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June 18, 2005

Why Linux

Filed under: Linux — cangione @ 1:06 am

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

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