Re: Of mice and men

Cheers for the info. I saved the link and wull check it out when I have the
system.

I really need some kind of "Introduction to Linux" because I have no idea
what the products are that you mentioned. "Suse"?, "White Hat"?.

Here's what I know (if I had a postage stamp, I could write it down... :-)):

1. Linux is an Operating System that was written by a Scandinavian guy (I
guess the winter's are cold up there and there isn't much to do...) who
kindly made it available to the world as an alternative to MicroSoft OSes.
Ever since then, people have been making money out of it... Shrink wrapped
boxes, support,
2. It comes as 'distributions' which you tailor to your needs. Degrees of
difficulty in doing this seem to vary.
3. It has a penguin for its symbol.
4. Some people swear by it, others swear at it...
6. It can "peacefully co-exist" with Microsoft Windows on the same system
provided it has its own partition. Such systems are said to be "dual
bootable" (I guess each partition must have its own boot track...?)

That's the full printoput on Dashwood's Linux knowledge.

(As you can see, I am just the man to install it for you.... :-))

Pete.

Some further quick points below...

"jce" <defaultuser@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:q1jee.49111$_t3.43061@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> A lot of distributions will automatically install a boot manager to help
you
> dual boot. Mandrake is traditionally ranked in the top few for ease of
> install (along with Redhat's Anaconda? and Suse's Yast) so I'm not going
to
> suggest it's a poor choice at all....the new version is Mandriva - in
> typical fashion renames itself for confusion
>
So these are distribution names, right?

> There are a number of pro's and con's to each distro however. The main
> issue with getting a "freebie" version is just limited to the support. I
> would look at what software you want to run and then do a quick search on
> them to establish if there are any typical problems.
>
That would be Linux application software?

> I for one, have had problems with certain aspects of both Fedora and with
> Suse. I have Fedora now because it happed to install my copy of websphere
> studio with less pain than anything else I've tried, though I regret this
> decision as I definitely preferred the Suse maintenance.

And Suse and Fedora are both distribution names?

With so many distributions, how does a newbie decide? Ah, sorry, you already
answered that. You should consider the applications you want to run, right?

> There is a
> distribution that intrigues me - White Box (it was mentioned by another
clc
> user on another thread) -this is supposedly a "red hat" distribution
without
> the "red hat" proprietary stuff.
>
> I guess my point is that you should look at what you need and then pick a
> distro because my experience is that upgrading is just a pain. Mandriva
> might work just fine for you or might not. As you already do your own
> backup images you might want to look into something like Linsight which
> installs "within" windows. Some versions also get much better support
group
> support. I haven't looked around much but my point is that the majority
of
> distro's really take care of you better than they used to. I remember
> having to do recompilations of the kernel to get my cable modem to
work....I
> cannot even remember how to do that anymore and doubt I will ever need to.
>

Well, that's encouraging, at least.

> Check out http://distrowatch.com/ there are literally hundreds to choose
> from.....and COBOL is supported on every one of them I"m sure - I'll have
to
> check the faq :-)

I certainly shall. And thanks muchly for what looks like very sound advice.

Pete.
<snip>



.

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