Best Distro to LEARN?

[jlc]

So screw distro wars.

 

All good points, I'll stop now. Like I've said I've used Gentoo quite a bit and it is good too.

 

Enough said.

[tyme]

cybrjackle: You don't have to stop if you have counterpoints :-) I'm not trying to be arguementative or mean. I think we all agree that what distro you use doesn't matter, it's that you're using linux that counts. I try to avoid distro wars as much as possible...wasn't trying to imply that a distro war was occuring here. just wanted to point out that just because Gentoo has emerge doesn't mean it's not good for learning some internals of Linux :-). As sarah31 said somewhere (atleast I think it was her...) you can learn Linux just as well on any distro-it's just a matter of wanting to. Personally, I just need a reason to want to dig in and learn, Mandrake and the like make me lazy :wink:

[jlc]

I totally agree with you, Gentoo doesn't have all the handy dandy Config tools like RH/MD/Suse from that point you are absolutly correct.

 

With Gentoo I remember getting my TV card to work. First time I ever had to figure what went into the kernel without breaking it. All others didn't it for me.

 

You know I'm getting so board since I went back to RH, I think I might go home for lunch and put gentoo back on! You've sparked my interest in it again. The thing I ran into was when I did the /etc/ update or what ever it was called, i didn't alway's read CAREFULLY enough and crooked my system. A couple of times I fixed it, a couple time I got tired and BLEW it away.

 

Anyway, instead of me making bad arguments I think I might go back to it for awhile. play with it again. Do you know, can you do LVM with it?

 

:D

[tyme]

oh yeah, etc-update can be a pain. i actually screwed up my system once because there was a bunch of updates and i didn't run etc-update, i reboot for some reason, and the mofo wouldn't boot! I didn't realize till later what the problem was...so at that point I did a re-install. But I wanted to change my partition setup anyways (it was spanned across two drives, I wanted to change it to just one).

 

dunno 'bout LVM....never tried. if you want to change out of RH but don't want some of the oddities of Gentoo, I suggest Arch Linux (http://www.archlinux.org)...it's new and needs a few tweaks here and there (grouping of installs-GNOME/KDE/etc., but I was told that'll be in the next release of their package manager; and more/better fonts), but it definitely looks nice.

 

or just hunt around on distrowatch. i've noticed a lot of interesting distro's, just haven't had the time/energy/motivation to try them out.

[jlc]

Well, I think I've installed just about all of them but Arch, SourceMarge & Crux.

 

The only one's I've truley had fun with were Libranet 2.8 & Gentoo & a little bit of Slack. I keep meaning to stick with one and just use VmWare to play with the rest.

 

Maybe I'll do that with Gentoo, then I will give arch a shot through VmWare to see if it will work, I'll just have to figure out what modules vmware uses to do that one.

 

I've been to a lot of forums and this is just about the BEST one & Linuxiso.org with friendliness & libranet.

 

Slack, Debian & Gentoo all have there band of peole that just want to tell you shut up and go away. Which is quite a shock sometimes. I like to help people and if I can find figure it out through man <filename> or google I don't mind posting a question and saying hey WHAT UP with this? Without getting back lashed at. While I'm no Guru, I've been using Linux for 4-5 years and Solaris for the last couple, so I'm not in idiot and I don't care much when people make some childishess rant's about posts.

 

Of course I'm probably guilty about the childish part, but I will atleast try and help people.

 

Anyway, I'm glad to be a part of such a GOOD comunity with top notch GEEKS :P

 

That's a good thing in my book so please don't take offense to it and if you do, RTM or the info, don't member which on it is in!

 

I just realized this has 64 replies to it, I hope nobody new reads it from start to finish, they might get lost.

[Guest fubar::chi]

i didn't bother reading the rest of the posts i'm just gonna give an answer. I'd say gentoo. it's sparse on config tools (actually there were none the last time I checked) so you have to do everything by config files. learning stuff like chrooting and configuring my internet from the commenad line saved me in a lot of sticky situations I had with mandrake when the config tools just weren't and option or i needed to do some ifconfig magic before i could get a net connection and ask for help here.

The rest are just to easy for me. I learn but i learn slowly because of al the easy config tools.

[static]

I'm sorry, I don't mean to harp on this, but I don't get why people think that "gentoo" is for the advanced user?  If you can follow there great instructions on there site you can install it.  After that, it emerge this emerge that?  It's not really that advanced or a hard learning curve.

The only reason I said that is because of PERSONAL experience, which is all you are ever going to get from anyone in the world for any topic.

 

What I meant wasn't "Gentoo's so hard, man!" :x That's not what I said. I said to know linux. It taught me where things go, how ceratin things interact with other parts of the OS, etc. But that's also because I poked around and strayed from the instructions they gave because I wanted to learn, which is what I thought you wanted to do. Of course newbies can install via the instructions. :rool: LFS has instructions too! So what? The point is to customize your linux experience, not your distro. The custom distro is born out of the experience. It takes an advanced user to get a perfect working gentoo system if they're trying to learn while they go.

 

I'm not mad - I just get annoyed when people ask for an opinion just to shoot it down. You asked for a good one to learn on. Answer: Not one with a GUI installer if it's the OS structure you want to learn, and not one with something like apt-get or portage if its the maintainance you want to learn. For the latter I'd say use any distro and make a point of installing all packages from source.

 

Anyway, No hard feelings. ;)

 

=======================

 

I too think many gentoo users suck. But not all of them, and I find the distro pretty solid. It's one of my faves out of a few faves. I enjoyed the installation process. However, I am not one of those unenlightened zeolots who pushes any one distro. I believe I mentioned 5 distros in my response? That's why I have a problem with generalizing any group of people. Love thy neighboring beliefs.

