help, I don't know what to do about windows and SUSE!

How else can you stack 20 terminal windows? I don't have that many functions keys!

Strictly speaking though, none of the machines here boot to a GUI either - everything boots to runlevel 3 (or equivalent). The servers here don't even have X installed.

I stuck in a vote for Fedora Core. I think that you'll have very little problems getting your work done with this and you'll still have easy access to a powerful distribution.

If you aim isn't exactly to get work done, but rather to learn Linux inside and out, I would suggest you install Slackware and then build an LFS system from it. If you do this, expect some time in a terminal. Once you've completed though, you'll know more than most people out there on the internals of Linux. You can build an LFS system with Fedora too, it's just that Fedora builds your system up for you so you miss all that learning experience at the outset.

look I have just worked out that rpm has nothing to do with CD's so throwing words like slackware and LFS systems just confounds me

LOL, sorry. Slackware is another distribution, one in which the term "user-friendly" has no meaning.

LFS is Linux From Scratch ( http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ ). This is a distribution that you build based off of your currently running distribution, whether it be Slackware, Gentoo, Fedora Core or SuSe.

Neither of these is for the beginner unless your sole aim to running Linux is to learn how it works. However, given the direction of this topic, I thought you should be made aware of these - if only for future reference.

Thanks for that this213, I will bear that in mind and I will certainly bookmark the link

hahah...way to be open minded in our open source world

GUI's do have its advantages.

*their, advantages? GUI's is plural and its is singular ;]

One word; screen.
http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/

Excellent. That darn X is just inviting trouble on a server.

I have to admit, on a desktop *nix machine (or one of my *nix laptops) I do run X -- but I NEVER run it on a server.




I fail to see how not wanting a function, which is at best useless or at worst, a known pathway to vulnerability places me in the close-minded category where open source is concerned. The underlying OS remains open source, as do the vast majority of packages, ports and toolsets.
In fact, I would say I am MORE open minded towards open source -- not because I have written some (which I have), or because it's a corporate direction (which it is), but because the derived benefit of OS is the innate ability to take what you need and remove what you do not.

Cheers.

i was jk lol

Well said, but you forgot the part about how you can modify an open source system to do only that which it's designed to do.

Yes, I know about screen, I was just poking.

X doesn't belong on servers, period. Anyone who thinks it's a good idea to just install whatever they can get their hands on to a server should be forced to listen to Ben Stein read man pages for 6 months. When he runs out of those, have him switch to RFC's. One of the reasons why Linux servers are more stable than Windows "I'm trying to be like" servers is that everything isn't tied into the GUI. Another reason is that there isn't (ideally) any worthless crap on a server - the only components there are what it needs to do its job (which is often single-minded).

True, though that's how I meant it.


I figured you would, but perhaps others might not be.




Well said. I wish more sysads had that much common sense. Sigh.

Ben Stein... heh. <Ben_Stein>Man formats and displays the on-line manual pages. This version knows
about the MANPATH and PAGER environment variables, so you can have your
own set(s) of personal man pages and choose whatever program you like to
display the formatted pages. If section is specified, man only looks in
that section of the manual. You may also specify the order to search the
sections for entries and which preprocessors to run on the source files
via command line options or environment variables. If enabled by the
system administrator, formatted man pages will also be compressed with
the `/usr/bin/gzip -c' command to save space.

Bueller? Bueller? </Ben_Stein>

Now that's funny.

wouldnt that be considered cruel and unusual punishment?

Indeed.

That's the idea. You know after an experience like that you'd hear that droning voice every time you even looked at a computer.

Still, it beats giving your sysadmins a shock collar that goes off every time the server their working on detects a layer 8 error.