Switching to Linux, now what to buy?
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From: Jim Haynes on 23 Sep 2005 13:24 One thing you could consider is buying the book "Linux Made Easy: The Official Guide to Xandros3 for Everyday Users" by No Starch Press. It comes with the Xandros CD. I have no experience with Xandros myself, but the advertisement for the book suggests it is aimed at people who want to switch from Windows to Linux. Look in google groups for comp.os.linux.announce for the complete announcement. Getting back to the advice of others - if you have access to a fast network and a CD burner then you can download a lot of stuff and burn your own CDs. If not CheapBytes is a reasonable place to get it already written to CD. But you still have a problem getting updates since there are lots of them and some of them are big. If you can, get a spare computer or in your regular computer a spare hard drive or spare partition. Hard drives are cheap. That way you can play with several Linux installations before you commit to installing it for real. You learn a lot by doing an installation and getting it to work the first time. In fact you might want to unplug your regular hard drive so you are sure you won't scribble on it and substitute the spare drive for your experiments. Getting help from a friend who has already been down that road is good advice. Personally I'm using Fedora Core 4 on two desktop machines, and Fedora Core 1 on a laptop - I had some trouble getting more recent Fedora systems to work with the peculiar hardware of the laptop. I played with Mandrake for a while, but I've been using Red Hat for a long time and found Fedora more familiar - not that Mandrake was significantly harder to install or configure. Email me if you wish. -- jhhaynes at earthlink dot net
From: John Hasler on 23 Sep 2005 13:11 Bernard Peek writes: > So I suggest that seriously think about using one of the download > versions. The ones that I've used recently are SuSE Linux and Ubuntu > Linux, either one will be fine for what you want. I'd go with Ubuntu if I > were you. Both can be installed by downloading an ISO image of a CD then > burning that to a CDR to make a bootable disk. You boot from that and > follow the instructions. Ubuntu will send you free CDs of their current release. See <www.ubuntu.com>. -- John Hasler john(a)dhh.gt.org Dancing Horse Hill Elmwood, WI USA
From: Martin Fenelon on 23 Sep 2005 13:48 23 Sep 2005 14:07 UTC, pmlonline(a)gmail.com typed: > I am now switching over to linux as a workstation. I'm at > cheapbytes.com, but I have no idea what flavor of linux to buy. Have a look at http://www.slackware.com Two CD's to download and in spite of what you might hear, it's very easy to configure. -- Email: Martin Fenelon <fenm at freeuk dot com>
From: pmlonline on 23 Sep 2005 14:45 Douglas Mayne wrote: > Here is a ranking of current popularity of distributions: > http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity Very nice! That made the decision 99% faster. About time someone made a chart, lol. I know, I know, it's probably been there for ages and I never saw it. I'll download Ubuntu and order Mandriva on CD. Thanks, Paul
From: pmlonline on 23 Sep 2005 15:07
> > As in "automatically weeds out responses from idiots"? > > I believe that might be one interpretation. Isn't that fuzzy logic? Some would say Bill Gates is smart-- smart enough to make a few billion $. That doesn't mean he has the time or desire to study Linux. Some may be idiots but what about those who don't have the time. I doesn't seem that much to ask for a secure os like linux to perform a default install and connect to a dhcp server without me holding its hand. If you tell the latest Mandrake you want dhcp then do I have to manually install a dhcp-client? I know Mandrake 7.1 doesn't, hence to reason for so many Mandrake / dhcp questions. Most workstation users don't want to learn all the gottchas, ins and outs, tricks or whatever you call it of an OS. Time = money for some folks. Go I really need to get a Mac? Paul |