[DOlson]

It is noteworthy that you can learn Linux just fine with any distro, so long as you make an effort to learn it.

 

In reality, you don't need to know how to do LFS, but it would be cool to do...

 

If I didn't start off with Mandrake and try learning as much as I could, I would have never got Gentoo running, nor would I have gotten Debian installed and configured.

[tyme]

DOlson's right. I, also, would never have gotten Gentoo running (haven't tired Debian) without having learned a lot on Mandrake before hand.

[Ixthusdan]

I also want to agree wholeheartedly with what DOlson said. I have tried several distros, more recently gentoo and archlinux. I find myself going back to mandrake in order to improve my box! The entire learning process is there in any distro, because linix is linux!

[Guest fubar::chi]

It is noteworthy that you can learn Linux just fine with any distro, so long as you make an effort to learn it.

 

In reality, you don't need to know how to do LFS, but it would be cool to do...

 

If I didn't start off with Mandrake and try learning as much as I could, I would have never got Gentoo running, nor would I have gotten Debian installed and configured.

i totally agree with this i learned a whole lot with mandrake specifically from the great documentation they have written. If i hadn't been as confortable with mandrake linux as I am I wouldn't have been confident enough to try gentoo, then debain and even BSD. Eventually I always come back to mandrake because it's easier to work with for me, oh yeah and eye candy is always readily available. The eye candy thing is true for gentoo too but then it takes time to compile. I dont wanna have to wait a day to compile X 4.3 just so I can use transparent cursors. For me that's what mandrake brings to the board.

Well i seem to have gone off an another tangent so i'll think i'll take this to another post

[jlc]

You are all correct, sorry I didn't mean to be so negative. In fact I went back to Gentoo, just to keep my system lean and mean. I had it up and running with Gnome, mozilla, gftp, xmms and some other stuff in about 12 hours from stage 1. So it wasn't that bad. I think I installed it so many times in the past, it was all in my head for the most part.

 

When I initally started this, I wasn't trying to imply that I was a noob. I've been using Linux for 4-5 years and it has been my main OS for the last 2 years, so I do understand Linux pretty good. I think I really should have put in the title.

 

"Should I learn everything there is to know about RedHat" since most of Corprate America uses it. The company I work with is starting to run some pilot programs with it to see how well it will work. So instead of moving over to a Solaris SA ( currently I install Solaris OS and hardware) I thought about also learning everything about RH and maybe doing the RHCE so I would be MORE qualified if they open a RH SA position. Linux was my First OS love, Solaris second. The company I work for employe's about 80K people and is I believe the 3 Largets Telcom in USA. So they use a lot of Solaris, HP and IBM systems ( I mean thousands ) . Some of the coolest systems I have ever got to work on.

 

In closing to my rambling giberesh. Sorry if I spoke harshly about any Linux, or there little clicks. Most Linux Distro's have some GREAT quality's!

 

Debian is awesome to work with and keep updated. (I'm still running a Sparc box with it on it.) Libranet is also fun to work with.

 

Gentoo is awesome/fun to work on & update.

 

Slackware is a little more tidious, but none the less, about as stable & secure as you can get.

 

RH is a nice out of the box give me some good Open Source stuff distro that is easy to update. A lot of company's use it and they do give back quite a bit to the community. ( I think they hose up there kernel quite a bit) still runs solid but hard to patch up THERE kernel.

 

SuSE/Mandrake are also fully bloated just like RH ( I mean Loaded) :lol: , Mandrake puts me off a little with the money troubles. SuSE has a lot of big things coming down and I see a lot of buisness moving to them with there different Server lines and Desktop additions. My selfish side doesn't care for the fact you can't Beta test or Download for free until about a month after wards. (Not so Open) Over the years thow, I have used SuSE more than any of the others and it is Solid. I also wonder how much an American Company would go with a German product? Some company's are like that, that brings politics into the forum and most people probably don't want that.

 

Arch & LFS look to have some good things going for them, but I haven't had a chance to do them. I was going to do Arch last weekend, but I know I could get Gentoo up and running without a problem. So I will probably give AL a go through VmWare.

 

If I missed some one's Distro out there, sorry those "I feel" are about as "Good as it Gets". IF you like something different, GREAT ( just don't say Windows)

 

Anyway, I will probably stick with Gentoo on my main box at home with a slow box running RH, and Solaris & Debian (really impressed with how it runs on sparc) running on my Sparc box. And run everything else through VmWare.

 

And I alway's have 6 box's at work to play with, for HP-UX, Solaris, RH and the dreaded Windows. 8) to learn from too.

 

Take care. You PEOPLE are awesome!

[jlc]

Well that's a fine how do you do, I just been talking with the Linux Manager about the pilot program and there testing.

 

SuSE - Mainframe zLinux

SuSE & Redhat - Desktp & Midrange servers.

 

SuSE was my main distro of choice for a couple of years and I know it better than the others.

 

To SuSE or not to SuSE, to RH or not to RH. That is the question. I hate the INTERNET, this stupid device Al Gore created has me changing my mind to much. Can I ban the internet?

 

Ok, I'm getting a little screwy!

[tyme]

I hate the INTERNET, this stupid device Al Gore created...

just for informational purposes:

Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet

what Gore actually said:

...I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

that is, in Congress. Read the article for a much longer more in-depth explanation. Also note that the Internet is different than the networking of computers. And creation!=invention.

 

(just in case people still think he actually _did_ claim to have invented the internet)

[jlc]

Thanks Tyme,

 

I was only kidding. I should of put the little "j/k" afterwards.

 

I actually think Gore is a pretty decent guy for being a Democrat! No, let's not start a political war. I found him to be just different than Billy boy. In a good way.