[ILUG] Favourite flavours

[Timothy Murphy]

On Tuesday 13 July 2004 15:46, Rick Moen wrote:

>  As I said in How to Ask Questions the
> Smart Way, "If your diagnostic theories were such hot stuff, would you
> be consulting others for help?".  See:  Smart Questions FAQ on
> http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Essays/ .
...
> 1.  <pedantic>My FAQ didn't recommend to novice users Lindows, which is
> a company.  It recommended _LindowsOS_, which is/was a
> distribution.</pedantic>  (That name was slightly out of date:  I've
> just now corrected it to say Linspire.)

I agree with most of what you say,
and I liked the essay,
but I still think any list of recommended distributions that includes Lindows 
is rather odd.

I've been very impressed with the quantity and quality of advice
given on the fedora-list mailing-list/newsgroup .
(I read it as a gmane newsgroup.)

Most of the issues that arise are not distribution-specific,
as you say - but I like to be told exactly what to do
("go to $HOME/.kde/share/config/... and edit ...")
and that does tend to depend on the distribution.

I ran SuSE for a time, but found something slightly off-putting
about the atmosphere of the SuSE mailing lists.

Anyway, my advice to any newbie would be
to try a Knoppix CD to see if Linux runs on the machine in question,
and if it does to install Fedora-2 -
it will probably work at once,
and if it doesn't it will certainly work in the end if you stick to it.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland