Planning on installing Linux, Which version?

[dxkj]

I've used primarily unix environments for coding, etc, but I decided I would like to get a unix/type OS on my computer at home so I can do some work there. Which one should I go for?


Plenty of Unix experience, very little Linux experience.



I would plan on sticking this on my laptop, and possibly main system.

 

[Flatline]

If you want unix-like linux, I would go with Slackware. However, the *BSD projects would be IMO the most unix-like free OSes out there.

 

[Farfrael]

Plenty of threads already about this subject. (http://forums.anandtech.com/search.cfm?catid=34)

If you are accustomed to a Unix environment you might want to try the various *BSD flavors.
If you want to use Linux, then i'll second Flatline's choice of Slackware. It is the most "Unix-like" of all the Linux distros.

 

[Olias]

Gentoo is easy to administer due to their on-line package database. It's caller Portage and takes care of all dependicies. Their Forums are also excelent for getting help.

Olias

 

[Kadarin]

Originally posted by: Olias
Gentoo is easy to administer due to their on-line package database. It's caller Portage and takes care of all dependicies. Their Forums are also excelent for getting help.

Olias

And their 2004.0 live cd is out now, which features kernel 2.6.3, KDE 3.2, and other up to date goodies.

 

[drag]

I think that Fedora is a good introductory experiance into linux. Redhat is the most common distro in the industry, so since Fedora is helped out by Redhat engineers it would create the most usefull experiance if your planning on getting a job that may be Linux-related.

Other then that any of the live CD distros like Knoppix, Suse eval CD or the Gentoo live cd is a great way to try stuff out with out commiting to a entire install.

Most people end up using 3-4 different distros before settling on something they like.

Also your hardware can make a big difference in your user experiance, if your building a computer from scratch for this it can give you the the advantage of using hardware whose vendors do a good job of supporting linux, which will make any install go buy with no more trouble then answering some questions about your network setup.

 

[Apathetic]

Check out SUSE 9.0. Lots of the system administration is lumped into a GUI tool called YAST. It makes things very easy for beginners yet SUSE allows more advance users to make configuation changes the old manual way too.

Dave

 

[sharq]

To be as close to Unix as possible, *BSD
For a linux distro that you can just install and start enjoying off the bat (assuming alot of your hardware is auto detected), the popular choices are:
Redhat/Fedora, Mandrake, Suse (Not necessarily in that order).
Slackware is a more hands on approach, if that is what you're looking for.

 

[episodic]

I'd like to second suse pro 9.0

Just do a google search on how to perform an ftp install and it is free that way.

 

[Nothinman]

If you actually like commercial unixes you'll be right at home with FreeBSD or probably even slackware which uses the horrid BSD init. I personally find them annoying, so many things that are handled for me by the package manager in Debian must be done manually. While it's good to know how to do those things without Debian's help incase of a problem, it's not something I like to do every day.