Help me with Linux!

Aug 30, 2009 00:35

For those of you who do not know either Linux or networking, ignore this please. For the rest of you: please help me figure out this maze of distributions! How do you tell apart Debian vs Ubuntu vs Red Hat vs whateverthefuck? Also, any help with Linux networking (TCP/IP application development) would be appreciated. I don't know where to start!

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Centos fdmts August 30 2009, 06:23:10 UTC
Redhat is a company. Once upon a time, they gave away a free linux distribution that was Corporate Good. They sold support contracts on that OS. It was the bomb.

Fedora was the completely, communist, socialist, loser free version of Redhat. Being not-redhat for being not-redhat's sake.

Then (maybe 3 years ago) Redhat decided that they would sell licenses for the OS itself. At that point, CentOS was born. CentOS makes a habit of taking what Redhat sells, stripping out all the RedHat branding, and giving it away for free. I.e: CentOS is Redhat, but without the license or the support.

I use CentOS 5. That is the only linux distro I install by choice. Under the hood, CentOS = Redhat = Fedora ... but I use CentOS.

SuSE is owned by Novell. They are doing the same thing as Redhat. SuSE is different from Redhat, but maybe equally good.

Gentoo is this version of linux where you have to build it by hand every time you want to install it. Takes a whole day to install, every goddamn time. If I were building linux for my old Commodore 128 ... maybe. For general use, no.

Ubuntu is this incredibly awesome, bleeding edge, newfangled distribution that supposedly focuses on desktop applications and the workstation user. I found it easy to install the one time I did it ... but I still prefer CentOS because more people use it.

All of the other ones are crap.

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Re: Centos simianpower August 31 2009, 03:51:08 UTC
Thanks for the summary. I heard today that Redhat is still free... but then I saw this. Confusing.

I think I'll probably stick with Ubuntu, but I'll keep CentOS in mind in case there turns out to be a need to go in the Redhat direction.

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