How much have you read about Linux?
Everything you need to know is freely available online. A good
source of these documents is The Linux Documentation Project at
http://www.tldp.org/ . Most Linux folks are in to both free source and
free documentation. You can find printed versions of the same documents.
When talking about Linux, there's a lot of talk about "Linux
Distributions". Wikipedia has a decent article on this, if you don't
know what it is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution
Personally, I've been recommending the Ubuntu (or Kubuntu)
distributions. It also has the advantage of having "Wubi" -- an Ubuntu
installer for Windows that can install Ubuntu / Kubuntu alongside
Windows to try it out. http://wubi-installer.org/
We all started somewhere, and a surprising number of us started with
simply the desire for something other than the Microsoft Monstrosity.
I picked up Linux in 1995, before Windows 95 was on the market, and it
appeared clear from the betas that it would be ugly as sin.
There are a number of different major desktop environments. The two
most popular desktop environments at this point are probably GNOME
(used by default in Ubuntu) and KDE (used by default in Kubuntu). Some
distributions allow both GNONE and KDE applications to be used alongside
each other, while others only have GNOME or KDE available. Just because
GNOME and KDE are popular, that doesn't mean there aren't others. There
are a *lot* of options available, some of them more light-weight than
others.
Distribution wars can, at times, reach an almost religious zeal. I
recommend you try more than one. More specifically, I recommend you
try at least one RPM-based distribution and at least one DEB-based
distribution. (For a good time, and an experience of the full range of
potential, you could try them in this order: Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu,
Foresight.)
However, when getting your feet wet in Linux, I recommend you stick
with one distribution until you feel comfortable enough to branch out.
I recommend Ubuntu/Kubuntu both for the ease of install and general
use, and also because there are a lot of applications you can play with
without installing anything from source. (There are even a wide variety
of options for "standard" components that are really core to the basic
functionality.)
If you have older hardware (more than 10 years old) I, personally,
recommend Debian. (There are others, some of which may still support 386
4MB machines, but that hardware is getting pretty rare.) Debian requires
64MB RAM and 1G HD min. with no desktop. They recommend a Pentium 4
1GHz with 256MB RAM for a system with no desktop. (No desktop meaning
text-mode only.) The great thing about Debian is that if you pick your
packages carefully, you can actually get away with only 64M. They have
lighter weight alternatives of pretty much all the larger components.
If you have hardware that is too old to run a light-weight Linux, you
could always look in to FreeDOS. http://www.freedos.org/ Almost as free
as Linux (some things may not have source), but a lot more DOS-like.
(When they hit 1.0, they had all the features of MS DOS 7. Most DOS
things should work, unless they used particularly obscure undocumented
features.)
Cheers,
Steven Black
--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
Fingerprint: 108C 089C EFA4 832C BF07 78C2 DE71 5433 8596 FA8E
On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 08:10:30AM -0400, Paul Proctor wrote:
> Hi,
> You guys don't know me but I am sorta desperate. I know nothing about
> LINUX. I have been using and building PC's since the days of DOS.
> I need a new OS and lots of advice on LINUX. My first step should
> probably be to attend a meeting I guess. Any help would be much
> apreciated!
>
> Thanx,
> Paul Proctor
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