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IT Linux - what distro

C

Clockworks

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Aug 23, 2004
Messages
5,269
I'm majoring in IT, my prof said that we would eventually be learning Linux. "Alright," I thought, "shouldn't be too bad, I just have to pick a distro." Too bad I have no idea which one I should download. I was going to use Ubuntu (a lot of people use it) but I'm not sure how many businesses actually implement it. I also need it to run as a live CD/DVD, I prefer not install it until I'm familiar with it.

My question is, what distro of Linux do most businesses use?
 
I think your professor is a little bit off.

Microsoft's Windows Server is by FAR the number one choice of operating system for the IT business.

But if you wish to cover all bases and you've never used Linux before, I say go with Ubuntu and get your feet wet, then cast yoru net further as you go along with "harder" Linux distros.

Or if you want to learn how Linux is built, get Gentoo and build around a bootstrap. Gentoo is a build-your-own Linux distro and is a hell of a lot of fun to play with.

edit: by the way, there is a Linux Operating System subforum here - http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=96
 
Sorry, I didn't even notice it before as this is one of my first times in this forum. :p
 
Azhar said:
I think your professor is a little bit off.

Microsoft's Windows Server is by FAR the number one choice of operating system for the IT business.
Click to expand...

When did he ever say that the professor made ANY implications towards Linux being a better choice than a Microsoft product (or any other product?) This statement seems VERY off-topic and potentially insulting to the OP, who just wanted to know information about LINUX, not inferences regarding his professor's motives.

202276
 
I could have sworn I read the original post to say something along the lines of "my professor says Linux will be the operating system of the future for the IT industry."

Hence my opinion. My apologies if I seem confrontational. It was not my intent.

I agree Linux is a great operating system or I would not know about them myself.
 
Azhar:

Well, the post has been edited--not sure how many edits, though.

Sorry!!!! :(

202276
 
I'd prob look at centos or the full blown redhat enterprise as redhat is still considered one of the big ones in the business world(centos is based on it). Suse is also a big one here.

As far as not wanting to install it first use virtual pc or vmware and run the os on top of windows. If you use virtual pc just make sure you set the video mode to 16 or 32 bit color. 24 bit color does not work on it(unless they fixed this in 07)

Ubuntu is a good system to play around with as well. It is really picking up steam and is starting to show up in smaller business'
 
swatbat said:
I'd prob look at centos or the full blown redhat enterprise as redhat is still considered one of the big ones in the business world(centos is based on it). Suse is also a big one here.

As far as not wanting to install it first use virtual pc or vmware and run the os on top of windows. If you use virtual pc just make sure you set the video mode to 16 or 32 bit color. 24 bit color does not work on it(unless they fixed this in 07)

Ubuntu is a good system to play around with as well. It is really picking up steam and is starting to show up in smaller business'
Click to expand...

I was giving serious thought about using Red Hat because of the business popularity factor. The thing is, what makes the distro or any other distro so much more popular than others? As far as I know, or I think, all distros are based on the same core but have different packages.
 
clockworks said:
I was giving serious thought about using Red Hat because of the business popularity factor. The thing is, what makes the distro or any other distro so much more popular than others? As far as I know, or I think, all distros are based on the same core but have different packages.
Click to expand...

Kinda. You really have a few different main distros that most of the others are based off of. The kernel is pretty much the same but can have custom work done to it for the distro in question. One of the big things is the package management systems that the different vendors use. FreeBSD, debain based systems, etc have there own package management systems and software repositories.

I'd go for redhat based system or ubuntu.
 
I would say Debian personally. Little Hard to get into, especially for someone coming from a Windows background, but it's very nice
 
If you're just getting your feet wet I would highly recommend Ubuntu. Because it has become so popular it has a TON of support. Their forums are filled with helpful people and tons of walkthroughs for doing most of the stuff you'll want to do. I have also run SuSE and really like that distro as well but sometimes I have a harder time finding the info I need to get something done.

 
Since you're majoring in IT, you may want to set up a linux server for the experience. A simple server like a File, Web, FTP, Torrent, or media streaming server are somewhat easy to setup if you find the right tutorial.
 
you are going to want to install it as a dual boot system or on a stand alone system. You are going to learn anything by using the live cd.
 
3 years ago when I was in the last year of my CIS degree program, we studied RHEL5, and from what I understand, it's the most common Linux OS in an enterprise environment you'll find in the US.

That being said, you should try CentOS as it is the closest thing to RHEL that you can acquire legitimately for free.

