, which I have now, so I can still use Windows while I'm getting used to Linux. I'm not afraid of the command line, a combination of that and a GUI would probably be best; it's my understanding that many Linux distributions have a balance of this. I know there are many task specific distribution of Linux (i.e. use for small businesses, use on older computers, user friendly edition). I'm pretty much looking for a balanced distribution that has a good combination and representation of what Linux is all about.

I've looked on various websites to get information, but I'd also like your input. I assume many of you use Linux; you seem to be intelligent people who can see past the evil lies of the Microsoft Empire. I know for a fact some of you do from the Post your Desktop thread, and personally, those desktops look much more intriguing than the classic Windows Startup menu.

If you could, give your opinion on different Linux distributions, their different aspects, and their pros and cons.

Thanks :p

I tried Ubuntu back in the summer; it doesn't seem too bad for a beginner. Don't come here with questions about it though, because they just flame you and call you an idiot without actually helping.

Debian or anything Debian-derived, such as Ubuntu/Kubuntu.

SCO rules lol

I'm just trying out Ubuntu myself right now...only using the liveCD at the moment but seriously thinking of making a partition for it as its started up nice and everything "appears" to be working.

I was recommended Ubuntu from a friend doing computer science, its supposidly the easier of the distributions to get used to at first.

knoppix hd install

My opinion: Go to gbk for all your Linux questions.

I myself, use Gentoo at home, because I like to tinker with the system. The huge downside of Gentoo is that you have to compile every program yourself, which takes a very long time. The good thing about that is that you can decide for yourself which features you want and which not. Some people will tell you, that you also get a performance gain, because you optimise everything to your specific system but as far as I know this is an urban myth.
Also some people say Gentoo is harder than other distros, but IMHO it is easier because of the many friendly tutorials and how-tos.

At work and for servers I use Debian, because I want a stable system, where I don't have to wait for every program to compile, before I can use it.
As (K)Ubuntu (supposedly (haven't tested it myself, yet) the most user-friendly distrobution) is also Debian based, it should be perfect for your needs. You should also be able to apply Debian-tutorials if you want to do something special, that Ubuntu wasn't designed for in the first place.

I'd stay away from such "user-friendly" distros like Suse. I have found them to be a pain in the donkey when you want to do something a little bit out of the way.
ie: You can't update your distrobution, if it's too old. With Debian and Gentoo you can just tell it where it finds the new programs and update on the fly. With Suse you'd have to reinstall the system from scratch.

h8red

<_<
>_>

SLACKWARE!

*runs away*

[QUOTE=West Wind]<_<
>_>

SLACKWARE!

*runs away*[/QUOTE]

You better run. Christ, you could ruin a man's sanity with talk like that.

I would definitely recommend Debian. I run Debian on my home machine, my laptop, and the massassi server. The kids have a machine with Ubuntu on it and it's really frustrating. The whole sudo/main user thing is a huge pain. It would probably be nicer on a faster computer. It also runs Gnome by default which I wouldn't necessarily recommend.

At work, not by choice, my dev system is CentOS, which is based on Red Hat. One of the supported operating sytems our software ships for is Red Hat. I would strongly, strongly, strongly recommend staying as far away from Red Hat, Fedora, SuSe, Mandrake/Mandriva, or any other RPM based distro as you can. You will just end up frustrated.

I have run hd-installs of Knoppix as well, and while they worked fine, they end up with a lot of software preinstalled that I never use. Your best bet is to do a net install of Debian and just install what you want. There are plenty of instructions and the new installer (although it still looks old) works very well.

You might also consider FreeBSD, which is not linux but Unix. It is a very nice operating system.

^^ after many years of installing each red hat and subsequently fedora that was released i finally gave up. i'm a debian guy now. net install like brian recommends.

i was never really frustrated with the rpm based systems and their multi-dependancy-package installs. it really helped me further understand what linux was all about even though i never moved away from just being a desktop user.

Gentoo if you like tweaking immensely (a la tons of options, fully customized system).

Debian if that sounds like too much work.

I get frustrated because the RPMS I want are not released in the "official" repositories so I have to go scour the net for a reliable source of RPMS, all of which are compiled for different versions of dozens of different RPM-based distros, and 90% of the time they don't work anyway, and I ended up installing 50 dependencies and the actual app I wanted didn't work

So then people go download the source and try to compile it, so they have to install all the *dev RPMS to get things to compile, and they go through the whole process again.

