[Nottingham] A newbie speaks... nervously

[Steve Caddy]

> And then I guess a Debian distro.

If you have time, it might be worth trying out a few distros before
settling with one.

<personal_comments>

I've tried Debian, but found it difficult to configure (probably
because it was a few years ago now). Then I tried Slackware, but
it didn't have all the packages I wanted. Suse refused to install
for some reason. I'm currently running RH9 (upgraded from RH6,
upgraded from RH4.1), and I'm happy with it, although the version
of xmms that RH distribute has the mp3 plugin mutiliated to not
actually play anything... so I had to download a working plugin.
Other than that, it was easy sailing.

I confess to being useless when it comes to compiling kernels (I've
botched several in my time), and I like the way that with the RH
distros you can download patches a la windows update style. Of course
the free service is a little limited, they do encourage you to pay
for the full service... but that's up to you.

I mainly use my RH9 box as a file server (setting up samba is great
fun), and I still use Win2k most of the time. But I like the ability
to compile c at a command prompt, and use linux for odd jobs like
that. Anyone know of a good (free) X server for 2k (don't like VNC)?
Might get more use out of it that way.

Can't really comment on the latest developements elsewhere, because
now that I'm settled, I've stopped looking elsewhere - for better or
worse. They all do a similar thing, it's just the user interface that
varies.

</personal_comments>

On a more general note - the first 3 months are the worse with Linux,
as you slowly learn that you really are the system manager, and it's
not going to hide options away where you can't play with them, or it
sets stupid default values that you can't change. Then you discover
how dangerous the rm command is. I'll endulge in a (true) story about
one of my uni mates. He wanted to deleted linux to reinstall, so he
logged in as root and typed cd / followed by rm -rf *. He then banged
his head on the desk a few times. Yes, he'd got his windows partitions
mounted. Yes, hey were now shiney clean and blank. Yes, it took him
weeks to get things back to how they were. Some speculated the
immediate results of his actions were a good thing (the blank 
partitions, not the bruised forehead) >:)

Steve

--
Steven M Caddy, MEng -----------------------------------------------------
"Hardware - the part of the computer you kick when the software fails"
Email: steve.m.caddy at ntlworld.com