[wplug] Linux newbie

[J Aaron Farr]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sino Kaya [mailto:Sino.Kaya at gmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2004 2:38 PM
> To: wplug at wplug.org
> Subject: [wplug] Linux newbie
>
> For my own survival in the field, I feel that I need to have some
> experience using Linux.  I'm thinking of trying Linux for 2 purposes:
> 1. For regular Home Office PC use
> 2. For developing industrial-strength software
> I'll probably need to do no.1 first.
...

As already suggested, Mandrake is a great linux distribution to start with.

If you have the time and the extra computer, it's also nice to just start
trying them all out: Red Hat (Fedora), Gentoo, Slackware, Debian, ...  But
I would't do this first.  Instead, I'd start with something like Mandrake,
get the know the system and then after you start feeling confident, get a
spare machine and start testing out other distributions.  Eventually, you
should try out Gentoo even if you don't end up using it.  Going through
the process of building your operating system by hand is a really neat
(and educational) experience.

My other suggestion would be to start out using some "live" linux CD's. 
These live distributions boot directly off of the CD-ROM without any
installation.  You can then test out linux and how your hardware responds
before actually going through an installation.  Knoppix
(http://www.knoppix.org/) is a really great live CD distribution, though
there are others.

jaaron