Debian has nothing like that. 99.99% of the time the software I want is already nicely packaged and available automatically at either a keystroke or click of a button. Dependencies are handled automatically and the software works.

Plus, since we support Red Hat with our software at work, I have to go through the hell of packaging our software for three different types of systems using the RPM system. I have to write a spec, compile a source RPM, and then 3 regular rpms for each of the packages we sell. The system is so freaking flawed it's no wonder the distributions suck.

Oh, and with Debian, you never have to "upgrade to the next version" because it's all handled automatically when you use apt-get.

Debian. For sure.

I personally have an ubuntu install on my home computer (breezy) because that's what I started out with .. Ubuntu is amazing, it just comes set up with a lot of stuff that you might not need and therefore would need to get rid of

I highly suggest both though (K/Ubuntu is a derivation of Debian)

/me waits for CM to come and pimp Gentoo more than he has already

while we are on the subject, hate to really turn this into a tech help thread but beans all you linux expects are here reading...

how'd the hell do you access NTFS drives through ubuntu, I've got them all mounted and such and I've been reading up at http://ubuntuguide.org/ but its been of little help past the mounting stage, I still get an access denied when I try to access then.

bare in mind ubuntu has been installed and used all of ~ 3hrs during which time I've focused on getting firefox upto 1.5, nvidia drivers installed and generally figuring out what the f*** I should be doing...

just like to say again that of all the distro's I've used ubuntu is so far proving the best, although there are still a load of things I have yet to figure out.

To explain in more detail, there are three major options for Linux systems. In the Linux world the primary difference between distributions is how you obtain and install software:

RPM-based Distributions - Unfortunately I don't have a lot of experience with this. I believe they may have a more advanced distribution system now but I'm not entirely sure. An RPM is an archive that contains the program binaries and an install script. It was invented by Red Hat, so you can find it in Red Hat Server and Fedora, as well as Mandrake/Mandriva.

I've generally found that RPM-based distributions are messy. RPMs are very poor for dependency-tracking so installing things can be a pain. Plus Red Hat, in particular, likes to use a lot of non-standard third party nonsense tools to glue their distribution together. I'd strongly recommend against using a RPM-based distribution but it's something to keep in mind.


Portage - This is the package tool used by Gentoo Linux. Portage is based, in theory, upon BSD's ports system. In a single command it downloads an application, stability patches, dependencies, compiles them, and installs them. The greatest advantage of Gentoo is the ability to tweak application dependencies - so you can customize a program to use certain functionality.

The biggest drawback to Gentoo is the complete and total lack of any configuration mechanism. In order to set things up you'll have to manually edit config files.

On the other hand, Gentoo absolutely excels at configuration management. Your config files are never accidentally erased by bringing another package in. If there's a conflict between new config files that cannot be merged, you are allowed to manually merge them at your leisure.

Unfortunately graphical tools for managing portage are few and far between. The king of Gentoo is still the terminal. If you really want to upgrade everything your system to the latest stable version you can use the following two commands: "emerge --sync; emerge --update --deep world", but obviously that isn't recommended. It's best to update on a package-by-package basis.

One final note: Although Gentoo is primarily focused as a source-based distribution, it is possible to download binary packages for almost everything.


Debian Package Management System (dpkg) and Advanced Packaging Tool (apt) - Debian-based distributions are sorta the in-between option. You can automatically retrieve and install binary packages from the internet. You can also, optionally, download and automatically compile a source build, but you still don't get the benefits of Gentoo's dependency customization.

Debian packages also include configuration templates, so you can visually configure an application while installing or optionally reconfigure it later. There are also a plethora of tools available to automate package retrieval and updating.

There are many distributions based on Debian, partly because it's so simple to build a distribution on top of it. The highest-profile example is Ubuntu.
[/list]

[QUOTE=James Bond]while we are on the subject, hate to really turn this into a tech help thread but beans all you linux expects are here reading...

how'd the hell do you access NTFS drives through ubuntu, I've got them all mounted and such and I've been reading up at http://ubuntuguide.org/ but its been of little help past the mounting stage, I still get an access denied when I try to access then.

bare in mind ubuntu has been installed and used all of ~ 3hrs during which time I've focused on getting firefox upto 1.5, nvidia drivers installed and generally figuring out what the f*** I should be doing...

just like to say again that of all the distro's I've used ubuntu is so far proving the best, although there are still a load of things I have yet to figure out.[/QUOTE]


Uhh wait you can't access them after you mount them? Are you sure you have read permissions? (If not, sudo give yourself read permissions)? Remember that you can't write to ntfs drives

yep looks like it...

