[H-GEN] Question from a wannabe Linux newbie.

[David Jericho]

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On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 02:54:54PM +1000, Ewan Edwards wrote:
> My answer to him was, "I suggest Redhat 7.3 because I'm biased.".
> Others in the office have suggested Mandrake because thats what they use.

I don't use RedHat 8.0 at the moment, but I will say RedHat 8.0. Very
nicely polished, and quite user friendly.

> * Will be wanting to learn a bit about shell and Perl scripting, but he's not 
> a programmer and has no intention of being a programmer.

RedHat 8 has enough shells, and a fair few perl modules to play with.

> * He intends installing OpenOffice.org on this PC as well as on his office PC.

RedHat 8.0 comes with OpenOffice 1.0.1.

> * He intends installing VMware and running various versions of Windoze as 
> guest operating systems.

Rob Kearey may be able to answer this one better than I, but VMware
has friendly rpms, and I believe they've fixed the issue they were
having.

> * He is a multi-lingual (English & Spanish) technical writer.

RedHat has good international support.

> * He wants to learn about producing platform independent product 
> documentation.

This entirely depends on the tools he plans on using. Writing PDFs
under RedHat KDE and Gnome is trivial.

> * He says that he needs "to be able to use it, learn about it, not be 
> overwhelmed by configuration things, etc., and not be bitten in 6 or 12 
> months and have to rebuild stuff."

Keep up to date with up2date, and he'll be fine.

> * He has some experience with Mandrake as a guest O/S in VMware on Windoze.  
> (The lengths some people go to just to get away from Outlook.)

Well, on that basis it could be argued to use Mandrake. Personally I
find Mandrake not as polished, but I haven't played with it in a
while. Things may have changed.

-- 
David Jericho
Senior Systems Administrator, Bytecomm Pty Ltd


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