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Fedora Core 4 has been released and provides some nice improvements.

http://fedora.redhat.com/

• UI is still very clean. Nice update with GNOME placing
  preferences and system settings under the Desktop start icon.
• Networking with windows networks has been cleaned up. I can
  finally see all of my Windows shares when browsing the Network.

yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for
rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out
what things should occur to install packages.

Home Page: http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/

How It Works: http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/howitworks.ptml

NOTE: Always make sure you update yum itself before you
update the rest of the rpms!

Command:

Then run:

A runlevel is a software configuration of the system that
allows only a selected group of processes to exist. Init can run the
system in one of eight runlevels. The main runlevels are 0-6. The
system runs in only one of these runlevels at a time. Typically these
runlevels are used for different purposes. Run level 5 is X11.
If you don't want to boot into the UI use runlevel 3.

Hit a key when you get the booting....message, then hit "a" to append
to the command line. Then add"3". This will boot into runlevel 3
and should put you at a text-based prompt to login.

Samba is an Open Source suite that provides file and print services to
various clients including Windows operating systems. It is available
under the GNU General Public License. More info is available at
http://us4.samba.org/samba

The smbfs command can be used to mount a Windows Share
within Linux.

Example:

I am often asked Why Linux. Why go through the trouble?
Which distribution to use? And most importantly what does it
buy me?

For those of us that grew up with the command prompt and text based UIs
you will feel at home with Linux. Finding things and interacting with
text based files is so much simpler with Linux you will wonder how you
found anything with the windows search engine. (The only saving grace
these days for windows search is the Google Desktop search engine) On
Linux you can find things and then dig down into what you have found
all from the command line. It is a great research OS.

How should I set up Linux? Various ways to do this but I highly
recommend setting up Linux in VMWARE to get started. You can still run
your windows operating system but run Linux on top of it.

The Various Distributions I have worked with:

• Fedora Core 3 - A recent build of a community based
  distribution. No cost but you have to download the ISO images and burn
  them to CD's or DVDs before you get started. This is not very difficult
  but another step and you need some bandwidth. If you run FC3 as your
  primary OS you can make VMWARE run on this distribution but you need to
  make sure you have a C compiler on your system. Has good USB hotplug
  support.
• Red Hat 9 Enterprise - The latest release of the Red Hat
  distribution. This is a fairly old distribution but the defacto
  standard for the enterprise. Many applications are certified against
  this build. VMWARE comes precompiled to run on this distribution.
• SUSE - A well put together distribution. Biggest draw back
  is that if you are trying to run this as your primary operating system,
  VMWARE will not run. A big bummer if you are still addicted to MS
  Outlook for company mail or that one windows program you can't live
  without.

CA