| Stephen Gran on 11 Feb 2006 15:13:52 -0000 |
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On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 04:08:27PM -0500, Ronald Kaye Jr said: > Suppose you were teaching a linux class to networking students. > > you want to give your students exposure to 4 or 5 at most > distros. job marketability and installed base are of primary importance. > > 1) what criteria would you use to make this decision? This depends on how much time you will have to teach them, and what their starting point is. The thing I've noticed more and more over the years is that linux is linux is linux. Distro choice really matters very little in the end. It's just the front ends to doing the the tedious tasks are handled differently everywhere. If you have time to teach them what's going on in reality, then you could finish with a shortish 'and here's how they do it' section. If you don't have that kind of time, I would pick relatively representative distributions based on how they handle software installation - an rpm distro, a dpkg distro, a tarball distro, and a source distro. So, some redhat, rhel, centos, suse, etc as the first, debian, ubuntu, knoppix, etc as the second, slackware as third, and gentoo or LFS for the last one. I would approach it this way because this is mostly where people get themselves in trouble on new systems. The other stuff of administering linux (editing a config file, adding a user, etc), has different front ends, but is straight forward enough to do manually that you just don't need to care about how the particualar distro handles it. > 2) what would your current choices be ( i will start with fedora core and suse) To be frank, Suse doesn't seem that important in the US job market - you do see it, but it seems like it's much more important in Europe than in the US. If you're looking for the commercial picks, go with RHEL/Fedora/whatever of the moment. Redhat is still the mainstay of corporate linux in the US. > 3) is there central location for a list of distros and hardware requirements? > (we may want to look into distros for our old, hardware challenged equipment, > like my old ibm p2 200-400 MHz PCs) Um, only semi serious here, but is there still computer hardware you can't run linux on? I seem to be running it on my adsl modem and my dvd player (they came that way, rather than me doing it), for instance. Just the usual advice for slow hardware - don't ask it to do too much, so stay with a distro that doesn't install and start every service under the sun. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Stephen Gran | Ever wonder if taxation without | | steve@lobefin.net | representation might have been cheaper? | | http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Attachment:
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