Dear God please help me!

**BarryWoods** · 04-10-2007, 08:52 PM

Originally Posted by WoLLy

for the sake of not looking like a poser:

We don't believe she's a real redhead.

Just kidding, well maybe just a little. Cute cat, now we know why they are all spastic.

**ODYSSEY** · 04-10-2007, 09:24 PM

Originally Posted by BarryWoods

We don't believe she's a real redhead.

So are you suggesting further proof?

**spuzzdawg** · 04-10-2007, 11:30 PM

1x vote for further proof

**rubicon** · 04-11-2007, 06:44 PM

Originally Posted by reece146

I've heard good stuff about Ubuntu (and variants) as well.

Ditto to that. I can't speak for fedora (aka red hat), but debian has served me well, both on the server and the desktop.

Originally Posted by reece146

If anyone tells you Gentoo tell them to put down the crack pipe. I admin a large number of production Gentoo servers at a commercial site... just a little insight to this. Gentoo is not a newbie distro unless you are prepared to make a big time commitment and/or have prior real OS experience.

Now that's just uncool. Sometimes the best way to learn how to swim is to just be thrown into the water.

Gentoo is a source distribution, meaning that instead of the precompiled binaries you get with debian (and its derivatives) or fedora, almost everything needs to be compiled from source. This gives the admin great control over what is and is not compiled into an app/service/whatever, at the cost of higher maintenance and install time. I use gentoo for all of my desktops and my carpc, since the performance gains are real. For the back-end, though, I stick with good ole' debian.

christie- Bravo for taking a look at the open-source world. If you've never touched *NIX before, then no matter what distro you go with, you will encounter a rather steep - but not insurmountable - learning curve. I recommend starting with debian or one of its variants, and move to gentoo on the desktop (and carpc) when (and if) you get comfortable with linux.

**shotgunefx** · 04-18-2007, 10:10 AM

I'd recommend Ubuntu for newbies. Debian is a good distro as well (Ubuntu is based on Debian). Also, ubuntuforums is pretty active.

I'll say that over the last 10 years, very impressed with how far things have come on the desktop side.

I'm running Ubuntu with a custom kernel now on my carpc, (was Debian previously). There were a few warts due to my choice of hardware ,software but most of it went pretty smoothly.

As far as software, python is a good place, but I'd also recommend Perl. Yes, Perl gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself, but it's got CPAN which is a giant collection of modules to do almost anything you want. A lot of people bash Perl for it's on resemblance to line noise, but that's only if you write it that way. If you do decide to check out Perl, perlmonks.com is a great resource.

FYI, my front end is written in Perl, using the SDL libraries.