distros?

[worker201]

I find Fedora Core 3 to be extremely satisfactory for my work. It's manageable, reasonably user-friendly, flexible, powerful, and is easy to find help for. Which is good for work. However, as a learning tool, I wonder if I'm getting shafted. Am I going to eventually get locked into Fedora/RH? Am I missing good learning opportunities by not ever using any other distros? FC3 offers me all I could ever want in an OS, but I used to say that about Windows, too, till I found there was something better.

If anybody has any thoughts about the pros and cons of expanding your learning base by experimenting with multiple distros (and how much disk space should be sacrificed for such a cause), I would be happy to listen.

[Calum]

i have always tried to try as many operating systems as possible. My limitations are hardware really. at the moment, i've got slack and win2000 on one machine and xandros and win98 on the other. even though i don't actually use those windows systems, it was a conscious decision by me to make them different ones, so if i ever do, i'll get variety. I have had all sorts of linuces on these machines, SUSE, Mandrake, Knoppix, RH/Fedora, Turbolinux, Lycoris, BasicLinux (which i really liked actually), Peanut Linux (which i also really liked) and so on. I also had windows 3.11 for a good while. i was trying to get it to *work* as one objective (i failed, to get it to work with the sound card, the cdrom, the printer et cetera) but i also had a fun time using DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS (my advice, install win3.11 over MS-DOS first, then install DR-DOS over ms-dos afterwards, DR-DOS installs extra stuff, if it detects windows!) and replacing everything with FreeDOS, GNU tools or other Open Source win3.11 stuff. great fun.

I'd dearly love to get another machine and dual boot it between BeOS and Solaris too. I have never tried either and would love to try both or either. I just haven't got the disk space at the moment on either of the existing machines. Dual booting's fun too, i have no idea what the multibooting facilities are like in Solaris or BeOS so maybe i would have to resort to making a small linux system go on there too, just to use GrUB. I'd like to try some BSDs too, i have the install CDs for FreeBSD 4.5 and 4.7 but haven't got to play with them because of no disk space, i can't make them function to do all the things the other users in the house require and so i always have to install a linux over the top of them after about a day

so in short, yes, use as many as you can. Even installing slackware as well as red hat will make you think a lot more, what with the BSD init, and all the other different defaults (if installing slackware, go and edit /etc/profile as soon as possible by the way, since by default it puts . in your $PATH, if you'd believe that!). I still haven't got the USB printer to work under slackware (and am going to buy a parallel cable (which luckily the printer has a port for) to use instead as a result) but it's all part of the fun...

[Void Main]

Not much to add to that. If learning is your goal then learning how to set up and configure various distros would be good but ultimately it's the individual packages, the kernel and networking that I think you want to learn. You can also do a fair amount of this type of learning in FC3 too if you don't touch any of the GUI tools included with FC3 (I actually rarely use any GUI tools other than Firefox and Evolution (which I am in no way dependent on). I might not be a good one to get advice from though because I have been using Linux from the beginning and there was little documentation let alone GUI tools or package managers.

There are a couple of distros that come to my mind if you want to learn some basics. Slackware and Gentoo. I have actually never used Gentoo so I am only basing my recommendation of this on what I have read. Slackware is one of the first Linux distributions. Before Slackware came along I used one called SLS which I believe would be considered the first Linux distro. SLS pretty much died when Slackware came out. I could be wrong but I believe Slackware actually came out of SLS or has some sort of roots in SLS.

Maybe even more important than using other distros would be to go to www.tldp.org and read, read, read. Install and configure everything according to the HOWTOs. When I started with Linux there were not a lot of HOWTOs but this is how you learning before there were books and tools. People started writing HOWTOs to make other people's life easier for setting up their systems. I still think these are the single greatest source of Linux knowlege. They are better than any book you can buy and they are not distro specific.

[Calum]

yes, you are right void main (about SLS), according to various sources (including Glynn Moody's excellent book "The Rebel Code"), Slackware was based on SLS, but made by a different distributor (Patrick Volkerding, as everybody knows) and was originally simply motivated by SLS needing some bugfixes which they weren't putting in. Slackware was originally SLS with bugfixes. Similar things have happened to tons of other distros, like Mandrake being based on Red Hat 5.2 (i think)

all part of the fun, again.

It'd be nice if tldp did come in a book though, i find books much easier to read than files.

[worker201]

I installed both Suse and Slack on my old laptop (my 'slacktop') that died, and I actually use Slackware on my ftp server at the office. I spent months of futzing with the soundcard on that laptop, and recompiled the kernel almost daily during that time. Which was like a crash course in Linux! Also spent an enormous amount of time reading at tldp, too.

But you guys have given me some ideas. I think I can spare about 5 gigs to install something else for a short time. My goal will be to not install any gui, but play mp3 files, cds, write cds, instant message, and a few other things. Actually, the IM is probably going to be the hard one. So what's a good free distro that is easy to find support for, and interesting to learn. Gentoo? Debian/Ubuntu/Xandros?

[Calum]

xandros is RIGHT OUT if you want a no-X distro to tinker about on. it is the windows 2000 of linux.


i'd say debian or slack. you know if i were in your position i'd probably try out gentoo, their installation and package management sounds interesting and i have never tried it, and i have the install disk right here, frustratingly enough.

or try basiclinux, it's a distro based on slack that is primarily designed to be as general purpose a distro as possible while still being miniscule, it's based around busybox. i used 3 versions, i think they were 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 1.5 and 1.7 were fun, while 1.6 was really irritating, ymmv i say try this one out first and then once you have got fed up with it, move on to debian. most of your time in the first stages of basiclinux is going to be trying to make it capable of doing all those things you mentioned. debian would probably be a better choice if you want your system to do all those things more or less out of the box, but where's the fun in that?

also, you might get away with just having a couple of hundred MBs for your entire basiclinux installation (say 500MB to include some space for your /home dir and everything, because from memory i am not sure if basiclinux's kernel will be able to read your other linux partitions straight off the bat, although your other linuces will be able to use the basiclinux partitions no bother) and you could install something else as well on the remaining 4.5 gigs. perhaps peanut linux (which i loved, it has a GUI, but it's enlightenment, which is really cool, especially with their default installation, i seem to remember another cool distro (possibly vector linux? maybe not) that used icewm and dfm together as the GUI desktop environment, worked really well, it can do almost everything kde can do, and a lot faster.

anyway.

Just a thought.

oh yes, basiclinux homepage and mirrors:
http://basiclinux.com.ru/
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distri ... /baslinux/
http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/