[Tutor] linux

[Kirby Urner]

At 01:29 PM 11/29/2001 -0500, Jeff Jones wrote:
>Sorry about getting off topic here, but beginning to learn programming 
>through Python has peaked my interest in Linux. The only operating system 
>I have ever used has been windows, and I've been using it since the DOS 
>days (except for computer class in the 7th grade when we used apple IIc). 
>Not by choice but because that's what has always been there when I turned 
>the computer on. Getting to the point... Does anyone know of any decent 
>FAQ's etc. for windows users not yet switched to Linux. Specifically, 
>which version to use? Thanks in advance for any help.


It's a huge topic, and I'll confine my remarks to this post
as I agree it's not about Python per se.

Makes a difference if you plan to devote a box to Linux or
dual boot it with Windows.

Makes a difference how much horse power your Linux box
will have, and whether you want to tackle it as a
"Windows-like GUI" gradually drilling down into the guts,
or as a DOS-on-steroids command line environment (easy to
do the latter on a low horse power machine, but an
only-knows-Windows person would find KDE or Gnome (GUIs)
an easier starting point).

There are also much-less-resource-intensive GUIs like
WindowMaker and BlackBox which many people like a lot.

A lot of people are liking the Mandrake 8.1 distro these
days, which is what I use (dual boot with WinME).  It has
an easy graphical install and comes with a fairly well
integrated set of tools (for a Linux distro -- they tend
to be hodge-podgey, because in open source, lots of
people get to play and the stuff is free, so there's a
tendency to get lots of GUIs, lots of browsers, lots of
email clients (which is good -- find which you like best
and uninstall the rest (or just let em sit there))).

You can download Mandrake and burn the CDs free, if you
want to go that route (some of the apps are not in the
free version, but all of Linux is, and of course Python
is, which you can download and build from the website
anyway).  In Mandrake, if you install it with the developer
tools, you'll get IDLE in a KDE menu without any configuring
on your part, ready to go.

Linux is a fairly steep learning curve if your goal is
to learn all about it, because "learning all about it"
really means tackling an arbitrarily large body of
knowledge and skills.  I recommend 'Linux Cookbook' by
Michael Stutz (Linux Journal Press), but there are tons
of useful books.

(There's also FreeBSD to consider -- in some ways a cleaner
environment than Linux (Torvalds agrees), but nevermind).

Kirby