OMO Linux install

[tigersaw]

I'm about to start a Linux course with the Linux foundation.
Picking up a cheapy win 8.1 laptop this week to use, as I don't want to mess up my home PC.
The suggested distributions are Fedora, Centos, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and Opensuse.
I was steering towards Ubuntu or Mint as I have heard them mentioned most often.
I was thinking of using live media first to make sure the laptop is happy, then going for a dual boot.
I'll obviously make a disk image before I start, but I know even then things can go funny, so does the org agree with my choice or not / have suggestions?

[jambo]

For a friendly desktop Ubuntu or mint work well. Different look, same basic setup with each. Fedora and Centos are setup in line with red hat approaches, Ubuntu and mint are based on Debian. Suse is its own thing built by novell.

Personally I'd shove Ubuntu on it and find how you feel about that. Live images on usb sticks are now very good so try a few and see what you like the look of.

Jambo

Sent without a real keyboard

[tigersaw]

Thank you - Guess you do that by telling the bios to boot off the USB first?

edit - not to fussed about desktop, as this is a course I think its more nuts and bolts

Ubuntu these days is much easier (and faster) to install than Windows. Except when something goes wrong. Usually these can be trivially fixed but somewhat daunting for the uninitiated.

If you want to learn then trying something off the beaten track (possibly not on your main PC) something like Gentoo might be more useful.

Might as well buy a raspberry pi while you are at it.

[tigersaw]

As its a course not self tuition I'll stay with something mainstream and recommended for now.
I bought a pi, didn't get on with it but introduced me to arduino from which I've made several projects.

I've got OpenSuse running on a dual boot PC at work. Haven't had much time playing with it though. I tried the same on our laptop at home and nearly killed it! Unless you're very careful with the setup it's easy to accidentally stop hibernate working and I couldn't get the wireless to work. The wireless switch is soft touch and not one distro I tried could turn it on (Mint, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, OpenSuse, Zorin all failed). Then, to add insult to injury, I was a little careless removing the Linux partition and carked the MBR. Mind you, rebuilding that got me the hibernation function back again, so not all bad!

I'm still tempted to buy a cheap recon laptop and build a Linux system from scratch though.

[jambo]

Originally Posted by tigersaw

Thank you - Guess you do that by telling the bios to boot off the USB first?

edit - not to fussed about desktop, as this is a course I think its more nuts and bolts

Nowadays it's rare you need to bother. Just go to one of the main sites like ubuntu.com and follow inductions to make a usb stick, pop it in the side and reboot. If it won't work then check bios but I'd say it would probably be set to boot off usb if there is one anyway.

Jambo

Sent without a real keyboard

[timwilky]

Why are you doing the course?

Silly question, but if it has anything to do with work, steer towards industrial distributions. As an organisation we use RHEL on our workstations/servers. About 200 servers and approx 500 workstations are supported by about 4 staff. (who come to me when they struggle)

It is all about having a stable supportable platform. Maybe not leading edge in terms of the latest packages. But the intention is that everything is in harmony.

[tigersaw]

[QUOTE=timwilky;2969511]Why are you doing the course?

QUOTE]

For fun, it was free enrolement.

If you want to start testing and playing with different distributions without breaking the installed OS I recommend virtual box made by sun. It's a free download and allows you to run more or less and OS you can get your hands on in a virtual environment it's great for testing and working out which distro you want to use permanently before doing a dual boot or format of your host OS. I run Centos, Mint and Ubuntu on virtual box on my macbook safe in the knowledge that I can't screw up my OSX installation, it's also good for running the VM turnkey linux appliances for offline development/testing of my wordpress site.