| Tobias DiPasquale on 12 Sep 2004 23:44:02 -0000 |
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sep 12, 2004, at 6:32 PM, Ron Mansolino wrote: The postal fairies left a spindle of cd-rs under my mailbox, so I've been d/ling Fedora core 2. (3Mps from duke.edu-> Comcast :)
So I need to make some decisions. I assume I'll have to pick window management stuff. I've never been lucky with FreeBSD; aside from X and Netscape I don't have a lot of experience with all the GUI stuff. I'm mostly interested in learning things I'll need to support in the workplace, so I'm curious as to what is used in corporate deployments. (It seems that the clueful people prefer Debian, but I see Red Hat more often when a job announcement mentions a specific distribution). Samba, NFS, OpenLDAP. That's the kind of thing most often used and its used because it integrates with legacy stuff like Windows and Solaris. You'd do well to check that out. Debian is nice, but with the inclusion of Yum and APT in RedHat, its lost its advantages in my mind and I'd go with RedHat or SuSE, especially if you want to run software from the 90's. Debian's release cycle to stable is balls slow and no one's forcing you to upgrade your RH installation if you're concerned about stability. I know I'm going to get flamed for this opinion, but we ran Debian for years and are now switching to RedHat because of the above concerns (not to mention the fact that you can find more people who know RedHat). Plus, its _MUCH_ easier to make custom RPMs than it is to make custom dpkgs (Debian's package format). I learned how to package software with RPM in a few hours (two days ago, in fact); Debian has 5 different places for information on how to make dpkgs and they're all wrong in some way(s) or another. What about firewall/security packages? My windows pc is pretty secure, iptables can't be beat for firewalling and pretty much anyone using Linux for network security is already using this. There's a great tutorial for iptables here: http://iptables-tutorial.frozentux.net/ Once your good with the above stuff, hit http://lartc.org/ for some really advanced stuff that you can do with the free tools provided with every Linux distro. About mail: I'm familiar with sendmail and qmail, but I'd like to check out sendmail. sendmail is better at integrating with everything than qmail, b/c qmail's author refuses to make any changes to it whatsoever. However, I would recommend Postfix; its faster and more secure than sendmail and also integrates nicely with a number of anti-spam (SA) and anti-virus (ClamAV) packages, as well as not a few mailing list managers (mailman). Also, has anyone played with this: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
What else should I look out for (or beware of)? CUPS (http://www.cups.org/) is notoriously hard to configure, so definitely get some practice with that in as many situations as you can muster. High-end laser printers seem to work well with CUPS, but printers that can't broadcast their own configuration are sometimes a pain to get working and shared with CUPS. Having said that, CUPS is still the best printing software for Linux today. HTH. Good luck :) P.S. Was Doug helpful at all with that last thing? He runs SPAM-L, so he's a good guy for that kind of thing, but I don't know if he ever got back to you. - -- Tobias DiPasquale 202A 04C4 2CE6 B985 8520 88D6 CD25 1A6C B9B5 1595 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (Darwin) iD8DBQFBRN8LzSUabLm1FZURAse5AJ97nhK7uFRtDoqrlaLNMVyTD9dFlQCgi+xc wDWHnJi/HSNicc7G+m/X5gs= =Tq3f -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
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