I will say the things we did in my RHEL classes didn't particularly require previous knowledge. Everything we needed to know we were walked thru in class on workstations, and our final project IIRC was to install and configure one RHEL server from CLI with a few security groups and users, and one RHEL workstation from GUI for the prof to go around and test our logins and permissions.

I don't recall doing anything with Apache, SQL, postmail, etc or any other served apps common in the wild.
 
If you think the distribution matters you're doing it wrong. WTH.
 
If you're looking at this from a "what systems should I know to be maximally employable when I graduate" perspective, Red Hat & Suse are by far the dominant players in the commercial enterprise market. Solaris is the commercial Unix that you're most likely to see, so it might not hurt to have some experience with it, as well.

Back in the day, when I was first learning Linux, I wanted an OS that I could play with and ran Slackware- now I just does what I want with a minimum of fuss and run Ubuntu. Debian came up with apt - a great package tool & Ubuntu puts a lot of polish on the base that Debian established and keeps things up to date. Honestly, if I was doing a serious deployment, I'm not sure if I'd go with a Debian or Ubuntu server.
 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the standard from what I've seen. They offer contracts and support, which is incredibly helpful. It isn't necessarily because the product is technically superior, but when you are in a bind having somebody on the other end of the phone is great. As noted, CentOS will be your best bet to toy with the system that is "close to what the big guys use". However, learning one distro and really understanding how it works is a lot better than just nagging on one distro without really knowing the how or why. I'm incredibly familiar with Gentoo, somewhat familiar with Debian/Ubuntu, and it took me less than a day or so to pick up RHEL at a moderate level.

If you're really looking to just learn Linux, you can't go wrong with pretty much any distro so long as you really try to learn it.
 
For the LiveCD route, Ubuntu is your best choice. However, depending on what the prof eventually wants you to do, the LiveCD route is probably not going to work in the long run as you will need to install the OS and mess around with it that way. A LiveCD is good if you just want to see what the OS looks like and how some of the preinstalled apps work, but that's about it. You really can't get into the OS that way. One advantage to Ubuntu is that it's only 1 CD instead of multiple CDs or a DVD so your download time will be decreased.

As said, Ubuntu has a lot of online support due to its popularity and a lot of noobs to Linux trying it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not insulting anyone with that phrase. Hell, I've been running Linux as my main OS for more than six months and I still consider myself a major noob.

Eventually, you will have to install a distro more than likely has a dual boot setup. This is probably the best way to do it if you only have one system. If you have a second system which isn't all that old and isn't needed for anything else, you may want to do the install on that one. That way you still have your Windows box to hit up the internet if something really bad goes wrong. I'm definitely glad I had a secondary box running so all I had to do was go to the keyboard and trackball on that system and look up what I needed.

I personally started out with Fedora Core 6. Eventually I went to a quadruple boot with WinXP, FC6, Ubuntu and SUSE 10.2. I really liked FC6 a lot but some things ended up being annoying about it once I messed with the other distros. Personally, I did not care for Ubuntu at all after using FC6 and messing with SUSE 10.2. I eventually settled on SUSE 10.2 as my main OS. No, it doesn't have as much user support or as user friendly support as Ubuntu, but I like it overall much better. I can usually find just about anything I need for help with a little google searching.

SUSE 10.2 is bloated as far as everything it installs by default. I will not lie to you about that. For me, it's not a problem and over time, I've learned a few things I do and don't need and I can usually add or get rid of them without much trouble. YAST2 for configuration and management is great as far as I'm concerned. While it may not always be the most intuitive setup, it does have pretty much everything I need within easy enough reach after I do a bit of searching.

I realize FC7 is out and I have not bothered to install that yet, but I will say that FC6 has a serious bug during the installation process. For anyone that doesn't know exactly what they are doing (which includes me) the GUI installation will crash if you do not let it use the defaults for just about everything during installation. I could not choose which packages and programs I wanted installed before the installation and that royally pissed me off. I would hope that FC7 has fixed this problem but as of yet, I have not tried it.

SUSE 10.2 does have a bit of a long drawn out installation process with a lot of options on what to install and what not to install (which I like) and it didn't give me any problems whatsoever about partitioning for the most part. The partitioning part can be a bit confusing if you're not familiar with partitioning to begin with as the "help" included with it is not the best.

I sorta forgot what I had planned on doing this weekend which was wiping my PIII 800 Windows machine and installing Linux on it for a couple of things. As the machine will sit there and for the most part do nothing more than run as a file server, stay connected on IRC for a couple of channels I do some stats collecting for and do a bit of folding, it should suffice on just about any distro as it does have 512 meg of RAM. The sticky part is running VMWare on it with a Win2k image as I still need a couple of Windows programs to run on it. Otherwise, I find the filesharing under Linux to be "better" than that under Windows. As it's my main file server box, that's a bit important to me.

