Justin said:
I respect your wanting to go with some other OS than one from Micro$oft. What's the best flavor of linux for me, a somewhat technically capable person but new to Linux? Lycoris looks cool. My 2nd PC is a Compaq Deskpro small form PC, Pentium 2, 450mhz. It has Win98 on it now. My AMD Athlon system has XP.
[Kind of long, mostly antecdotal]
I've never used Lycoris personally, but it appears to be pretty easy to get started with.
One of the things that you'll find about linux, in general, is that it doesn't take mammoth hardware to run it. For many distros, a PII/450 is plenty. Sure, it won't run as fast as a faster machine (duh?), but it works and works well. In fact, I'm running a stripped down version of linux in my basement - on a 33MHz 486/DX2 w/ 24MB of RAM, booted from a floppy.
Distrowatch.com (
http://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major) is a good place to start. They have good summaries of the distros available, and you can see what you think you're comfortable with. Linux documentation is available all over the place, but I often turn first to linuxdoc.org when I'm trying to figure something out. I personally use Redhat, but partly because it is an easy, popular, and most important to me, *stable* server platform. I've had it running for over a year without a reboot. Had it not been for unannounced power outages and a couple of harddisk failures, I'm sure it would have kept going long beyond that.
I've also used Mandrake and was fairly happy with it, until I did too many dumb things in a row (by choice, not accidentally) and finally broke it real good.
Knoppix seems like a good way to just play without actually changing anything on your harddrive - just boot from the CD and away you go.
One of the things I really like about linux it being free: Free as in speech, and free as in beer. You don't have to fret about sinking 300$ into something you might hate. If there is something about the distro you don't like, you have a plethora of options, ie: don't like KSpread (the KDE spreadsheet program)? go fetch Gnumeric or OpenOffice. If you really get adept, and you find something that really just bugs you, there is probably an option to change that setting. If not, you have the freedom to change the code to make it work like you want it to. I've done this on several occasions. Recently I was trying to generate 700 single-page PDFs for a report - each one the same except about a different area of Ohio. Can you imagine trying to do this with Word? I downloaded a perl tool called 'PDF::Reuse' and tied it into my database. There was a problem and the author of PDF::Reuse helped me get around it. Another problem I had I was able to fix myself by editing the
PDF::Reuse source code.
I've always felt like Windows is sort of like those cars at Disney World which follow the track. You can kind of steer them, but they're going to go where the track goes. Linux is more like off-roading - you can go wherever the hell you want. You might get lost, but at least you have the freedom to get lost.
-rj
98SL2
(but who the hell has every payed for an MS OS at home eh?)