[Novalug] Linux For Beginners

Mackenzie Morgan macoafi@gmail.com
Sat Nov 29 22:40:16 EST 2008


On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 22:13 -0500, Jean Figarella wrote: 
> Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> > On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 19:28 -0500, Jean Figarella wrote: 
> >   
> >> Basically, while the other distributions are very good and perhaps more 
> >> "modern", ( I use Ubuntu on my laptop, and CentOS at home) I can tell 
> >> you that for learning hands down Linux then Slackware, Gentoo and Arch 
> >> are better tools.
> >>     
> >
> > I don't really understand the thinking that one can't learn while using
> > an "easy" distro.  Just because you're not *forced* to learn doesn't
> > mean you won't learn it "just because."  And really, if you don't want
> > to learn it "just because" then...well, do you really want to learn?
> >
> >   
> I didn't say you won't/can't learn with the "easy" distros.  What I was 
> trying to say that in my case, and that of many others the learning 
> process and understanding was accelerated when trying one of the more 
> "difficult" or geeky distros. One of the reasons for this is that there 
> is no GUI configuration tools. Since I've used RHEL and CentOS at work 
> (yes I am a sysadmin) very few times I've have had to compile software 
> from scratch (configure and make). The junior guys that we have simply 
> don't know how to do this, and also don't even know how to compile a 
> kernel to simply conform it to your specific hardware. To them if the 
> software is not in yum or apt repo, then there is no software. If you 
> ask them: "Hey how do you add a route or a default gateway manually?" 
> Many times their response is: "I don't know."

Fair enough.  There are some things we generally don't need to mess with
thanks to GUIs.  Strange that they don't compile though...I see so many
Ubuntu users that compile software all the time due to Ubuntu's Stable
Release Update policy[1]  But for networking...yeah...in my experience,
the time to mess with that is when you find a bug.  Like not being able
to use WEP with NetworkManager with certain revisions of the Intel 3945
wireless card.


[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates

-- 
Mackenzie Morgan
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com
apt-get moo
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