On Sun, 28 Nov 2004 21:36:38 -0700
"Joe and Colleen Huber" <
huber@fastq.com> wrote:
> I'm sure this gets asked on a regular basis but I'm not having much luck
> turning anything up in the archives so here goes... I'm looking for a
> recommendation for which distribution to go with as a "newbie."
>
> As a bit more information while trying not to ask too many things as once...
> I've been programming (OpenVMS) for the last decade, had set up my PC to
> dual boot Win 2000 and RedHat 7.1 about 2 years ago (wanted to play around
> with web design) and had Apache running on the RedHat side, poked around a
> bit, then things sort of fell by the wayside. All I have is a (win)modem.
>
> I was talking to qwest on Tuesday (just the minimum - 256 upload/download).
> Haven't talked to Cox. If anyone has any comments good, bad or otherwise on
> either I'd appreciate those as well. Qwest said they would handle all the
> set up on the PC (I didn't ask if that meant "windows set-up").
>
> The PC I have at the moment is almost 6. The short term (shortly after
> Christmas) is a (new) dual boot system Windows (for the wife) and some Linux
> distro. I've got a hosted website out there - static HTML with a sprinkling
> of JavaScript. Things are getting to the point where I would like to start
> getting into some server side stuff (get Apache and MySQL running) so that I
> have something to learn/test on for web development. Should I just pull the
> RedHat 7.1 off the shelf? I get the impression that RedHat has sort of moved
> away from the "personal computing" market.
>
> Any thoughts appreciated.
> Joe
Joe,
Quite a few questione there! (HINT: keep it to one Q per post and others will find it easier to answer.)
OK. Newbie distros - Tons out there. You might have a look at DistroWatch[1] for a description of each. Mandrake[2], Fedora[3], and SUSE[4] are amoung the most popular. Some like Mepis[5] and Ubuntu[6] but I think you'd find them too lightweight for what you'd want to do later, such as server stuff.
You can't go wrong with either Debian[7] or Slackware[8] for servers and they make fine desktops as well - just won't hold your hand as much as the others.
Since you're used RH you might find that White Box Linux[9] fits the bill as well.
You'll find PLUGers on the list that use Cox or DSL. I'd recommend FastQ for DSL. You'll be able to run your own server, something Cox won't let you do with the home service. You might look into
www.linode.com, too.
Dennisk
[1]
http://distrowatch.com/
[2]
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en-us/
[3]
http://fedora.redhat.com/
[4]
http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/index.html
[5]
http://mepis.org/
[6]
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
[7]
http://www.debian.org/
[8]
http://www.slackware.com/
[9]
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/
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