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

[Rick Phillips]

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>
> Good afternoon all,
>
> I have the uneasy feeling that I'm going to start a
> bigger-than-Ben-Hurr
> discussion / flame war here, but here goes anyway.
>
> One of the people I work with has just ordered himself a
> brand spanking shiny
> new PC, on which he is planning to install a GNU/Linux
> operating system.  He
> has now come to myself and a few others here with the
> question, "Which
> distribution should I use?".
>
> 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.
>
> So, the point of this email; What do various HUMBUG people
> suggest for this
> person?
>

I run Mandrake 9.0 on my home computer, my mail server in the office and my
satellite internet gateway.  I has everything you need on 3 CD's.  The
Mandrake update module works smoothly fixing bugs, security glitches etc.


> No doubt a lot of you will want to know more about what this
> person wants to
> do with his shiny new PC before giving a considered opinion.
> To answer that,
> I can provide the following incomplete list.
>
> * 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.
> * He intends installing OpenOffice.org on this PC as well as
> on his office PC.

Open Office installs by default on Mandrake 9.0


> * He intends installing VMware and running various versions
> of Windoze as
> guest operating systems.
> * He is a multi-lingual (English & Spanish) technical writer.
> * He wants to learn about producing platform independent product
> documentation.
> * 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."
> * 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.)
>
> All intelligent suggestions gratefully received.

Don't know whether my comments are intelligent or not but I have installed
Mandrake on desktop PC's for people who are so computer illiterate that they
cannot even manage to maintain their "automated" anti-virus updates.
Happily, they have no trouble coping with Mandrake using Ximian Evolution
for mail and Mozilla for browsing.  Both installed by default.

Loading the extra language modules should be easy during install.

Mandrake seems to be (if you can believe all the write-ups) the winning
desktop distro.  It is easy to install, it picks up just about all modern
hardware without intervention and, if you use expert mode, gives you all the
flexibility you need to set-up exactly what you need.  Having used Mandrake,
Red Hat, SuSE and Lycoris, I do concur.  Haven't tried Debian yet.

My 2 cents

Rick Phillips
>



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