Re: larry

["Dale C. Scheetz" <dwarf@polaris.net>]

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 15:20:38 +0000
Bob Hutchinson <hutchlists@midwales.com> wrote:

> Here is my two bits worth on the Newbie v. Techie debate.
> 
> When someone comes to me and says 
> 'I want to use Linux, but don't have the skills'
> I will suggest that they

Point their browser at: ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions

There are lots of choices here, but the best way to start is with a Live
CD.

The easiest to start with (the iso is less than 50 MB) is 'damnsmall', a
Debian based live CD that fits on a business card CD and provides a
minimal system on a minimal desktop.

If you have the bandwidth for a full CD, or can spend a couple of bucks
at CheapBytes, try 'knoppix'. This is Debian based as well and contains
over 2 gig of packages integrated into a KDE desktop using a compressed
filesystem to fit it all on a 715 MB iso.

The knoppix technology has been used by many of the other live CD
installations found at ibiblio (btw they are not all live CDs even when
iso images are provided) including damnsmall.

Knoppix even has a manual ... well sort of. There is an O'Reilly book
called KNOPPIX HACKS (and it has a free Knoppix CD in the back cover ;-)
that gives instructions for many useful things that can be done with
Knoppix.

The major advantage of the Live CD is that you can put this CD into your
Windows box and reboot into Linux without touching the hard drive on the
Windows machine. You can get familiar with this desktop and even edit
your Windows documents using Open Office (you may have to figure out how
to remount your hard drive read/write, but that's always a good newbee
exercise ;-) and you get all thi without ever installing anything!

On the other hand both of the above are installable. I have used Knoppix
installs as the basis for servers and am currently writing this email
with Sylphead from a hard disk install of DSL (Damn Small Linux aka
damnsmall) at my home. After recovering the stripped out dpkg files you
can use apt-get to install anything Debian provides (I added abiword,
gnumeric, the gimp, xine, mahjongg and spider in this way).


<< lots of good stuff deleted >>

My conclusion is that Debian is doing what it intends (providing a
distribution that others can use) and should continue to provide
the broad based program set with a well integrated infrastructure to
support it. Anything from desktops to servers can be built using some or
all of Debian.

We can safely leave the desktop work to those using Debian. If you are
new to all this, see above...

And, did I mention Ubuntu? This is Free Beer as well as Debian Free Software!

Luck,

Dwarf