[wplug] Which distribution to start with?

[Frank W. Holden Jr.]

Hi Ted. Welcome back to the 'PENGUIN WORLD'... I have tried and used 
most of the distro's available. They all will work quite nicely, well 
at least for my hardware. IMHO, Redhat is an enterprise styled distro 
with a lot of 'eye candy' added so you can get the personal touch. 
This IS good! I like Mandrake myself! With the pre-compiled install at 
the i586 level, it seems to move along faster than Redhat's... BUT, 
this makes no real difference when you have intentions of compiling 
the whole install to Athlon and/or i686 or for the 64 bit 
architecture. When you have a need and that need is for speed, then 
you take the time... :)

Now that I have given you what I see coming out of the gate, both of 
these distro's have there own plus sides. The use of apt/yum in Redhat 
is nice and fairly quick, but no real way of seeing what is available 
you may want to install. Mandrake's distro has this ability based upon 
your install CD(s). The other thing I see is that Redhat has 
everything on their sites to DL that isn't caught up in the enterprise 
install. Mandrake on the other hand will give a good install 
selection, but not everything available.You need to purchase the 
install CD(s) to get online access to other software. Redhat now is 
starting to remind me of M$UCK with their price, while Mandrake has 
kept the low end install reasonable. With 'Fedora' being Redhat's FREE 
version while Mandrake has their 'Community' install.

All in all, when you DL either of these distro's, you get enough to 
wet your appetite and leave you wanting MORE... Once everything is 
compiled to YOUR hardware needs, they both work well and are stable! 
Hunting software for either, pre-bundled in rpm format, leaves the 
same flavor in your mouth. Then again, what makes the difference when 
you are going to (re)compile that program to your own needs!!! They 
are both EASY to install...

With the last two statements I made, nearly any of the distro's will 
do what you want. The rest is in your hardware choice, God and your 
hands, in that order and the latter being supreme! I have a working 
Redhat 9, Fedora FC2 and Mandrake Community 10 installs recompiled and 
stable. The difference I see, IMHO, is in the 'EYE CANDY' within the 
GUI's and the games/toys... If you like more games/toys from the get 
go then Mandrake rulez...

Tux under any other name is still "THE GREATEST PENGUIN ON EARTH"!

Just my 2¢ worth Ted...
Frank


Ted Fisher wrote:

> Hello WPLUG
> 
>  
> 
> About a year ago, I did my first experiment with Red Hat 8.  That was 
> fun, but my effort was ultimately overcome by events and abandoned.  Now 
> I'm interested in building a dedicated Linux box and restarting my Linux 
> education.  I'm a EE from the days when dinosaurs roamed the Carnegie 
> Tech campus, code was written in Algol60, and a CDC 6600 ruled the top 
> floor of the computer center.  During my hiatus from Linux, Red Hat 
> seems to have transformed itself into an enterprise-focused creature, so 
> I'm not sure I want to stay with their software. Would anyone be willing 
> to share some advise on which Linux distributions I should consider?
> 
>  
> 
> If it makes any difference, my focus is writing sharable software for 
> modeling and simulation of electronics and electromagnetics in C, C++ 
> and Java.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks.  Ted.
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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