WARNING: This email is sort of a rant, and sort of advice. Read at your own
risk!
There are a number of points to debate here, but it's a dead horse, so I'll
try not to be too "flammable". I do feel that Debian has more resources,
included documentation, excellent man pages, etc. and more intuitive
underlying structure than any other distribution. Aside from that, what you
said is true. Even of windows, it's much harder to look under the hood of
windows and at the point you want to actually change something your hands
are tied. But it's still possible to learn a lot about what windows
actually does.
Along these same lines, I have recently been playing around a lot with QNX.
They are supposedly fully POSIX compliant. Porting Linux applications is
supposed to be as easy as a "quick re-compile" (says this on their website;
gotta love marketing.) Anyway, when you get right down to it, it's a
barebones Unix-like OS on top of a Microkernel (not unlike the HURD). The
man pages are HORRIBLE and are not even installed by default. The only
decent documentation is in HTML format and is extremely sparse. QNX has
been around for a long time... you'd think they would do a better job at
simple things like this....
<deep breath>
So getting back to the original point, many Linux distributions are
extremely different. Hopefully the LSB will address this to some point (I
have my doubts). But being an idealist I feel that the best OS should win,
not the one with the most market share; specifically pertaining to Linux
distributions I firmly believe that Debian is the most organized, most
technically superior and most stable available. And hands-down, Debian is
the best OS for administration.
None of this takes the BSDs into account, all of which I've seen and used
are superior to most Linux distributions available for all of the reasons
I've stated.
Anyway... hopefully this is a sane argument and will help Mr. Russell make a
good decision on what to try out. Ultimately I'd suggest he install every
distribution he can get his hands on and pick the one he likes the most to
focus on. Remember we're talking about someone who wants to LEARN about the
guts here... right?
Blake Barnett
Sr. Unix Administrator
DevelopOnline
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim [
mailto:farli@qwest.net]
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 12:55 PM
To:
plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: Introductions
Just a point of clarification. Debian (and Slackware) are the hackers
dreams
in terms of learning the guts of Linux. But that doesnt mean you cant learn
just as much with any of the others. They just present you with a very
familiar type of GUI interface that makes using it right out of the box
easier. You can still dig under the hood any time you want.
On Thursday 19 July 2001 12:39, you wrote:
> If you really want to _learn_ linux, not just how to use it, but the
> technical nitty-gritty --Go with Debian. If you want to simply use linux
> as you would use windows then Mandrake is probably best.
>
> There's no better way to learn than diving in. Sink or swim. I must have
> re-installed Slackware 5,000 times when I first started learning linux.
>
> Blake Barnet
> Sr. Unix Administrator
> DevelopOnline
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ron Russell [mailto:ron@siliconbuddha.com]
> Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 11:43 AM
> To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
> Subject: Introductions
>
>
> Hello all. After my post to aztechlist I was referred over to here for
> being a good place to learn Linux stuff.
> I'm a Microsoft bigot and it looks like I'm turning to the dark side. <-
> Please don't flame me that was a joke.
>
> I'll be installing my first Linux OS this weekend and hopefully getting it
> to dual boot with Win2k. I haven't decided on a distribution yet, but it
> will probably be Redhat. I've been told that I should get the redhat
Linux
> bible that has the 7.0 distribution so I think I'll be buying that. Is
the
> Red Hat 7.0 distribution relatively current?
>
> And I'll be getting the O'Riley "Running Linux" book as well (due to
> popular opinion).
>
> Ron Russell - MCSE, CCNA, CNE
> 480-6-Buddha
> Silicon Buddha LLC
> Enlightened Network Services
> www.siliconbuddha.com
> Offering Free Vulnerability Assessments from the deserts of Phoenix
Arizona
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