[Nottingham] A newbie speaks... nervously

[Michael Leuty]

On Thu, 2003-11-27 at 13:37, Matt Hurst wrote:
> All thoughts and wisdom gratefully received!

I'm replying as an almost-newbie myself. No doubt one of the big boys
will correct me if I make too many mistakes.

You don't have to decide which distro to use in advance, why not try
several? I certainly have.  :-)   If you have a look at
www.distrowatch.com you can learn a bit about the many that are
available, but here is a bit of information that I have learned.

For the past few years there have been three RedHat-based distros which
have churned out new versions every six months and which have been
available to buy in a box or as a free download. They are RedHat itself,
SUSE and Mandrake.

RedHat was the original, and provides IMHO the best looking desktop with
gorgeous antialiased fonts. However it is not too easy to customise. But
there are many books you can buy which tell you how to do this sort of
thing, and there are active user mailing lists.

SUSE is German, does not do public beta testing, and the download
version is only available as FTP files (you have to download the files
to your hard disk or while you install) rather than ISOs for burning CDs
to use for install. I am told that there are more frequent problems with
hardware detection during installation, but once set up it is very
stable.

Mandrake is French, and has a good reputation for ease of install,
hardware detection, and customisability. An enthusiastic user base, with
mailing lists and bulletin boards. They have a possibly undeserved
reputation for poor quality control, and the company has been (and still
is) in financial trouble.

These three distros concentrate on putting out a properly beta-tested
version every six months, and between times simply issue security
patches.

Debian is different. Not so much a company, more a world-wide network of
hackers devoted to the ideals of open source software. There are three
versions. Stable (currently "woody"), which is old software but solid as
a rock and lovingly monitored for security errors. This is what you want
to run your server. Testing (currently "sarge") which contains packages
thought to be stable and work together well, which is probably what you
want for a desktop. Unstable (always called "sid") which contains
packages which are thought to be stable but don't always play ball with
each other. You will run sid if you are brave, foolhardy, or know what
you are doing. Each package has its own team of developers, who are
co-ordinated by a mysterious team of supernatural beings headed by a
bloke known only as Ian, married to Debbie. Official Debian releases are
few and far between, but the unstable and testing packages are being
constantly updated; so you choose your version (e.g. testing) and then
keep it updated.

Debian is not easy to install, by all accounts, but Ian (married to
Debbie) is looking to port the RedHat installer to Debian, which may
make life easier soon. And, going the other way, RedHat is now able to
use apt-get, the Debian method of adding and updating programs.

GNU/Linux programs don't come with nice .EXE installation files. The
manly way of installing them involves strange incantations including
"make install", but the RedHat distros use RPM files, which work similar
to Windows installation files, but don't always find the "dependencies",
the library files required for the program to run. If the dependency
isn't on the system, RPM files just say "tough, dependency missing".
Apt-get is a more sophisticated system which will go and get the
required dependencies for you, and also keeps track of what dependencies
are required for which program. For example, if program B requires a new
version of dependency X, but program A requires an older version of X,
when you try to install B apt-get will warn you that A must be
un-installed. Or something like that <awaits howls of derision from the
experts>.

Changes are afoot. RedHat no longer produces a boxed version of RH
Linux, it will only sell the much more expensive commercial RH
Enterprise Linux (with support to match). However it is supporting the
new Fedora Core project, which can be considered as a sort of "RHL 10".
The desktop is even more gorgeous, a very polished product, user support
still as active. ISO files are available for download.

SUSE has just been bought by Novell. I don't know what difference this
will make to their product strategy, but for now SUSE 9.0 has just been
made available for FTP download (or you can buy a box for £30 from
amazon.co.uk).

Mandrake are still limping along financially, although technically their
distro is good. I suspect that they will either be bought by a large
company or go down the plughole. You can download ISOs of version 9.2,
or the installation CDs are available on the front cover of this month's
Linux Format magazine. Beware that the cover disks include the original
kernel which overwrites the firmware of certain CD-ROM drives made by LG
(although most LG CD-RW drives are not affected). Since then Mandrake
have altered the kernel, and LG have issued software to repair the
damaged firmware in their drives.

The distro I am (currently) using is Libranet. This costs money ($65
i.e. about £45) to download the two CDs, but installation support is
included. Libranet is Debian (mostly "sarge"), with an excellent
installer and some useful utilities for maintaining your system,
including easy installation of Java, Flash, RealPlayer and QuickTime
codecs. Once installed you can keep upgrading, tracking "sarge" (or
"sid" if brave).

Hope this helps.

-- 
Michael Leuty <mike at leuty.net>