I've been dabbling with Linux over the last few years, eventually abandoning Windows, these pages include some of my notes as I've worked out a few difficult things. And a page about why you might want use Linux, with an accompanying page about why I use Linux.
“Which Linux should you try?” is a question without any single correct answer. There's a plethora of distros with different aims, and levels of difficulty. I started out with one of the more famous ones, “Red Hat Linux,” then moved to Fedora when Red Hat made Red Hat Linux a pay-only distribution. It was very similar, so I didn't have to work out how to deal with a different way of doing things. But it can be difficult for beginners, thanks to be it frequently trying out new things, rather than have new things go through more test cycles before becoming part of the general release, and goes through frequent re-releases (a new version comes out about twice a year, and the second-oldest version become unsupported at that time). Ubuntu seems to be the common choice for people to escape to Linux from Windows, or even MacOS (with Windows users tending to escape from an unreliable and annoying system, and Mac users escaping from very expensive hardware). Ubuntu offers a longer-lasting support for each release, and support for some things that are disallowed in other distros for licensing reasons. Ubuntu being Debian-like is a bit foreign to anybody coming from a Red Hat background, and CentOS is a popular alternative for people who want to stay using a Red Hat-like OS, but find that Fedora changes too frequently, and/or don't like the ethos of Ubuntu (which can be considered dumbed-down and too commercial).
- Are you feeling lucky?
- Compatible hardware
- A brief description of one method of installing Fedora 7 without a DVD drive
- Post-installation customisations
- A brief introduction to installing software on Fedora
- Running my own DNS and DHCP servers
- Restoring GRUB on a dual-boot system
- Running a NFS server (on Fedora 20)
- Sending mail through Yahoo SMTP server with the Evolution mail client
- Serving time on a local area network
- Time & date variables Evolution uses to format the datestamps when listing mail
And a few hack scripts:
- Firewall script to configure iptables
- Signature scripts for the Evolution mail client
- Script to stop laptop hard drives excessively parking themselves
- Script to restart the NTP daemon with Network Manager
And the reviews section of my website, separately, has a review of Linux (a few different versions of Linux, as tried out on a couple of computers), and a later review of Fedora 7, specifically.