pinniped's Profile

Hahaha - sounds like BergenDog and vb_baysider are just learning how to use Linux then. The advice given in the article is pretty good and happens to be the same advice I give a lot of people: If you have a friend who can use Linux, start out with whatever distribution they have. Dragging someone over to your computer to help you out is so much more efficient than sitting at a second machine and posting questions or chatting with someone on the IRC ##Linux channel. Fedora and Suse will probably run on the most hardware and are the least painful to install. Knoppix and Ubuntu (both based on Debian) are the next easiest in my opinion, but may be lacking drivers because the Debian team is fanatic about the definition of 'free software' and puts a lot of effort into stripping non-free drivers from its archives. (Some of which the Knoppix and Ubuntu maintainers then spend time putting back in!) Personally, I have always used Debian. Recently I spent 48 hours getting pure AMD64 code installed on my Opteron beast (thanks to a buggy install script... grrr... oh well, that release was not officially supported so I can't complain too much). But - despite all the hair rending, I'm happy with my Debian box. I can't wait until OpenOffice functions properly on an AMD64! Uh - BergenDog - why do you want a graphical interface on a machine which is just going to be a server? I read stuff like that and I just go: "man, you're whacked! - what a crazy idea - a GUI on a server!". Well, don't give up - it's definitely not easy to learn, but you are well and truly the master of the computer as opposed to being a slave of the GUI configurators. What I find really hilarious about reading how other people try, somewhat succeed and give up is that I knew someone who was 73 years old at the time (this was 2001) and he said one day "I heard about this Linux thing and I read somewhere that Debian was the best distribution to use so I thought I'd give it a try". I told him that Debian was one of the worst distributions for beginners, but he just wouldn't listen. Within a week he had it up and running and had configured Apache and set up his own website with photos for his children and grandchildren to look at. I don't know if I could have done that in a week as a beginner. This guy was an electronics technician by trade - not a computer programmer. So - there's hope yet for you young 'uns! It's amazing what you can accomplish when you have no bias and ignore people who tell you "that's too hard!" hahaha!