Exit Strategy: Making the Switch to Linux

I’ve decided that it’s about time to remove that pesky virus known as Windows XP from my computer once and for all. Since I’m going to build myself a new machine as soon as I’m done with the Eagle, I just decided to wait and install it on my new computer. Until then, I’ll just count on litestep to make up for Microsoft’s flaws.

Nonetheless, I’ve decided to do a little background research, so that I know exactly what I need when it finally comes time to load the system. I have been totally amazed (and slightly overwhelmed) by the amount of information and choice available in Linux.

I decided that I should start by picking a distro. Dennis L., the only guy I know personally that runs it at home, uses SuSE. I looked into that, but it seemed a little too corporate for me, so I decided to move on.

Somehow, the name “Ubuntu” had cropped up a lot in my research. I looked at their site, as well as what others had written. It seemed like a clean, user-friendly distribution with good organization and a helpful community. Still, something just didn’t seem quite right. I don’t know what it was - maybe the too-white teeth and too-perfect smiles of the multiracial, picture perfect “circle of friends” on the Ubuntu homepage. Maybe I felt like it was just too user-friendly, and wouldn’t let me learn enough about the nuts and bolts of my new OS. M Anyway, I shelved it and went on to my next distribution.

The next distro that came up was Gentoo. Here, finally, was an opportunity to get my hands dirty and really understand what was going on in my operating system. I had no idea what was meant by “Portage trees” or “USE- flags,” but I figured that I would be able to teach myself everything as I went along. I got about halfway through the manual before I realized I was in way over my head. Until I had a farily firm grasp of the architecture and structure of Linux, I realized I was going to have to wait for Gentoo.

Finally I stumbled upon Dominic White’s article. This was a huge help - most importantly, it introduced me to Debian, which seems to be just the right distro for me. Not excessively technical, but not totally shiny and pre-packaged either.

Clearly, I’ve still got a lot to learn about this, but I’m glad (for the time being, at least) to have settled on a distribution. I suspect that this is going to be a very long process, but I look forward to the power, control and freedom of my very own Linux Box.

technorati tags:linux, debian, OS, litestep, windows

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Published:: 06.24.06 / 7pm

Category:: software

Marc 06.25.06 / 11am

You probably know that Ubuntu is based on Debian so they are quite similar, except that Ubuntu is a bit more polished. I run Ubuntu myself at home and I really like it. I’m very comfortable with Unix and Linux, but I just don’t have a lot of interest in spending a lot of time mucking around to get basic things (like sound cards and networking) to work. Since it’s Debian-based though, I still have apt-get and I can easily muck around with cool stuff like FUSE, tsocks, VTun, FreeNX, SBCL, Python, Ruby on Rails, LinEAK, etc. In fact, more than anything I use the machine for experimentation since I already have web hosting, WebDAV, and Subversion from DreamHost.

Good luck with your switch to Linux!

-Marc

Jacob 06.25.06 / 9pm

Thanks for your comment. Don’t get me wrong - Ubuntu looked very nice. I just want to get my hands dirty with Linux, and it seemed easier to do with Debian than Ubuntu.

Dominic White 06.26.06 / 12am

I’m glad to be of help
It has been about two years since I have written that post, and I don’t think I have touched a Gentoo system since. I think they have a long way to go to resolve the stability problems in their package manager.

As for marc’s comment about Ubuntu being a bit more polished, that certainly holds true for the desktop inteface and ease of use, stuff that is important to and end-user. However, they haven’t made any significant changes to the underlying structure of Debian, which means that for your average commandline warrior, the polished interface Debian presents with its ease of management and well integrated powerful system utilities is still Debian polish. Synaptic, aptitude, apt, dpkg are all Debian tools which other Debian based distros are leveraging. Couple this with their very good security team and excellent stability I think only FreeBSD rivals them for production server use.

If you really want to hack and learn the OS, start by recompiling your kernal and reading the help information on all the items, play around with Debian a bit, then try out plain slackware. If you don’t cheat then you will end up having to manually resolve dependencies and recompile things. From there Gentoo is a good place to continue the learning because it attempts to do a lot of the hardword for you, but fails a lot of the time and the experience you gain in fixing it is pretty good. Once you feel you are ready, linux from scratch will provide you with an unparalled learning experience. However, you can now do all of this in a VM. So slap Ubuntu on your machine for maximum use of your machine with all the kief management tools, and do your digging in a vmware-player run image.

Jacob 06.26.06 / 8am

Like I said, I’ve only been at this a couple of weeks now. I understand that the package management system is an important part of each distro, but I can’t really tell the differences between them (yet). There’s just so much to learn here - a big part of the problem is the fact that I can’t install it onto my box yet, so I can only read and play around with LiveCDs. Obviously, this is a strange way of going about it, but it’s the best I’ve got right now.

I imagine that I’ll start with Debian or Ubuntu just until I’ve got a better understanding of the file structure, commands and package management tools, and then get a little deeper. This does have to be a working machine, too, so I guess VMWare’s the way to go.

Thanks a lot for the feedback. Another reason to go Linux - the community’s really helpful and they don’t charge you $50 a call!

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Exit Strategy: Making the Switch to Linux

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