Chris Dickson wrote:
>I am a complete newbie to the world of linux however I want to explore. I
>have a box on to which I plan to put linux, if I could figure it out I would
>make it an internet firewall and a mail server, poss. other stuff if I got
>adventurous. The thing is what distro so I choose?
>
>At the moment I a copy of SuSE which came with a book and I have downloaded
>Mandrake and Red Hat as these were the names I had heard of most. What would
>you recommend I install which isn't extremely complicated but still gives me
>power to do what I want with it.
>
>Thanks in advance for all suggestions
>
>Chris
>
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Hi Chris,
I personally would recommend Mandrake as a first distro, its very easy
to install, and very compatible. Almost any software package you
download in binary format will work, it has a good auto-update program
and very good configuration programs, and it looks cute. Its not famed
for being super secure, but thats nothing you can't change by locking it
down a bit.
The only downside to mandrake is its quite big, a small installation is
about 200mb, and its installer takes a good bit of ram so not as easy to
install on low spec machines.
Suse, I havent used since v5.2 but at the time it had a lot of good
features, it was easy to set up, although i ditched it in the end
because getting a lot of software to run out of the box was a lot of
hassle, i'm sure its not the case nowadays and I have heard good reports
about YaST2 (the graphical setup tool) also. Lawrence (IIRC) and quite a
few active members of the group use SuSE so its probably a good start also.
Red-Hat. I havent used red-hat in years, but i guess its just as good
or bad as any other. In theory it should be very compatible with RPM
but don't quote me on that. Its also not favored as being super secure,
but i guess thats a trade off you sometimes make between ease of use and
security.
At the end of the day, it doesnt really matter which distro you use if
you intend to do things by hand, although that can be quite tricky for
a first time user, from experience i've found it easier to use the setup
wizards to begin with then once you want to learn a particular package,
start doing it by hand. If you want to dive in the deep end there is
debian, i dont like it personally because its completely unintuative
but it does have a nice package management suite.
Hope that helps make your mind up. Welcome to the dark side
Cheers
David
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