Gentlepeople, This is the beginning of a series of (maybe dumb) questions relating to Linux, its installation, configuration and maintenance. (I hope this is an appropriate place.)
I am quite proficient with Windows but for a number of reasons I am not happy with it. So as a first step I am trying to rid my house of it (I cannot be 100% successful with this because of my son's games, but I can at least be about 80% successful). However, I have a working network and am not prepared to break it (completely), so I am trying to do an incremental transfer. I have done a number of Linux installs and have had varying success in getting things working. However, I do not feel I am in control of what I doing. So here is my first question: What distribution should I use as my base? I have a number of criteria I want to satisfy so please read these criteria before you advocate your favourite distribution and feel free to offer different distributions for my different purposes: The main criterion is what I call "maximum parsimony". I do not want bloated installs (one of my reasons for being disenchanted with Windows). I only want to install on each machine the minimum needed to serve the purpose of that machine and then to add/remove (reasonably easily) packages I need (or don't as the case may be). At least two (one server and one workstation) will be designated "production" and I want them to always work, be stable and easily maintainable (upgradeable and patchable). I am a programmer (of sorts) so I eventually want to learn how to install and modify source distributions. I am also planning to do some work on an open source project, so I will be targeting machines for a number of purposes. To this end, it would be preferable for me to be able to create my own distributions from a suitable base. I won't have a lot of choice what hardware I use (much of it will be old) and I may have to trash and rebuild some machines multiple times. I will not necessarily have a bootable CDROM drive. I regard these things as base for all machines: Linux kernel supporting machine hardware Base networking C/C++ compiler to be able compile kernel/modules locally on machine Printing Web browsing X windows on workstations, not servers I am not afraid of the command line and advocate scripting to automate processes. However, graphical/browser interfaces sometimes make things easier in certain circumstances. I am not sure whether what I have said makes me sound like a "hacker", but I think that I am more a "control freak". My objective is to control and customize my environment. Please in your replies also state a local (Sydney, preferably in the city) source of the latest version of the distribution on CD at a reasonable price (approximately the cost of the medium). Thanks in advance. Brendan -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
