[ILUG] Free Linux? Newbe Q

[Kevin Philp]

I wouldn't recommend a Newbe compiling their own code from day 1. I don't know 
your level of experience but unless its pretty high I would start with 
downloading the binary ISO files and burning yourself a few CDROMS instead. 
That way you can have a fully fledged Linux system up and running in an hour. 
If you don't have broadband (and you will need it to download a comlpete 
distro) then you can buy the binary files cheap from lots of places such as 
www.cheeplinux.co.uk or somebody on the list will burn you a few disks for 
the cost of postage + disks.

A few pointers for you - rpm package files are typically held in SRPM 
directories for source files and RPM directories for binary files. You don't 
need the source files to get up and running.

Start with an easy to install/use distro such as Fedora (which is Redhat), 
Suse or Mandrake. Everyone has something to say on this topic and everyone 
has their favorites but those three are all very good and very easy to use.

The source and binary files are all freely available for you to download and 
use.

Kevin.


On Wednesday 13 October 2004 13:54, David O'Callaghan wrote:
On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 13:42, Andoni wrote:
> I was just looking at Esat's FTP Mirror the other day and came across
> this:
>
> ftp://ftp.esat.net/pub/OS/linux/redhat/linux/enterprise/3/en/os/i386/SRPMS/
>
> Can anyone tell me what it would take to turn this into a working
> machine? Basically I want to know is this all executable or is it
> source code, is it free to download and use or should I be paying
> RedHat?

It's source code, so you would have to build all the packages.

Several projects have already done this: try CentOS
(http://tardis.linux.ie/view/2595), White Box Linux
(http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/), or Scientific Linux
(https://www.scientificlinux.org/)

David