Heh heh, it's true what they say about about UNIX users (and now Linux
users). They have no idea that 90% of the discussion below is completely
incomprehensible to the average computer user (I should say, the average
person who uses a computer at work or at home -- not professionals in
computer-related fields). You probably lost half of them with
"distribution". Most of the rest bailed at "kernel". The last non-Linux
person fled screaming at "command line".
I'm not knocking anybody, that's just the way it is.
;-)
--
Max Heim
'66 MGB GHN3L76149
If you're near Mountain View, CA,
it's the primer red one with chrome wires
on 1/31/07 10:33 AM, CHRIS KOTTING at ckotting@wideopenwest.com wrote:
> I just thought I'd weigh in (as a dedicated Linux user) on the discussion.
> My goal is not to heat up a debate, but to shed some additional light.
>
> Ubuntu is a pretty danged cool distribution. I've played with it some, but
> haven't implemented it on any of our machines (we have 6 at home). The
> biggest thing that slows it down is that it was designed to boot from a CD
> on any machine without needing to be installed on that machine. That piles
> a ton of overhead processing that systems that need to be installed don't
> have to deal with.
>
> The difference in the memory requirements that David Councill noted is a
> result of the flexibility that most Linux distributions provide. From a
> single set of CDs you can install anything from a single-purpose machine
> built around a 300 mhz Celeron to a huge server providing a backend to 1000
> thin clients, or anything in between. Generally, if you want a really
> pretty graphical interface with ALL the bells and whistles (video-editing
> anyone?), you're looking at 500 meg of ram.
>
> Just about all Linux distributions have made huge advances in the past few
> years, particularly with the advent of the 2.6 version kernel. If you had a
> bad experince a few years ago, it might be worth another look.
>
> Allen's wondering why so much is written about using the command line
> editor. It's a function of a couple factors: First, most of the folks
> writing the instructions are very familiar with the command line. Second,
> it's an easier way to write instructions. (Though it looks like gibberish,
> telling someone to "Type 'sudo yum install --fix-missing mythtv <return>'"
> is a lot easier than walking them through the graphical tools to do the same
> thing.)
>
> That brings up another point, for most distributions the need to compile a
> program after downloading it is pretty limited unless you are doing
> something unusual, or bleeding-edge. The command I used in my example above
> will install (on many distributions) a suite of about a dozen applications
> that together make up a complete Digital Video Recorder and home
> entertainment system. You still CAN download the source code for all the
> pieces and compile them (if you want to edit the code to make it do
> something else), but you really don't need to.
>
> In case anyone's asking, what do I use? Windows 2000 at work, because
> that's what we're requied to use. We have a couple of Win98 machines at
> home to run an obscure Windows-only application and kids educational games.
> Everything else at home is Fedora Core (lots of features for daily general
> use), or some flavor of Debian (snappy performance on small, old, machines).
>
> Feel free to ask me Linux questions off-list.
>
> Chris K.
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