Re: [Sheflug] A place to start with Linux.. help please

[lesleyb <lesley.binks [at] xxxxxxxxx>]

Beer Monster wrote:
> Alan Pope wrote:
>
> > I use Ubuntu which can be downloaded from http://ubuntulinux.org/ .
> > It's got good hardware support and for the most part "Just Works
> > (tm)". You'll probably get lots of recommendations for Fedora,
> > Mandrake, Ubuntu and others. I'd try a few out until you're happy with
> > one.
> >
> >  
> > XMMS is quite a nice mp3 player - similar to Winamp. Firefox and
> > Thunderbird come with Ubuntu. You can also backup your Thunderbird
> > config on windows and use it under linux - this is what I did when I
> > migrated the wifes PC from Windows to Linux.
> >
> >  
> Hi Al,
>
> Thanks for this advice.  It seems that Ubuntu is a good place to start 
> and it's not one that i've heard of as much as SUSE/Mandrake etc, but 
> i'll download it and give it a whirl.
>
> Cheers
> Col
I've SuSE'd for many a year so I buy a new SuSE distro every now and 
then.  To be honest the 'main distro's' like SuSE Mandrake RH are 
products based on Linux these days.  I think all of these are rpm based. 
 That's your software package management system.  I handle Thunderbird 
and Firefox outside of that system.

I think SuSE, RH and Mandrake are a flavour of what lies beneath.  SuSE 
are good and I assume RH and Mandrake are too, but I installed Ubuntu a 
while back and was reasonably impressed with that.

It's a single CD installation procedure with enough to get you ready to 
download more of what you need.  It's Debian based and I felt at ease 
with it fairly quickly.  I still haven't figured out what was happening 
on port 764 yet a port which seemed to be open after installation.

Debian is a 15 CD set so Ubuntu offers an easy Debian-style route.
This uses a different software management system but which is equally as 
efficient as the rpm system.  The configuration, and /etc directory as a 
whole, seemed far simpler than it is with SuSE and, if you want to play 
around with something where almost everything is where most things tell 
you they are, then I would strongly suggest Ubuntu.

HTH

Lesley
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