h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, I will find out what sort of lapdog will be mine soon! The Borg are sending the offer to me as we type.

*snoopy dances around the lab*

Hey Marv, how does it feel to be shaking off that inertia?

Nervous but exciting.

I'm told this is the place to come to talk tech. Or, in my case, look vaguely terrified while everyone else is talking tech.

I'm checking out the Slax distro of Linux (it's KDE based, i believe) and wondered if anyone had any recommendations.

I have been a Windoze user since age 11 (10 yrs ago) and have found using other OSs to be quite terrifying, but manageable. Someday I hope to be able to use Macs, Linux boxes, and Wins at the same level. I was pretty d@mn proficient with the Win stuff, so it may take a while.

And, d'E, i apologize for my comment about keyboard shortcuts in the Atelier. I had no idea they came from Macs. I still get vaguely uneasy when recalling the difference between "Ctrl" and "option" and "apple" and "alt" on a Mac.

by Slax do you mean Slackware? I've used that one. It's probably not the best better for beginners, unless you really want to work on getting at least some of your hardware setup.

Mandrake 10.0 is what I have, it's really easy. I imagine "Fedora Core" (the free version of Red Hat) must be easy if not easier.

sea
I'd agree with Dave
Slackware has a reputation for requiring a bit more installation know-how but the end result tends to be more customised to your computer.

I would also suggest Mandrake, I'm running 10.1 on this machine, or Suse

If you pick mandrake you can try asking us questions, but that doesn't mean we will know the answers

Mandrake and Suse have very good reputations as being easy to use. I also recommend Lycoros, and the latest Red Hat seems good too, but the hands-down winner (from what I've read) for the easiest-to-use Linux seems to be Xandros.

I think the key to making Linux easy to use is to be willing to pay the $50 or so for a supported version, so all your updates are easy to find and install.

And sea, you are forgiven for your transgression. /* makes the Sign of the Mac over sea */

before sea spends $$ I hope she knows there are public mirrors available which you can download the latest releases.
A lot of them are run by universities... so you may well be able to get the iso files to burn to cd very fast when your in college

So you can try some of them and then pick the one that suits you best.

Pointing you towards dE's home
ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/

or for mandrake ISO's
ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/Mandrakelinux/official/iso/10.1/i586

Also rather than buying retail box sets, where a chunk of the price goes into the retailers pocket, most distributers have subscription schemes where you can pay them direct.

There is a lot of info at www.kernal.org as well... Plus links to most of the distros I think.

ooooooooooooh!

I only picked this version because it was made for booting from CD. I'd rather not wipe the harddrive just yet, and figure out what I like first. Though it makes it quite difficult to use things from my harddrive. *shrug* oh well.

I'll have a look at the links you suggested.

s

There's quite a few run from CD distro's about, I think almost all the main disto's now do one.

Mandrake move & Knoppix spring to mind immediately.

I'd be psyched to discuss *nix, and mandrake in particular.

TO quote the commander-in-thief

"Bring it on!"

I keep a knoppix cd around just for recovery purposes. It has already pulled my cestnuts out of the fire a few times. Knoppix is (imho) the best live cd version out there.

The ctrl,alt,option,meta,command key shortcuts for things like cut, copy, paste, etc were all agreed as a standard years ago. I used to use them on sun workstations years ago.
I'd have thought that keyboard shortcuts came before the Apple - just like the idea of a windowing gui

I was taught that the shortcuts were IBM inventions.

Shhhh! You're revealing Apple's dirty little secret! Actually I don't know where they originated, but Apple was the first to use them in a widely-distributed OS. And universal? Try using ctrl-c in a Unix command line.

Knoppix CDs are a great April Fool's Day tool. Pop it in someone's computer the night before, and when they boot up in the morning they suddenly have linux.

The command line does not a gui make d'E

Anyway it was meta-c for copy when using openwindows on sunos, just like using ctrl-c and cmd-c work differently if you've got a terminal window open on os-x

And on the sun I used at Kodak, the ctrl key was where the caps-lock nomally is - so meta-c was not a problem at all, actually much easier than ctrl c.

I think that this.. http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/space-cadet-keyboard.html predates the Mac.

I would not have survived in such an era...