On 25-Oct-01 KEV@hartmann.dk wrote:
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Either would be a good choice, SuSE is also quite good but can be a bit weird in its mentality (well yasts mentallity anyway). I would say go for Debian but then I am completely biased and a deb head so I would say that :-)
The best way to tame yast is to take out its SuSe Config scripts when they start to annoy
eg
/sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.postfix /sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.postfix.bak
where I trimmed it wings for its messing with my postfix mail server settings
but these SuSEconfig files are very rarely a problem in-fact I think SuSE has a distinct advantage over say debian in that you have your keyboard mappings setup for you and that is just a glaringly obvious example. These days it backs up any files before modifying them which is MUCH better than the old yast.
A SuSe machine is up and running in no time and pretty user friendly. I am now moving over to debian mainly because of "apt get" and its simpler booting scripts and its layout is friendly also SuSE seem to release a distribution every two months and the stable ones seem to occur late in a release cycle (eg 5.2-5.4 and 6.2-6.4, while 6.0 was poor and 7.0 had some serious show stoppers such as my postfix problem unless you downloaded the rpm patches)
I shall keep my main box SuSE as they have done so many nice things to my setup (my changes are all stored so they will be distribution agnostic). From my experience so far I think SuSE is a good choice for new Linux users and its annoying habits are at least manageable, where as recommending Debian to a new user may leave them with the opinion that you can't map the Home and End keys on your bash/terminal environment to take you to the start and end of the line.
This is just an example of the sort of thing a debian first time Linux user may never do but some time working with a SuSe or Mandrake like distribution will give you ideas that this sort of thing can be done.
To summarise some pre-configured settings are useful. My reasoning being that if you don't know that you can to set them, you never will set them. These problems are compounded if the settup is complex.
My biggest problem with Linux in particular and Unix in general is not that its poorly documented as thats not the case, my problem is I often don't know what I want to do so don't know what to read to solve my problems.
Hope everyone follows my argument for some hand holding,
Regards
Owen
Linux Newbie tip
check out the "alias" command as a start to configuring your bash environment.
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No-one on this list should ever feel a pratt or be afraid of asking questions, dumb questions are welcomed and encouraged and if anyone flames a newbie on here for asking a silly question they will be pounced on by me and feel the wrath of my Lart stick.
I just wanted to second this, although your lart stick business seems a little harsh to this bleeding hart liberal.
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Date: 25-Oct-01 Time: 20:30:07