Switching to Linux, now what to buy?
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From: Nico Kadel-Garcia on 23 Sep 2005 20:25 <pmlonline(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:1127484446.719537.290370(a)g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... > Hello, > > 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. I see > three pages of CD's > http://cart.cheapbytes.com/cgi-bin/cart/scan/mp=category/se=101/tf=title.html?id=sorJVU3v Rule one. Ignore Peter, everything he says is aimed at sniping at the newbies and demonstrating his superior intelligence by growsing at them without actually answering their questions. Fedore Core is the "beta test new software, bleeding edge, don't whine to us for upport, download free" version of RedHat. FC1 and FC2 are deprecated, and unless you're stuck with them for some reason, I urge you to go ot FC4. Use the DVD's if you can, they're just easier to work with. If you need a more standard and stable OS version, RedHat now has what they call "RedHat Enterprise", which lags Fedora Core by quite a lot but has every component far more thoroughly tested by the time they include it. That's quite expensive, but there is a free rebundling of it called "CentOS", that I really like and approve of for server use. > I have an old 7.1 Mandrake, but I can't get it to work with my dhcp > router. I have spent two solid days on it, read all the forums. It > won't work! Someone said I need to install the dhcp-client. Did that, Don't waste your time with it. Proceed to FC4 or CentOS 4.1. DHCP is now vastly, vastly more stable and supported than it used to be. > What about all those other flavors and such as Pink Tie Linux? Anyhow, > I would greatly appreciate any recommendations and info. I just want a > desktop workstation that will guarantee to work with my router, very > user-friendly, and secure. People like making their own very special Linuxes for various reasons: They're fun for developers to play with and to try out ideas, but if you want it to just work and don't need to do development, I'd use CentOS 4.1.
From: Nico Kadel-Garcia on 23 Sep 2005 20:29 "Peter T. Breuer" <ptb(a)oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote in message news:35fe03-jsj.ln1(a)news.it.uc3m.es... > It would be meaningless, then. IQ tests originally measured relative > development in children and adolescents. The extension to adults simply > measures the performance on, err, IQ tests. It would be a measured > against a (logarithmic?) normal curve, I suppose, with mean 100 and SD > 15. So at 178 you would be five standard deviations off the mean, which > leaves too small a sample to measure against (two SDs is the 95th That scale got abandoned at least 20 years ago. Now they're graded based on the results of an education and psychological committee, and have next to nothing to do with any sane curve matching.. For example, "Normal" on the Stanford-Binet when I took it was 117. "Look up the documentation", Peter. And stop sniping at the newbies.
From: Rick Moen on 23 Sep 2005 20:33 Peter T. Breuer <ptb(a)oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote: > I didn't realise that was common. I doubt I have EVER bought anything > but a 3com, 8139, or eepro as a NIC. You are a wise man, sir. (You probably also bought genuine Tulip cards, back in the day, if I guess right.) > Some of us even moved the disk to another computer. The second generation of Sony VAIOs required exactly that drastic tactic: Rumour has it that Sony's executive staff were annoyed at how the engineers had made the original series (e.g., my still-functional PCG-505TX) 100% Linux-friendly, and ordered them to make the newer models deliberately hostile to non-certified OSes. Whether that's true or not, it could have been so, judging from the components: They had a brand-new video chipset that necessitated purchase of Accelerated X or Metro X. They had a non-supported sound chip. They had a winmodem (and this was back before that was near-ubiquitous among laptops). Most inconvenient of all, they had USB-connected external floppy and CD-ROM drives, which meant you couldn't use Linux boot media of the day on it. And no, PXE didn't yet exist, so you couldn't netboot it. So, those intrepid souls determined to run Linux on those machines were obliged to disassemble them, remove the hard drive, mount the hard drive in a desktop box, install the Linux distribution of choice, move the hard drive back, and re-do XFree86 and some other hardware discovery. You had to work at it. > Or downloaded the entire debian archive site complete with crosslinks > out of potato into hamm in order to nfs mount it as a local disk and > uncompress the packages one by one via ar and tar, then run their > install scripts later. Well, I had my own full Debian mirror. ;->
From: Nico Kadel-Garcia on 23 Sep 2005 20:40 "John Howell" <jehowell(a)ihug.co.nz> wrote in message news:dh1qcs$ij0$1(a)lust.ihug.co.nz... > pmlonline(a)gmail.com wrote: > >> Hello, >> >> 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. I see >> three pages of CD's > > I started out looking into various websites revewing distros, then > downloaded a few live eval CD's. These are great for checking if the basic > install for an OS will work out of the box for your hardware > > I stuck with Suse Linux as the YAST util makes setting up the box fairly > painless for linux, and suse can use rpm files for installing apps so you Unless you actually try to do something remotely complicated, like installing an updated package that has requirements not in the update list. It actually *CANNOT* merge the results of both a base and update download site, which leads to adventure like accidentally reverting your kernel when instlaling the base package and having the kernel reversion *BREAK* kernel module installations that were actually published by SuSE. Check out the NVidia and the old 3Ware imodule installers: I ran into this full-tilt 1500 miles from the server when some idiot asked me for help and rebooted the machine while I was fixing it remotely, before I could restore the new kernel. SuSE's RPM's are *BADLY WRITTEN*. As an example, they hide the actual kernel patches behind 3, count them, 3 layers of confusing add-on scripts and tarball bundling. I could go on, but as an experienced admin, I'd rather date Peter than use SuSE again.
From: Jean-David Beyer on 24 Sep 2005 09:27
Peter T. Breuer wrote: > pmlonline(a)gmail.com wrote: > >>I can only talk about linux older than 1.5 years. The insall was >>straightforward. I also tried RedHat 6.1. The insall will ask if >>you're using dhcp. Everything installed. No modifications and you >>boot it up and the internet does NOT work Don't give me your >>idiot-friendly stuff. My IQ is over 150. > > > :-). Ordinary tests only go up to 145! You must be on one of those > pay-and-we-evaluate-you schemes! IIRC, most IQ tests go that far, having a standard deviation of 10. However Cattell (sp.?) has a standard deviation of 15, to better separate the very top (Mensa uses (or did when I took their test) that one) and it probably also separates the very bottom well too. I took it and got 152, IIRC, but that is not as impressive as those familiar only with the s.d. of 10 tests seem to think. I am not impressed as it does not seem to help me with the kinds of problems I try to solve. And I decided not to join Mensa anyhow. http://nicologic.free.fr/FAQ.htm These guys say most IQ tests have s.d. of 15 and Cattell has a s.d. of 24, so either I remember incorrectly or they changed it since I took it in the mid 1960s. -- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. /V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org ^^-^^ 09:15:00 up 101 days, 3:12, 4 users, load average: 4.32, 4.30, 4.23 |