[thelist] nice easy Unix distro installation?

[Matt Warden]

On Sun, 29 Aug 2004 12:26:20 -0700, Roger H. <rogerharness at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I'd really like put together my own L.A.M.P. system mainly for
> experimenting, and web testing.
> 
> I DO know a little unix and have taken some beginning PHP courses, but what
> I DON'T know is the best way, (cheaply) to set up my own system.
> 
> I have been googling, but I was wondering if you folks have any suggestions
> for a downloadable unix distro, for an old system I want to set up as my
> pretend server. Something I can install MySQL, PHP, etc. Hopefully something
> I could just burn on to a cd, and load to the dino computer.
> 
> Anyways...not a life of death thing here, and I can't really afford much
> right now, i just want to play a little...feel some of the power.

Most linux distros have come a long way as far as an easy install goes.

When I built my new box, I installed WinXP and MandrakeLinux on it.
The MandrakeLinux install was multitudes more simple than the WinXP
install (although, admittedly, this was mostly because WinXP wouldn't
recognize my various SATA drives without a driver disk).

The harder part is once you get things installed. There are some
distros out there that are tailored to former Windows users. I have
never tried these. However, I do know that one of the most frustrating
things to a newly converted Windows user is not being able to find
pre-compiled packages for their system. So, you might want to look
into whether these tailored systems are compatible with more popular
distros, or you might have to be doing a lot of command-line compiling
(which, once you get used to it, is nice -- but anything that adds to
the initial learning curve is not a Good Thing(tm), IMO). And, in some
cases, like with Oracle, you simply cannot install the software on
your system, because they don't support your distro.




-- 
Matt Warden
Miami University
Oxford, OH
http://mattwarden.com


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