[Novalug] Linux For Beginners

Charles M Howe cmhowe@patriot.net
Sun Nov 30 00:14:13 EST 2008


FWIW, I recall a failed meeting a decade ago of CONSIDERABLE importance
to me with one of the smartest guy I knew who was trying to master
Slackware (Which I had recommended to him). He was trying to make use of
a hex number, I think. It was days later when he informed me that he
needed to use x. Ugh!

Charlie

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."
> 
> You can certainly learn from Ubuntu and Fedora, heck I learned some 
> stuff with windows 95. I don't have anything against these distros, and 
> by the way I do think they are wonderful distros.
> 
> --Jean
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