Distro Opinion

[Diello]

A very hot morning all -

I'm looking for your opinion on which distro to go for.

I basically have no knowledge what-so-ever in Linux - I played with SCO-UNIX many many years ago, but remember nothing of it.

I'm after something that is fully fuctional, not a lightweight version. It's primary focus will be running Apache/MySQL/PHP and a couple of development apps, and probably OpenOffice too.

I don't want to spend any money on it if I can avoid it - since it's just to get my feet wet - so something where I can download the ISO and burn it would be preferable.

Also, any recommendations on the best "get started" books would be great.

Many thanks

[Geoff]

Well, to be honest, I don't know what the best distro is for you. Its a very personal thing. Almost all the big distros will meet your requirements. Its simply down to which one you get on well with.

http://www.linuxiso.org is probably a good place to start. The best advice I can give you is to download a few and try them. Mandrake, Fedora, Gentoo and Debian are a good selection of starting points.

One thing you should do before starting out is to boot on the hardware you intend to use with a LiveCD. That way you get to find out if the hardware is compatible without having to go through a hard drive install. Its also useful for finding out with drivers work with your hardware as sometimes its not obvious. I recommend using Knoppix for this, it seems to have the best luck getting it right.

If your curious, I use Gentoo.

[tarquel]

Just to add a two cents, Powys CC favour Slackware. Its fairly straight-forward to setup and works nicely

(cant get the soddin' thing to install properly on my old SCSI-based HP NetServer )

Cheers,
N.

[mark]

Knoppix is lovely. I also tried KUbuntu [KDE desktop version of Ubuntu [x]]. KUbuntu seems very slim too. Doesn't Slackware have no GUI?

[Geoff]

Depends if you install one or not.

[tarquel]

lol

:P

[mark]

Depends if you install one or not.

K....

[Diello]

Thanks for all your opinions I shall no doubt be asking alot of dumb questions in the future.

In the process of downloading Fedora.

[Ric_]

Once you get your feet wet, give Debian a go too. Not as easy to set up and configure but the package management is very good and (due to the insanely paranoid maintainers of Debian) it's very stable so is ideal for servers.

Like Geoff said, try a few (you'll probably find some don't work first time which is no good if you want to get going without any knowledge) - Mandrake is the one I use if I'm unsure on the hardware.

[Geoff]

This article over at TipMonkies might be helpful too:

http://www.tipmonkies.com/2005/06/16/linux-distros/