I'm an experienced embedded software developer but I've never used Linux or GCC. Which Linux distribution would you recommend for a beginner? I expect to be able to dual boot with Windows. I was planning to buy the Red Hat Linux 9 Bible but Red Hat has moved on to newer versions. Is there something else that would be better?
Thanks Kevin
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Mandrake 9.2 should do you fine. I currently use it for Linux SW development using the Anjuta IDE.
Ian
I'm glad with the SuSE distris,
Michael
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Kevin Kramb enlightened us with:
While I encourage people to try Linux, just OOI, you don't _have_ to use Linux to use GCC if that's all you're trying to do: you can also use cygwin in windows:
I think Red Hat has generally been better for beginners, and that tradition continues with Fedora Linux:
It's true that the "official" Red Hat Linux is disappearing.
After that, I've heard Mandrake is meant to be quite beginner-friendly, although they dabble much more in closed source than Red Hat does unfortunately.
Jifl
-- --["No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway"]-- Opinions==mine
Well, the "plain" Red Hat Basic is being transformed to Fedora (as you mention) but Red Hat Enterprise Workstation and Red Hat Enterprise Server (RHEW and RHES) are still around.
Red Hat Basic users with current subscriptions (up to some November? drop dead date, IIRC) can switch to RHEW at a 50% discount, effectively transforming a $60/year support package to $90/year (for up to two years) or they can go to the free Fedora distro.
Personally, I'm OK with paying for RHEW for a production machine. That's an affordable, supported distro for "serious" work and there are still many options for learning or hacking. The old free as in speech not free as in beer thing.
And the observation that Red Hat is the only distro to bring suite against SCO is also an incentive, for me at least, to throw some support money their way.
Recommend that the OP surf on over to Distro Watch and check out their descriptions of the pros/cons of the major distros.
The Red Hat 9 Bible (ISBN 0-7645-3938-8, if we're talking about the same one) comes with the 3-CD version of the RH9 basic distro and you get a free "guest" account that you can use to up2date the packages to the current release level. It's not a bad deal and has pretty good info on what to do when, where, and how.
-- Rich Webb Norfolk, VA
I agree entirely with that opinion.
Red Hat makes a good choice for organisations trying to standardise on a single distribution, where a few people will have to support many users. It is also often the best supported distribution by third-parties.
Mandrake has always been easier for beginners than Red Hat - it is undoubtably one of the most beginner-friendly distributions out there. I haven't heard of Mandrake "dabbling in closed source", although I may be out of touch - my impression has always been that both Red Hat and Mandrake have been very much on the "all code is open source - you pay for the service, support, etc." line. Perhaps you are thinking of Suse, whose installation and configuration utility YAST is closed source (although they otherwise make huge contributions to open source). Suse is always a solid choice for a professional - amongst other things, it comes with excellent printed docuementation.
An alternative is Knoppix - download the iso image, burn the CD, reboot, and you have a working linux system running live from the CD. If you like it, run the hard-disk installer script and you're done.
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