My first Linux

I grew up in the microsoft world using MS-Dos and MS-Windows operating system. Yet for years I wanted to get some knowledge and experience with linux. I was not a complete linux newbie though. I fact I used it a bit in High School but I didn't stay long enough there to gain proper linux skills. So I was familiar with some basic shell commands such as: ls, chmod. I was taught VI by my Math teacher. I almost completely forgot about it and I'm far from being a fan. I also had some knowledge about Apache since I've been using it for years on MS-Windows.

Anyway for several months I wanted to build myself a linux box and turn it into a server. All I was missing was a PIII motherboard. I tried ebay but I never managed to get the one I wanted. So I eventually given up and following the good advice from my friend Daniel I bought myself a AOpen XC CubeMZ915 barebone loaded with Intel® Pentium® M Processor 750+ 1.86Ghz, 2GO RAM, and 200GO HD. That was in the early days of January 2006.

First of all I installed Windows XP on that machine just to make sure my hardware was working properly. Then I was busy for about a week trying out several linux distribution. Some friends helped me deciding what to try. At the same time I did not want to spend weeks assessing every single linux distribution out there. So I ended up trying only three of them:

• Mandriva 2006
• Debian 3.1
• Suse 10.0

First I tried Mandriva and at the beginning I was really seduced by this distribution and I thought I was going to use it. But then I reasoned myself and I thought I better try some other distribution before settling down for one of them. Actually I had few issues with Mandriva:

• KDE would crash after some times. GNOME was fine though.
• Often when I tried the settings in KDE it would not work properly so I had the feeling that quite a few settings functionality offered through the UI were in fact not working as one would expect.
• You have to pay yearly subscription to get access to the full functionality of that release. Such as flash plugin for your browser for instance. To me that did not make much sense to pay for linux even more as I'm still learning how to use it.

So I tried Debian but it turned out that I needed to setup extra drivers to support my network adapter so I quickly dismissed that distribution.

Then I tried Mandriva again before installing Suse eventually. And I have to say I'm more than happy with Suse so far. Never got a single machine crash. It seems to support my hardware very well. Great administration and setting support using Yast. Automatic system update. Suse was the distribution I wanted.

Want to know how I configured that Suse 10.0 linux please go here .

-- StephaneLenclud - 07 Feb 2006