This really comes down to what do they want to do with the machines.
Are these going to be desktops for users? Are these going to be
servers? Are these going to be used to teach a class on Linux?
I've installed quite a good number of different distros in "my day."
(Always wanted to say that! :0) And in my experience it just comes down
to what the machines are going to do.
Mandrake makes a great desktop for new users. It's stable, is
reasonably secure "right out of the box." It's cute, people are drawn
to it.
RedHAT, especially lately, seem to have abandoned security. 7.1 out of
the box can be hacked into in minutes. Recently we installed a 7.1
machine, and 25 minutes after the server was installed, it was already
hacked and somebody using portscanning software! That was a server
install! But RedHAT 6.2 is very sound! We went back to that version
for that server, no problems. Installing apps comes very easy.
Everything is made in Linux for RedHAT.
Debian has a following of users that at times have a complex thinking
they're the group of elite *nix users. It is however very secure, in my
experience it's a pain in the butt to install. There is starting to be
more and more support for it as far as software as well as hardware. As
far as a desktop machine for a regular every day user, I would suggest
against it.
SuSE is a muscle car. I know we through around a lot of car comparisons
when it comes to the distro wars, but it's a pretty package, but tuned
up a bit. Security is good, apps are plenty, but not as many as RedHAT
or Mandrake. It's a long, hardware intensive install. SuSE 7.0 was 6
discs I believe. Took almost 2 hours to install. But it was very solid
and sound when installed.
Caldera had the best install. I used that for a month or so before
Mandrake 7.0 came out. After that I've used Mandrake for my
workstations. It was pretty simple, nothing to complicated about it,
but I don't know about it being a real sound workstation, it was very
much so an in for Windows users. Administration was next to none, but
since there wasn't much to administer, that would cut back on the work
needed.
FreeBSD is a server distro if you ask me. I know some people do use it
for a workstation, but it's a damn good server. Kernel compiles are
easy and quick, very secure, a lot of ISPs use them for servers. You'll
have a very solid server, that once it's configured to your liking, only
backups are needed. Talk to somebody else about using it as a desktop.
OpenBSD is a server only really. You can lock that machine down so
tight, the only way you can get into it, would be to sit down at it's
keyboard. But the web server and mail server and everything else will
work great! Not a desktop OS at all! I've tried 4 times and I couldn't
get Xwindows to work correctly at all!
Slackware wasn't anything impressive honestly. It's install was a lot
like FreeBSD, but nothing special. I honestly didn't leave it installed
long enough since I had to use that machine as a test server for RedHAT
for our current project.
But where you'll find a fair comparison of the distros to let you know
which one you should choose for what, good luck! I've looked. All of
them have been out dated, and biased. But something like this should be
researched AFTER they know what they want to do with the machines.
Hope that helps a little.
tdh
--
T. Holmes
-----------------
UNIXTECHS.org
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----------------
"Real Men Use Vi!"
Uptime:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
11:02pm up 6 days, 9:56, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
--------------------------------------------------------------------
| Hi...In my college we are going to install in about 20 PC's one Linux
| distribution..... I believe that LM 8.0 is the best one i ever seen so far
| for the purposes we had... Another persons think that SuSE 7.1 is the best,
| another ones think that RH 7.2 is better, and so on....
|
| The question is, i want to know some place on the internet, or some document
| which contains a further explication of why to choose LM instead other
| distributions..
|
| Thanks
|
| Bytes
|
|
|
|
------------------------------------------------------------------
