Ok, I feel like a complete idiot. I've hear deveryone in my school talking about "Linux". I have no clue what it is...what is it?
Please don't insult me :(
Thanks!
Non-PC
ID:275501
 Mar 7 2004, 3:30 pm
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Mar 7 2004, 3:36 pm
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Scoobert
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Linux is an OS that is for people who have time on thier hands, or are getting payed to mantain servers. If you dont have ether, or are a not very good with computers, dont bother touching it. Linux will give you more headachs then anything else, but when you get it to work, it's like winning the SuperBowl.
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Linux rocks, as Scoobert was trying to say. :P
Its a seperate OperatingSystem from Windows, made by (more or less) any random programmer in their free time. It has massive business applications as servers and mainframes, can be far more stable then windows and doesn't get affected by windows viruses. There is nothing to pay for it, you can also download simple versions of linux that run off a CD if you want to test them out ( http://slax.linux-live.org/ is pretty nice ) its only a 200 meg-ish download so its not too hefty and it runs entirely of your PC's RAM so when you turn your pc off its back to pure windows again. Its linux for the not-so-literate. Joy. (Oh if you have a USB ADSLmodem, or a 56k winmodem its very unlikely that you will be able to get online with it. I just bought myself a router ADSLmodem so nonce it comes I'll be saying my goodbyes to windows. w00t.) | |
try http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/introtolinux.html for a little crash course on what linux is in a nutshell. and then you can look at http://www.linuxiso.org/ to see all the different distributions of Linux there are (and their list really has the most popular ones).
you might want to first try out several "live-cd" distributions that allow you to boot from the CD and experiment with Linux without screwing up your copy of Windows. in addition to the link that Maz gave, you can check out: Puppy-Linux http://www.goosee.com/puppy/ (less than 60MB, can fit an entire functional Linux in RAM- cool for a "pocket Linux") KNOPPIX Live CD http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html (a "what is knoppix?" is farther down the page) DemoLinux http://www.demolinux.org/old_index.html looks pretty good too, though I have not had a chance to try it out yet www.suse.com also provides a live evaluation CD, links are found at the bottom of http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/suse_linux/ index.html | |
I tried Demo Linux, seemed pretty simple and straight forwards. Only bad thing for a newbie is it starts out in console mode (Or mine did anyway.)
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Maz wrote:
I tried Demo Linux, seemed pretty simple and straight forwards. Only bad thing for a newbie is it starts out in console mode (Or mine did anyway.) that's probably so that you have immediate access (and exposure) to console tools- the purpose of that distro is to introduce Linux to people, and the console is the normal/common way of using Linux. probably something like "startx" or "xstart" or just "x" is used to get you into the graphical interface. | |