Where to get LINUX for home?

[Jeff Billman]

I have a very good friend that swears by gentoo but I would say that after talking with im you need to be a programmer and pretty heavy into Linux to tackle it.

[Balaji N]

which list are u asking? the difference between the home and professional edition? sorry. no idea.

may be u could ask the reseller.

-balaji

[Craig_72]

The only issue I have ever had with Linux on a PC is with a laptop with a Lucent WinModem on it. If you are connecting to the internet via a broadband connection, you should not have any problems.

As far as flavors go, I personally think Mandrake 9.1 is a fantastic distribution. Install is easy as pie. Auto Hardware Detection works like a dream (that's been a problem with previous distributions of all flavors). And it comes packed with software for a very reasonable price and it's well documented and their support forum is fantastic. I have heard very good things about SuSE as well.

FreeBSD is more techie oriented. I'd go with Linux first.

[John Meissner]

1 - Linux will work on all your systems. Linux will run on just about any platform. Intel and one distro (a debian product) will run on PA Risc.

2 - There is not so much a list of "pc's" but more a list of hardware. Many manufacturers user different hardware even within the same model. So most linux distro's have a list of hardware they support.

3 - This is a very subjective question. I personally prefer Red Hat. I'm currently using Red Hat versions 7.3(at work) 8.0(on my laptop) and 9(on my home system). I really think 9 is the best version Red Hat has put forth so far. Other distributions I've used have been SuSE enterprise 7 and 8. I prefer the tools and the look of Red Hat.

4 - see #3 (Red Hat 9) The reason I say this is they have pretty'd everything up and it's not just estetics.... in 9 some functions are much easier. I've never been able to correctly get Samba to work correctly on the other versions but in RH 9 it was SOOOO easy.

5 - no unless you have a need to or just want to try it.

[Jerome Henry]

Hi !

Adding to Balaji's tip lfs is also a good one to build it by yourself :
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
(take some coffee).

RE the list, it's more a question of kernel compilation than a question of packages. You can always get more packages on downloading from the Internet.
Take Red Hat as an example, you have the standard distribution (called 'standard distro'), and several distributions, called 'pro' (distro for distribution), which all have a specific kernel :
So, Advanced server has a smp (multiprocessing) enabled kernel, ehenced RAM support up to 16 Go.
You could recompile your kernel yourself to do that, but Red Hat did it for you, and also sells very good online or phone support.
ES edition does the same with 2 processors and 4Gb only.

As for the LIST itself, there is no difference in RH, In mandrake, for example, some network tools are not included, such as NFS server, NIS, NTP server, and all network monitoring tool...

Did I get the bunny you kept in your hat for that ? :]
J

[AlienRoadShow]

OK - This thread has taken several twists and been redirected a couple of times and I'm just confusing you all. So I'm going to close this thread and open a new one about the 'list' of packages provided by John Poff and the top twenty linux packages most critical to know.

(* By the way, I've been keeping up with the point awarding argument going on in the HP-UX forum. What's up with the old guys with all the points not liking the new guys getting any points? Sand bagging? *)

[Caesar_3]

Hello!

Here is the links for build your own
linux as you asked:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

http://librenix.com/?inode=2789

there you will have the info

Caesar