[TriLUG] Linux Distributions Question

[Phillip Rhodes]

Tommy Williams wrote:

> For a somebody that is new
> to linux, and would like a server capable of hosting SAMBA shares for
> "other" machines on a LAN, and also capable of hosting HTTP both LAN,
> and WAN (mostly just to learn and experiment with), which distribution
> of Linux would you recommend?  While you are considering this question
> I know that I have basically asked for what flavor kool-aid you like.
> Still I would love some input.

Almost any well-known, and plenty of more esoteric, distro's would
suffice for what you want to do.  You might want something with a
large, vibrant community associated with it, so you'll have plenty
of people to ask questions of, etc.  That still leaves a staggering
array to choose from.

Personally I'm using the Fedora series these days, although I have
used SuSE extensively in the past.  I think you'd be fine with either
one of those.  If you want to use something equivelant to Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, without paying big $$$ to RH, you might like one
of the projects that are re-building the RH Enterprise stuff from source
and distributing it.. White Box or CentOS.

Honestly though, there are soooo many choices, and you'll probably
get at least one response on this list for every one of them...
none of them are really bad, especially if your goals are really
just to learn and experiment. Heck, you could try putting together
your own linux from scratch if you really want to learn a lot.

http://lfs-mirror.tpegg.org/lfs/news.html


TTYL,

Phil