[Wylug-help] Which Version of Linux?

Mon Oct 24 08:04:31 BST 2005

Stuart Taylor writes:

> <html><div style='background-color:'><DIV class=RTE>
> <P>Ay-up.</P>

Hi Stuart -- welcome to Wylug.

> <P>After much hair pulling over windows I've decided to have a go with
> Linux. Ican't seem to make my mind up over the various distributions
> available though. I've narrowed it down to SuSe, Mandriva, Fedora or
> Knoppix,

Isn't Knoppix just a 'live CD'?  That's where you don't install the OS
from the CD to your hard disk; it just boots off the CD and runs from
there.

This is great in several situations such as: demos; checking that the OS
works with your hardware; doing something which requires Linux on a
friend's computer which doesn't have it; and repairing broken
installations.  But for day-to-day use you probably want something that
actually installs to your hard disk.  Apart from anything else, loading
the entire OS from a CD is very slow, and ties up your CD drive.

Knoppix is based on Debian.  Ubuntu is also based on Debian, but comes
in both a live CD and an installation CD version -- so you can try it
out and check that everything works with the live CD, and then (so long
as that works) install it from t'other CD.

> but I've no idea how they compare or ease of use.</P>

In general there isn't that much difference -- at least not when you're
new to Linux, cos they'll probably all be equally overwhelming!  If you
have a mate who's already running Linux (or it's used at work or
something) then go for whichever distro he uses: being able to have
advice work exactly the same far outweighs any slight advantages in one
package manager or another.

For what it's worth, I'm very impressed with Ubuntu 5.10, which was
released a couple of weeks ago: the installation process was the easiest
I've seen for any OS; the default set-up is usable and with a good
selection of software; and the almost-automatic (needs confirmation)
security update system works well.

But I don't have experience of the most recent version of any other
flavour of Linux, so I've no idea how it compares ...

Good luck with it, and let us know if you have any more questions.

> <P>Stuart<BR><BR></P></DIV></div></html>

Oh, and if you could manage to persuade your mail program not to wrap
your text in pointless HTML tags, that'd be appreciated!

Cheers.

Smylers
-- 
May God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a
difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done.