[UFO Chicago] Re: Brian's Conversion from FreeBSD to Debian andQuestions on X

[Larry Garfield]

On Wed, May 10, 2006 11:47 am, Christopher D. Heer said:

> I've got lots of comments/responses/thankyous to everyone who's responded
> that I'll send in a bit, but I wanted to address this one right off.
>
> I have absolutely no intention of using GUI stuff over the CLI/shell
> tools.  In fact, that's specifically what I'm looking to avoid: if the GUI
> does it for me, I haven't learned anything.  I'd much rather screw it all
> up via the CLI and learn my lesson.  :)  I work on Cisco routers all day
> long, and frequently still open up a command box on Windows (or Cygwin --
> Cygwin is a small part of what got me moving on this).  Plus, I thump
> around on my Tivos a lot via bash.

In that case, if you're looking for a "try it a few times and break it a
few times to learn" setup, Debian Stable or Ubuntu-Server would be my
recommendation.  The basic difference is that Ubuntu has newer packages
and its own archive, which has almost all the same stuff as Debian does. 
Both are minimal installs to start from, but you still install and
configure stuff in a semi-automated way, which I like.

If you really want to get your hands dirty, Slackware *shudder*.  It's not
a distribution, it's just an installer.  After that, you're on your own.
:-)  (Many slack fans will insist that's not true.  Last time I looked,
though, any sense of package management for slack is optional add-on,
therefore I don't count it.)

Once again, come to DePaul Linux Fest, this Saturday! :-)

--Larry Garfield