| Paul L. Snyder on Sat, 23 Feb 2002 00:26:00 -0500 |
|
On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Paul wrote: > I've heard that there are a couple Linux distributions based on Red Hat. > Mandrake being one. I've always used Red Hat. It's easy enough to get started > with and good enough for real IT work. Mandrake seems to babyish to me, not > that it's a bad desktop OS. > > > > got nowhere fast and went to Redhat. I've been hearing about Mandrake and > > was wondering anyone's two cents on choosing and operating system for a > > newbie, on later on for an expert, or whatever else different ones are good I can't see that Mandrake could be considered "babyish" compared to Red Hat. It's quite sharply engineered, if a bit rigid in some respects. There are a number of automation routines which are meant to make the user's life easier (harddrake, menudrake, etc.), which I haven't used much in the time I've been using Mandrake on my primary workstation. They might very well be helpful for a new user, I suppose. While Mandrake started off as a Red Hat derivative, it has since gone its own route, and is now a fully independant distribution. Mandrake seems to be slightly ahead of Red Hat on the version curve, integrating new versions of KDE and GNOME earlier. For what it's worth, Mandrake packages are compiled with Pentium optimizations, by default, while Red Hat compiles for generic i386. I've never used SuSE, so I can't speak to its new-user-usability, but it seems quite highly regarded. Debian is an excellent distribution, though perhaps not the best one upon which to cut your teeth. If you're looking for a project, there's always Linux-from-Scratch, where you build a system from the ground up, compiling everything by hand. (Though you probably want another Linux machine around to get the process started off.) Er, perhaps not the best tooth-cutting, either. Gentoo Linux is a fairly new distribution. Like LFS, everything is compiled locally, but there is an infrastructure to facilitate and automate the process. It's quite easy, from the experimentation I've done, to build a tightly focused machine with few extraneous files. Still a few glitches, and lots of development work required before this is going to become a major distribution. I've seen speculation that Gentoo is a good candidate for taking over some of Slackware's traditional userbase. "Babyish"? pls Attachment:
pgpkNkAYKatyr.pgp
|
|