Just remember, it's all about experimentation and finding what works for what you want to do.

 
Another thumbs up to CentOS since it's literally RedHat Enterprise. From the CentOS site:

Purpose of CentOS

CentOS exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform to anyone who wishes to use it. CentOS 2, 3, and 4 are built from publically available open source SRPMS provided by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policies and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.). CentOS is designed for people who need an enterprise class OS without the cost or support of the prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor.

Neither the CentOS Project (we who build CentOS) nor any version of CentOS is affiliated with, produced by, or supported by the prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. Neither does our software contain the upstream vendor's product ... although it is built from the same open source SRPMS as the upstream enterprise products.
Click to expand...

Another good one to try, even though I hate it with a passion is OpenSuse. It's based off of Novell's SuSE which is also very popular with businesses. If you want to try something just to try it and get rid of Windows, is Ubuntu (my personal fav). Although to get really close to a unix distro try out Slackware.
 
wow, reading this thread made my head hurt.

Honestly, choosing a distro is a 100% opinion sort of thing.

basically choose your favorite color and go from there. It is the biggest difference in distro's. Everything else you learn can be carried between distro's and used on each and every one.

Are you good with computers and figuring out how things work? Or do you want something that is just working right out of the box? Are you using this as a workstation or a server? Do you want to learn linux, or is it just for this class?
 
meinzorn said:
wow, reading this thread made my head hurt.

Honestly, choosing a distro is a 100% opinion sort of thing.

basically choose your favorite color and go from there. It is the biggest difference in distro's. Everything else you learn can be carried between distro's and used on each and every one.

Are you good with computers and figuring out how things work? Or do you want something that is just working right out of the box? Are you using this as a workstation or a server? Do you want to learn linux, or is it just for this class?
Click to expand...

- I can pick up thing s pretty quickly
- I don't mind it not working right away, I've dealt with Vista and nVidia's piss poor drivers for the past few days
- I'm not sure which of the two, he hasn't told me yet
- At the moment, this is just for class but later on down the road, I can see it to be a very valuable piece of knowledge.
 
Download CentOS and give that a try since it's essentially Red Hat Enterprise.

SuSE is another good one to try.

Also give FreeBSD and Solaris a whirl.
 
slackware hasn't been mentioned at all yet and I honestly think it definately deserves a mention.

it has been a great learning platform for me. It is simple enough to figure out, but complex enough to let you do as you please with it.

Plus, there is a TON of documentation on it.

www.slackware.org if you're interested.

otherwise, gentoo and ubuntu would be my next choices.

I personally would NOT go with any fedora, redhat, mandriva, or suse. Personal preference, but I just don't like them.
 
Gentoo is great to play with if you have lots and lots of time on your hands. ;) You can learn some things about compiling a kernel and other programs depending on what route you take.

Sabayon Linux if you want a pre-compiled Gentoo install that supports most modern hardware. You can also still emerge extra stuff from portage. Comes with some of the fancier GUI effects out of the box. Includes proprietary drivers from Nvidia and the like pre-installed. The Live DVD is even OpenGL accelerated.

CentOS in order to play with the features/functionality of Redhat Enterprise for free.

SuSE... I've avoided lately. I had it screw up one of my NTFS partitions during a "bad" bootup. And it was only mounting it in Read-Only mode.. :(

Ubuntu, just make sure the hardware you're using it on isn't too new. Otherwise you may have some issues and it will require some hacking to get running correctly. Easy enough to get going. Definitely read up some on the Ubuntu Forums for help. I wrote a HowTo there once :)

Check out Ubuntu Server too. Its a very bare bones install (command-line) and you can use apt from the command-line to install anything you want. I've been going this route a lot lately. Its fun though.

Slackware was my very first Linux install back in 93 or 94.. can't remember now. Its been awhile. I haven't played with it recently.

A lot of the documentation out there is distribution independent. The specific distribution focuses will be how you install your programs. Do you compile? Use emerge? apt? yast? rpm? yum? Etc?
 
I started with Redhat in 94, then slack, then back to redhat.. Around 97, I swtiched to slack again for about 8 years, and last year or so I picked up Gentoo.

I will probably not install anything other than gentoo again, unless something more esoteric comes along. PatV is half-dead, so I don't see slack continuing on for very long.

As far as I'm concerned, the only thing the "distro" does is package management.
I compile my own kernel as soon as I can, and start recompiling most of the built-in apps ASAP. emerge lets me compile everything as I install it, so I'm happy there.
 
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