Re: New to Linux
Steven Rosenberg put forth on 4/18/2011 6:58 PM:
> On 04/15/2011 12:49 PM, Krzysztof Bieniasz wrote:
>>> FWIW: O'Reilly published a Special Edition book LEARNING DEBIAN
>>> GNU/LINUX (c. 1999). It was a very good introduction and step-by-step
>>> guide to installing and using Debian. I got it for free from the Debian
>>> booth at Las Vegas COMDEX 1999. This was the first year Linux had a
>>> major presence at COMDEX. Having the Linux people all in one exhibit
>>> hall greatly simplified my investigations of making the switch from the
>>> Amiga. I still have the book. However, ultimately, I chose Mandrake 7
>>> as my first distro. Debian was not a distro for the noobie, either then
>>> or now.
This really truly depends on the traits of the 'noobie'. Warning, car
analogy: A successful Debian noobie is the guy who changes his own oil
and replaces his own water pump and alternator when needed, without ever
having done so before. I.e. a person not timid about popping the hood
and digging into the problem, knowing full well that no matter how bad
he may break things along the way, he can fix it.
Noobies who pick many other distros take their car to the shop for all
repairs and even oil changes. They may read about how to do these
these, but in the end they don't trust themselves to do it, knowing they
don't have the mental aptitude and personality type to put the engine
back together, and know the car will run, after tearing it apart.
>> today though... Nowadays just about any distro is noob-friendly enough,
>> perhaps excluding Gentoo and Slackware.
This depends on a few things, the most distinctive being whether you
install a GUI or not and thus have graphical administration tools. My
baptism into Linux consisted of making a Debian network install boot
diskette via a downloaded Win32 floppy imaging util and disk image file,
booting that diskette and performing a network install of Potato over my
first ADSL line back in 2000. I did a compact install, added all
packages I needed via apt-get, edited any config files I needed to with
vi, etc, etc. It was a *steep* learning curve. But that's what I wanted.
I did this because it was a trusted colleague's answer to my question:
"What's the best way to learn Linux from the ground up?" He was right.
--
Stan
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