Maximillian Schwanekamp wrote:
> Here's an easy one, though I bet there is no consensus on the answer. Which
> Linux distribution is ideal to get started with?
My top three choices: Mandrake, KNOPPIX, and RedHat, in that order.
Mandrake is a traditional newby distribution. By newby, I mean that
they hide the Unixness to make the system seem slicker and provide GUI
front ends for common administration tasks. The installer is well
designed and it doesn't ask TOO many challenging questions. By
traditional, I mean that it comes from a company, has regular releases
at least once a year, and is all packaged up on CD-ROMs.
KNOPPIX is more interesting. Its primary incarnation is as a live CD.
That means you boot off the CD and don't necessarily install anything
to your hard drive. If you want to keep data around, you can create a
KNOPPIX filesystem on your Windows disk partition. If you decide you
want to make it permanent, you can run the installer and then you'll
have KNOPPIX on disk. KNOPPIX is based on Debian. Like Debian,
KNOPPIX is an all-volunteer effort, not a corporate product. It uses
Debian's update system, apt/dkpg. While there are official Debian
releases every few years, most Debian (and most KNOPPIX) users update
whenever they feel like it, to whatever is current at the time.
RedHat is popular, I think, because it has a lot of the same "feel" as
earlier Unices like Solaris. It's not a bad choice, all the parts are
well integrated, and, like Mandrake, it has GUI tools for many system
administration tasks. (Actually, so does KNOPPIX.) To me, though,
it's just not exciting.
On the other hand, all these distros are more alike than different.
So what do I run myself?
Gentoo on my home desktop.
RedHat at work (because I have to, not because I want to).
Mandrake on my laptop.
Debian on my servers.
KNOPPIX on various machines on occasion.
> Alright one more - I use Macromedia Studio, especially Dreamweaver. Does
> anything similar exist for Linux, specifically PHP? Zend Studio?
I'm not sure exactly what DreamWeaver does. (I know you create web
sites with it, but I don't know how much it helps.)
If you just want an HTML editor, take a look at:
Quanta
Mozilla Composer
bluefish
In that order.
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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