In the Linux world there are also two major options for desktop environments. This might be the start of a terrible holy war, so I'm going to preface this by saying that it's my opinion. The best way of choosing a window manager is to try them both out for a week and see which one is better suited to you. That said,

GNOME - GNOME is the opensource answer to the MacOS user interface. I'm not talking about OSX here, I'm talking about classic Mac like System 7 or something.

Gnome is -- and I'm really sorry to say this -- a terrible eyesore. It just looks bad. Their user interface is completely dysfunctional too. While MacOS retains a menubar at the top of the screen for consistency and ease-of-use, Gnome's is simply redundant and pointless.

Gnome also intentionally eliminates support for features and common interface elements. While claiming that their omissions are a design decision to make Gnome easier to use, they're simultaneously making it much harder to accomplish anything non-trivial.

The worst part about the situation is that Gnome is becoming truly ubiquitous in the Linux world. Almost every commercial distribution now installs Gnome by default (including Ubuntu), and many high-profile Linux desktop applications use Gnome's user interface style - like Gaim, the Gimp, and Firefox.

Gnome wasn't even created to be useful, it was created out of spite because KDE wasn't PURE GPL. And this nonsense has been continuing for about 7 years since Qt2 was licensed under GPL. It's pretty sick. Sorry, that's just my opinion.


KDE - KDE has a much more 'Windows' vibe. Take that to mean what you will.

KDE's goal is to make everything work in the user interface. If you can do it in the terminal, you'll [eventually] be able to do it in KDE. It has an absolutely gorgeous scheme for power management. The KDE project has its own office suite, integrated web browser component (although they're working on porting Firefox), the premiere visual IDE in the Linux world, and the blessing of Linus Torvalds. <3

The largest (legitimate) criticism of the KDE project is their tendency to reinvent the wheel. However, I think this is understandable since almost all of the major Linux software is written for Gnome. I've also found that KDE's applications are often times better than the mainstream ones. There isn't anything preventing you from installing Firefox on a KDE machine, but because it's written for GTK it probably won't mesh too well with your desktop.



In the case of a pure Debian or Gentoo install, your choice of KDE or GNOME (or Fluxbox or OpenStep or IceWM or twm or XPde or whatever these kids are using these days :p) is entirely up to you. You can also usually find variants of the more popular distributions that use the other: for instance, if you want the niftiness of Ubuntu with the good-ness of KDE, you can find it in Kubuntu.

Actually, I'm pretty sure I remember hearing somewhere that Gnome was created to stay 'true' to the roots of Unix and Linux--C. KDE was done in C++ or something. That's what I heard, at least.

if anyone was curious...

by umounting and then re-mounting the drives I was able to get access....weird...

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Actually, I'm pretty sure I remember hearing somewhere that Gnome was created to stay 'true' to the roots of Unix and Linux--C. KDE was done in C++ or something. That's what I heard, at least.[/QUOTE]
Yes, Gnome/GTK use C. KDE/Qt uses C++ with preprocessing (like MFC).

That's not the real reason Gnome was created though.



I'm being pretty hard on these guys, but in the end it boiled down to this: KDE depended upon software that wasn't licensed under GPL. It was becoming popular (a threat) and Gnome was created to replace it with a "free" alternative. Hardcore GNUers were worried that the open source desktop world would eventually become locked in to a commercial library.

actually that was frustrating.

The entirety of this thread can be summed up in two words: Use Debian.

Gentoo + Fluxbox = dream machine.

Happy, Shintock? :p

Thanks, you guys have been very helpful. I think I'm going to try Debian, specifically Kubuntu, it seems to have gotten the most endorsements. I appreciate all the posts. I've definetly learned a lot from reading them. The Linux world is much clearer to me now.

I prefer Gentoo + E16 myself, but Fluxbox is damned nice in its own right. In fact it's what I use on top of Gentoo for the backup server I'm building at work [old HP NetServer LH3r]. E17 looks real shiny, and I toyed a bit with the cvs version recently, but it's far from distribution-ready/stable, having been slated for release Real Soon Now for several years.

I'd likely be using Debian with it, however Gentoo's megaraid module is the only one I've found so far that just /works/ out of the box with the RAID controllers on that server. Debian / Ubuntu both report no partitionable media.

