which linux to go for

[Tony Baechler]

Hello.  The following are strictly my opinions from a novice admin
perspective.  I mean that I have used a form of Unix for years but never
set up my own Linux box before.  With that said, there are three main
choices.  Slackware, Debian, and Red Hat.  I have no experience at all
with Red Hat but have read that various config tools require graphics, so
I would stay away from it for now.  I fought with Debian for many months
and installs but could never get it to work.  Either the kernel would
crash, the modules would not load, the drivers could not be found, or the
base packages were incomplete or missing.  Yes I read the instructions and
I downloaded everything as I was supposed to.  It could not support either
my network (cable with dhcp) or CD drives.  I gave up in complete
frustration.

By comparison, Slackware was easy.  There are three different
distributions of Slack to look at.  There is the main version like what
you would buy on CD.  It is designed for a native Linux system and
supports most standard hardware.  It now includes a Speakup enabled
kernel, the others do not.  This is new with 8.0.  It is smaller to
download.  You can either get the ISO images and make your own CDs or if
you have a fast connection just get all the packages and install what you
need.  I found that by just getting the packages and nothing else it would
easily fit on one CD.  The other is just source code and extras.  The con
is that it comes with fewer packages.  You get basic things like Lynx,
ftp, Mutt, Elm, Pine, the kernel sources, and the like but you do not get
things that are available in Debian.  This is a guess though since I never
got to see enough of Debian to tell.  Also, Slack uses and odd package
format (it is the standard .tgz) which is could for installation
(installpkg filename.tgz) but is not widely supported.  Red Hat by far has
the most out there but Slack supports the rpm format.

The others are for standard DOS/Win systems but let you get your feet wet
while still being fully working implementations of the Linux OS.  One is
Zipspeak which worked very well but I am not sure if it would work now
(8.0 and on, plus the new Speakup) because Speakup requires use of the
proc file system which is not supported by umsdos.  It is lacking many
things such as program development which is almost necessary to do
anything practical.  The other is called Loopspk.  It uses a loop
filesystem but runs from a DOS partition.  Basically it stores the
complete OS in one huge file.  I really like it but it was designed for
the 2.2.16 kernel and the only talking kernel I could find was 2.2.13.  I
had to find an old Zipspeak (7.0 I think) site to get it, and the modules
did not work because of the conflicting versions.  It comes with the
standard tools and I had no problem compiling a few programs with it.
That would be my recommendation if you just want to get your feet wet
without taking the plunge.  I think the minimum space requirement is 180
mb which is a bit big but worth it.

Feel free to correct or modify as you see fit.  Permission to repost on
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