Which Linux for me (you must get this a lot!)

[-iceblade^]

Start on Ubuntu; it gives you room to customize a little, and play around with the Terminal (which I assume is pretty important to anyone doing a CompSci degree), but also should work more or less out of the box on most hardware, so you can get used to the actual OS without worrying about compatibility.

I would then move on to Arch, which is a distro which you have to completely build and customize yourself-apparently isn't too hard to do, although I've never had the patience (or need) to do it myself. I would expect it to teach you a LOT about the inner workings of Linux though, which would be ideal for you.

i echo this.

i moved from XP/Vista to Ubuntu, to Linux Mint (a better Ubuntu) and then tried OpenSuSE, Mandriva, etc, before mobving back to Mint... now i'm preparing to make the jump into Arch.

 

[knowlesy]

ubuntuy + redhat

 

[manic111]

i echo this.

i moved from XP/Vista to Ubuntu, to Linux Mint (a better Ubuntu) and then tried OpenSuSE, Mandriva, etc, before mobving back to Mint... now i'm preparing to make the jump into Arch.

For his purposes I'd go Ubuntu over Mint though, it would help him in having to learn to mount drives, download MP3 codecs etc...you don't have to do this with Mint, even though it's pretty simple.

 

[GarethDW]

Yep, it's not difficult to achieve but will give you a nice fuzzy feeling inside when you get it to work

 

[jakspyder]

heee heee i downloaded ubuntu 8.10 at school today on their lovely new 20mb broadband

will probs install it tonight if i can hunt down a blank disk otherwise ill lend one form school and do it in a few days

again thank a lot for urr friendly help

also someone mentioned virtual machines is it worth doing it this way first or just dual boot it?

 

[pingwing]

Dual boots a quicker way to actually get into it (removes the warm fuzzy wrapping of windows to fall abck upon) so i recomend just going with that

 

[rsatd]

*jumps in*

I say jsut get gentoo and play like mad! (its very similar to arch, well arch is based a lot on it, but gentoo is more established and teches you a bit more about how its all set up/works)

Gentoo woo, though I broke something on my one and now apache complains about lack of sysvipc while it is enabled in the kernel, needs more looking into

 

[Tony Williams]

Mandriva, Mepis and Gentoo.

 

[trackrat]

I have tried most of the distros, but find Debian is the most stable and a good learning curve.

 

[.walls]

I have tried most of the distros...

you've been busy... I know there are over a thousand on linuxcd.org

... but find Debian is the most stable...

heh - that is kinda the whole point of Debian stable.... it's also why you don't get anything even close to bleeding edge.

I do agree though - it does have a good learning curve (i.e. it holds your hand less than ubuntu)

 

[trackrat]

I will rephrase my remark about the distros, I have tried all the mainstream distros.
SuSe, Fedora, Mandriva, Mint, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mepis etc.

Each one I have tried has taught me a bit more, but also increased my frustration when I cannot solve what should be a simple problem, that is where the Linux forums are so good, but for a newbie they do not make it that easy, expecting everyone to be familiar with the CLI.

 

[BigglesPiP]

We also use fedeora for networking practicals but nothing amazing, just network card setups really.

My play thing - a 2 fabric, fibre channel SAN - requires 4, 2 port HBAs in each of the roughly 80 hosts. That's some serious bandwidth.