[SC.LUG] Distro Upgrades & Re-installation

[Richard Smedley]

Hello Matthew,

On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 18:46 +0100, Matthew Tolley wrote:
> Robert Marshall wrote:
> >> I'm having a 'distro day' today, installing a dozen or so different 
> >> distros to find which ones really grab me.
> > eeeeek! a dozen!?
> 
> OK, a dozen may have been a bit ambitious! Due to technical issues and 
> other demands on my time I only managed 3 or 4!

Nothing's tempting me away from Debian or Ubunt atm ;-)

I'm having a ThinkPad week - trying to assess and resurrect as
many of my old ThinkPads as I can. I've put OpenGEU (Ubuntu
with E17) on one, but it's Debian for all of the rest :-)

> The serious point of the exercise is to find a distro that's so good it 
> converts my friends away from Windows! To impress them sufficiently it 
> should be easy to use, speedy, stylish and completely idiot-proof! 
> Distros that are 'hard work' aren't going to lure them away from the 
> dark side.

Most of my clients are fairly non-technical, and Ubuntu seems
to work well for them. One or two have been interested enough
to improve their technical skills substantially and are still
happy with Ubuntu.

> I've shortlisted Debian, Zenwalk and PCLinuxOS as serious contenders for 
> my next distro, but if they don't come up to scratch I might end up 
> sticking with Ubuntu. I was trying to find out if there were technical 
> advantages or disadvantages between the rpms, debs and slackware 
> formats, as this could affect my decision. If someone can explain the 
> differences in non-technical plain English it would be appreciated!

RPMs and DEBs contain information about package dependencies.
The info in a .deb is more extensive, and the APT (Advanced
Package Tools) system does a better job of resolving dependencies 
and handling updates. Slackware's system doesn't really come into
it - I wouldn't recommend Slack for a non-technical user.

> While we're on the subject, how do I find executable program files in 
> Linux? In Windows I used to look in the 'Program Files' directory for 
> .exe files. Where should I look in Linux? 

Your Operating System's files are in /bin (if you might need them)
or /sbin (if only the system or superuser needs them).

Your package manager will probably install new apps to /usr/bin or 
/usr/sbin (as appropriate).

Hand-crafted packages of your own should go in ~/bin, but /usr/bin
is acceptable. 3rd party binaries may be in /opt

> Also how will I know whether a 
> CD is bootable?

Stick it in your drive and type

shutdown -r 0
;-)


Or, more seriously, do you mean one you've burned yourself? A CD is
made bootable at the ISO creation stage - once upon a time by putting
a boot floppy image in /boot, now with modern magic that doesn't work
on the oldest systems.

Cheers,

 - Richard