DescentBB

Soon I'll be sitting with a spare pc as my dad is upgrading his. Now given this pc have a whole lot of miles mostly oc'ed to I was think of doing the next:

make it a dual boot system
- xp for a media centre box in my room (music, dvd's & soforth) &
- Linux to get my hands dirty with, applications I'm interrested in learning to use Linux for is as a server box & lan/wi fi network vulnerability testing.

So any advise on which Linux I should try & get my hands on would be appreciated.

System:
p4 1.6 o/c to 2.1gHz
1gb ram (pc133) I think
Geforce 6600GT (AGP)
40gb hdd
Sound blaster live
onboard realtek lan

For ease of use I'd suggest Mepis. Was my all time favorite for a long time. Right now I'm using Debian 4.0 and it's been stable as a rock.

Ubuntu

MD-2389 wrote:Ubuntu

x2, worked for me.

\"Ubuntu\" is an ancient African word meaning, \"Debian, except with a predictable release schedule.\"

I'm playing around with Ubuntu right now myself. It's pretty cool.

Media Center Edition sucks, btw. Don't bother. Looks cool, but oop! No real functionality.

Ubuntu.

Mepis isn't too bad, but it doesn't have the support Ubuntu does.

Ubuntu. It works, plain and simple. Not to mention that you'll never have to buy Microsoft Office again.

I'll go against the grain and say SuSE on this one... it's got a nice system-wide control panel that Ubuntu doesn't have. That's all.

I'll go against the grain too and say Fedora, I've been playing with it and I'm a linux noob myself, I can't compare it to ubuntu since I haven't played with that yet but its pretty nice once you get it running.

I should also mention that Ubuntu, SuSE, and Fedora should all have Live CDs so you can try them before you install them, which I highly recommend doing. Download and try all three and pick the one YOU like the most. You can always install a different one later if you don't like it. Because it isn't like you have to deal with product keys and licensing.

Your intentions regarding what you want to do with/in Linux actually have direct bearing on which distro you should use as a learning medium.

Ubuntu is definitely the Linux desktop new user's distro of choice, most especially for those coming from a Windows world, as it helps with that transition more than most and is extremely well-rounded. However, if you have every intention of rolling up your sleeves and peeking under the hood as soon as possible, Ubuntu has lots of oddities that don't exist in most other distros, even the other Debian ones. It is still a good dev learning environment for things like apache, mysql, php, Lua, and so forth. But if you have 'Linux admin' in mind at some point, Ubuntu is an odd duck and may not adequantly prepare you for the rest of the Linux world.

If you do have 'Linux admin' in mind at some point, or you have intentions of jumping into using Linux in production environments such as ISP's, you may be better served going with Suse, Fedora, or even Redhat ES3 or 4. I can't definitively say whether Redhat ES3/4 is the most widespread production Linux distro overall, but I'm pretty sure it is the most-used rpm-based one (and it's the one that the company I work for uses across its national footprint in production environments). I'm sure someone else can offer up the equivalent deb-based one (probably Suse?).

Generally speaking, I'd probably steer towards recommending Fedora as a learning medium that can give you all the power and versatility you want, and keep from teaching you bad habits or force you to deal with wild oddities. But for myself, I choose Ubuntu for the fun and flavor of it (both as a home dev environment, and a workstation at work).

In case it wasn't obvious from my post, I am an Ubuntu user, a lot of my reasons mirroring Sllik's. It's got some nice eye candy, and I can set up a lamp (linux-apache-mysql-php) and Java+Eclipse development environments within a few clicks too. I also dig dpkg.

Sllik, could you expand on the oddities you're referring to from the Linux admin standpoint, concerning both Ubuntu vs. debian and Ubuntu vs. non-debian? The only thing I can think of here is the whole no root thing, but that's trivially overcome. However, I don't have a lot of experience in the Linux admin standpoint, so I'm curious what you have to say. (As an aside, I did some coding on an Ubuntu Server for the first time yesterday, so it actually does have some presence in the server arena.)

Jeff250 wrote:The only thing I can think of here is the whole no root thing, but that's trivially overcome.

Heh heh, yes: su root

For anyone (like me) who doesn't have long experience with Linux, the no root environment restriction is really a boon. It's much harder to screw things up those times when you think you know exactly what you're doing, and really don't have a clue. Learning's been considerably less painful with Ubuntu than say, the old Mandrake distro I tried a few years ago - just one of the reasons I recommend Ubuntu.

In Ubuntu, something like getting a root prompt is simple enough without the need for hacking the system so that it once again more closely behaves like other flavors of Linux. Simple sudo su - or sudo bash.

