in reply to My first "Windows Anonymous" session

About four years ago I too took the plunge into linux after years of being a microserf by "playing around" with Mandrake and Redhat.

I would like to humbly recommend checking out Debian as I have found it to be the ultimate lazy-man's distro...it works, is easy to maintain and best of all, it is a non-commercial distro which is the whole reason I was getting away from MS in the first place ;-)

The Debian website has much info but in addition I would recommend Debian Planet and Debian Help as these two sites saved what little hair I seem to have left.

Lastly, if you are like me you will be wanting to do all of the above on a laptop which brings it's own set of challanges to the mix...so I add in to my recommendations Linux On Laptops which, frankly is nearly as much of a god-send as Perlmonks has been to me.

As for books....quite honestly, if you are an MCSE...save your money...there are better on-line resources that won't cost you money and most of the books are about half "how to install" anyway.....with the notable exception of the Linux Desk Reference by Scott Hawkins which I used quite a bit until I eventually got more comfortable typing in "man" when I forget what a command does...which is pretty much daily

Good luck, and welcome to the world of former MS users.....come on in, the water is just fine.

  • Comment on Re: My first "Windows Anonymous" session

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: My first "Windows Anonymous" session
by SyN/AcK (Scribe) on Jul 18, 2003 at 04:30 UTC

    In reply to phydeauxarff, most of the *Nix distro's are free, if that's what you mean by non-commercial.

    Debian is a great recommendation, as is your page on Linux On Laptops. Actually the reason I had not included Debian in my recommendations is that I've had trouble installing it on my laptop (which the good people at Linux On Laptops fixed for me), and I have not with Mandrake or RedHat.

    In any case, if you are interested in a source that is good for learning the general commands available in *Nix and how to use them, you could check out Linux Commands

    I've found that link to be very helpful to me in conjunction with the man pages. Also, some Linux versions have the info facility which provides some good in depth info on certain topics. For example, I had an assignment that I had to use bison to do, so I typed info bison at the prompt and it pulled up several examples of using bison.

    Hope this Helps.
[reply]
      Actually, I meant 'non-commmercial' to be descriptive of the fact that Debian is not a company while Redhat and Mandrake are both companies and the distributions part of a commercial enterprise.

      While the others are open-source and can be obtained at no cost (or little cost if you consider the media and bandwidth to obtain them), they are commercial entities driven by commercial needs such as market share and I believe this affects their offerings.

      Debian has no profit motive and no shareholders to answer to and this shows in that often their distro doesn't include the latest whiz-bang feature, but IMHO the stable distro is just that....rock solid.

[reply]

        Ok, well in that case I would have to agree with you. The other annoying thing you get with Redhat is the up2date feature... while its sweet for keeping your system patched, you got to either pay for it now, or fill out a survey every week. I never catch the surveys in time.

        Plus if you use debian, you get that extra cool apt-get utillity, which is a God send.

        By the way, I agree with you, it is a very stable version, I'm actually running either Debian or GenToo on my entire network (except my Laptop which is Mandrake 9). Just in my prior experience, I think its easier for a Windows user to migrate to Mandrake or Redhat first, since it will feel more like windows.

[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom