Re: The Microsoft stranglehold on its users....

Straydog wrote:

<snip>

At least if I build my own machine, I'll have a good idea of what's going on.

I've gone through this learning curve and the first thing is what are you going to do about a firewall. I had a linux box running and after a couple of months (I was lucky) it got hacked. My advice: read the book first about how to get your firewall going. Linux is not necessarily easy. Lots of different distros out there. harware compatibility problems. Yes, it is possible to get an install to work just fine.

I've come across some websites that addressed that.


I'd rather see you get an old junker box from a thrift store and start with that.

I've been looking around town already, but they seem to be scarce.

Get one of the cheapo used books on Linux from Amazon.com and
make sure that the description of the used book says it definitely has the CDROm disk in it and preferabley in a sealed envelope. All the new distros require high end spec boxes. Start low and learn. Then work up.

I spent some time reading about it earlier today.


Your biggest goal should be to get something like Red hat 6.2, not befor. the best in the 7s was RH 7.3, not 7.4. 7.0 to 7.2 were buggy as hell. Better read up on the distros if you can. They had one where the whole thing would boot off a CDROM disk (it was pretty slow, but you could get an idea what you were getting into before you made a big leap).

I've come across a number of websites for different distributions.


Do you homework and you won't be displeased or frustrated.


Agreed.
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