I was actually fuzzy on all the differences a co-worker and I ran into, so I had to sit down and talk it out with him, then go back and do a bit of rediscovery so we could collectively remember. Aside from the triviality of not enabling root login by default (which is a good safeguard and, as Jeff250 say, very easily overcome), some of the weirdnesses we remember finding were:

No such thing as /etc/inittab. You can't simply go in and tell the system that you want it to default to runlevel 3 on next boot by making a change to one number in that file, as almost all other distros support and expect. You don't even get the opportunities with grub to set the runlevel there; you have to edit /etc/mtab instead. This alone was extremely weird at first.

There's trappings of rc.d mechanisms, but the paths to various things is slightly off from the norm - or at least the norm according to Redhat/Fedora... it may be that other debian systems more closely follow what Ubuntu has done. The primary example being that there's an /etc/init.d/, but no /etc/rc.d/ and so forth. They tried implementing something that was supposedly more robust in Ubuntu Edgy, but I can't currently seem to find any references to it for Feisty, so they may have abandoned that direction (or I just didn't search hard enough).

Another oddity was that mail was not enabled by default (as in the command line executable, not any particular server), but I have a different opinion from my co-worker on this. I figured there was underlying security reasons for doing so, as well as keeping the distro streamlined by not installing something they would expect their desktop userbase to actively use. There are a few other default package choices that were made that rubbed him the wrong way, but that's something that fluctuates from distro to distro and isn't specific to Ubuntu.

One of the biggest ones for me personally was in the area of command-line options for configuring X or simply doing discovery on what vid card you have installed. While going in and looking at Xorg.0.log proves a good option in the end for most distros anyway, practically every command you can think of that would poll your vid card for details in other distros doesn't even exist in a Feisty install. There were probably deb packages I could have used to add one or two, but I didn't investigate much further after I got what I needed out of the xorg log itself. But it was a weird and frustrating few minutes.

I guess overall, there wasn't anything earth-shattering as far as differences were concerned, but they were certainly sources of frustration. Some of them may have more roots in debian-versus-redhat instead of being Ubuntu-specific, and I don't have the depth of knowledge with the various distros to say with certainty whether that's the case or not. I wouldn't consider any of the above to be good arguments from steering a new Linux user from an otherwise-solid and well-supported distro that both comforts and empowers.

I think the only other OS flavor that I've occasionally considered for similar reasons was OSX, because while it is a little more limiting initially, it's running a flavor of Unix under the hood (BSD, I think?) and you can do probably almost all the same things with some exceptions + get the power of the Mac user world and actually have access to a slightly larger pool of games that are officially supported for it. Wine and Cedega sort of trump that these days, as long as you're patient, but that's not usually something I'd say a new Linux/UNIX user migrating from the Windows world is going to be receptive to using.

you can edit the parameters grub passes to the kernel inside grub itself by pressing e on a entry.

Sllik wrote:I'm sure someone else can offer up the equivalent deb-based one (probably Suse?)

Suse is rpm-based, which is one of many reasons I use it. I'm frankly completely astounded that someone would set out with the objective of making a "human" Linux distro and somehow choose debian over rpm. Any distro that doesn't use rpms is going to be more trouble than a non-geek will be willing to put up with. If I had to guess as to their reasons for going with deb for Ubuntu, I would suppose that they let a "purity of open-sourceness" ideology trump the stated objectives behind Ubuntu.

I've been using Linux off and on since I got my first copy of Slackware in 1996, so "ease of use" isn't my top priority, but Suse does have it in spades. I am dual-booting my brand-new laptop. It came with 64-bit Vista, but many of the drivers wouldn't work right. I called the manufacturer for tech support, and they said that my model of laptop was "not yet approve by Microsoft for use with 64-bit Vista." Then why did they ship it to me with 64-bit Vista pre-installed? The manufacturer and the distributor bounced me back and forth like a ping-pong ball until I gave up and found drivers component-by-component on the website of the companies that made the individual components. Meanwhile, openSUSE 10.3 worked perfectly out of the box. It was a very surreal experience, having a dual-boot system where the Linux side worked perfectly with no tweaking required while the Windows side required hours of painful work just to achieve basic functionality.

sablefire wrote:Any distro that doesn't use rpms is going to be more trouble than a non-geek will be willing to put up with. .

Qualify that statement.

fliptw wrote:Qualify that statement.

Don't think I need to.
Through the miracle of "circular logic:"

1. A non-geek would not like using a non-rpm-based distro; ergo:

2. A person who likes using a non-rpm-based distro must be a geek; ergo: (see '1').

As long as it's not Gentoo, I think I can use almost any distro.

Well, as long as I can use Smart on it for package management. Which means Suse, RedHat, and all Ubuntu flavors.