[thelist] Which Linux?

Chris Johnston chris at fuzzylizard.com
Wed Jul 23 08:01:35 CDT 2003


> I am interested in advice from evolters about which Linux distro would be
> best for a web developer like myself.

"I am looking at purchasing a used Pentium II 233 with 64MB or something
of that order"

My first suggestion would be to purchase a better machine with a lot more
ram. I have a PII 266 with 128MB and Red Hat runs very slowly on it. Plus,
a lot of the apps that I like to use suggest a minimum of a PII 300
machine in order to run. In addition, KDE and Gnome both tend to be memory
and resource hogs, so you will want to get a more powerful machine.

However, with all that said, it is more than possible to run Linux on the
machine that you have specified, you will just need to run a different
window manager.

As for a recommendation - Red Hat or Mandrake, either one. Both are good
for newbies and both are easy to install.

Mandrake Pros - Excellent distribution with an excellent community. If you
go with this distro then I highly suggest you check out
www.mandrakeusers.org, this will be your best online resource when it
comes to any problems.

Red Hat Pros - Very easy to get up and running with. This is probably one
of the easiest distros to use. Plus, with the Red Hat Network, it is also
incredibly easy to update. Also, this is the distro that everything is
certified against. If you want to install something like Oracle, then you
will need Red Hat (usually and older version though).

Red Hat Cons - A little bit harder to play with in terms of changing
window managers and upgrading/installing kde or gnome.

As for application, both come fully loaded with almost everything you will
ever need.

One app that I would suggest you get that does not currently ship with any
distro is jEdit - www.jedit.org - an excellent all around text editor with
syntax highlighting for just about every major language on the planet and
lots of other goodies.

Both distros are about 3 ISO's in length, but can be installed with only
the first and are freely downloadable from their websites and mirrors.

Need any help with the setup, or have more question, just shout.

-- 
Chris Johnston

chris at fuzzylizard.com
www.fuzzylizard.com


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