It seems that a while back megaraid was divided into two seperate modules, megaraid and megaraid_mbox [I believe], to seperate older cards from newer ones. Unfortunately, a number of cards at the schism fell through the gaps and didn't get included in either module, particularly several of the NetRaid cards. In order to get Debian installer running and recognizing it, I would have to hunt down the patch file, manually patch it, and then slipstream it back into the installer cd.

Gentoo on the other hand, just /worked/.

I am, however, rather fond of apt, particularly on older boxen where emerging can take a fair while for large things [eg X11.org]. And while Gentoo /does/ offer the ability to use binary portage binhosts, they don't provide any official ones, which is just begging for security / compatibility issues with using third-party hosted ones.

Gentoo has several main advantages, mostly as outlined above viz configuration and such. But what it /excels/ at, is after you've built your system from the ground up, you /know/ it basically inside and out.

Something like Ubuntu, on the other hand, while slick and fast to install a comprehensive environment from, after it's up you hardly know /anything/ about how or why it works [or doesn't work as the case may be]. It is, however, lovely for people who just want a cogent desktop machine. For instance I have a friend who I gave my old computer to, but she wants to stay away from Windows and doesn't want to invest in OS/X or the like, so it is almost certainly becoming an Ubuntu machine once we find a monitor for it.

Debian has the advantages of being very stable and well-cured, however if you want bleeding-edge it may not be for you, as it tends to stick to tried and true methods and builds, versus new shiny less stable ones.

SuSE is dreck. You know even less about your system than with Ubuntu even, and it combines the user-friendliness of Slackware's incessant dependency-hunting with the clean low-impact footprint of Playskool's My First Gui(c). It is one of those very special Linuces that actually /decreases/ your intelligence by using it.

Slackware I still have nightmares about the endless stream of nested broken compiles interspersed with dep scrounging, wash rinse repeat.

Or you could try something really wild and different and go for a BSD. My sleazy eyes(c) lately have been taking a look at NetBSD, guaranteed to run on a toaster or your money back. Just as soon as I find a power adapter for it, I'm planning on setting up my recently scrounged Amrel RT586 Toughbook as a sort of glorified NetBSD typewriter, all 586 cpu and 8MB of ram of it.

[If anyone has any ideas where I might find such an adapter, by the way, I'd love you forever. I've tried Amrel themselves and several obscure electronics stores without any luck so far.]

Jon`C is spot on. Couldn't have put it better myself.

For Debian-based distributions, Knoppix is good, as is Ubuu Linux.

Yes.

And I agree that Gnome sucks. For the KDE users out there who use GTK apps, try gtk-qt.

Things like this make me wonder why Linux can't go the setup.exe route like windows does. It would be so much easier, I wonder why nothing has been done about this.

If you're a new user who is used to windows, installing software on Linux can be an absolute b****, even on an apt-get distro. The stress I experienced with gettign the RPMs to work in Red Hat probably took years off of my life.

I also vote for Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I like Debian well enough, but I like the more bleeding edge software available in (K)ubuntu. As far as the Gnome/KDE debates go, it really is personal preference. I'm prefectly comfortable using both, though I never figured out how to add my own items to the Gnome menu, or how to change the default ugly K menu button.



What's wrong with sudo/main user? Sudo just lets you run commands as root until it times out. su still works to login as root until you sign off. While Ubuntu doesn't come with it enabled by default (silly and dumb, I know), all you have to do is open up a root terminal and use passwd to set a root password, and then everything works fine.

I always install sudo when using FreeBSD and OpenBSD has it pre-installed. Very useful utility.

Your kidding, right? Please tell me your kidding.

The setup.exe route is possibly the worst idea of all time. It would require Linux to use a registery system similar to Windows, which is window's greatest design flaw.

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]The setup.exe route is possibly the worst idea of all time. It would require Linux to use a registery system similar to Windows, which is window's greatest design flaw.[/QUOTE]And GNOME replicates it.

The "setup.exe" thing is... eh... no. OSX does it alright, but pretty much nothing beats Gentoo or Debian.

To install UT2k4 on Gentoo you insert the DVD and emerge it. Portage automatically copies the data files from your DVD, downloads the latest patch and installs it. The only way the software installation situation could be better than Gentoo is if they had a decent GUI tool for managing Portage. Maybe I'll write one when my X1800 works under Linux.

gtk-qt will work as long as you aren't using x86_64. Apparently it has some issues still.