[Ham-Linux] A distro for n00b

[Richard]

Hi,
there is a lot of hyp over which distro is best, some will judge it by
the ease of installation, others by the amount of Ham apps it appears
to have.
I say appears to have, as in fact they all have the same. Some Ham app
software writers will claim that their s/w will only run on a certain
distro, this usually means they haven't tried it on other distros.

I started on Redhat when you had to compile your own kernel if you
wanted the ax25 utils. I then moved to Mandrake, now Mandriva, its a
distro that's hated by some as its swallowed many other distros in its
path. But it still uses RPMs, Redhat Package Manager, and there is a
wealth of Ham software that runs on it. 
Futhermore, the advantage of RPMs is that in a lot of cases RPMs
written for one distro that uses them, ie. Suse, will run happily on
Redhat, Fedora and Mandriva.
I've found that Mandriva is now damn neigh foolproof in its
installation, It'll search on dual boot machines for win32 drivers that
can be used with ndiswrapper on the windows partition automatically,
and like most of the mature distros you can "su" to root to do what
ever you wish to the system.
Be very wary of distros which use "sudo", you dont have the freedom to
do as you wish, that's OK for a real newbie but can be a pain.

For instance should the install fail to load the correct video driver,
and you boot up the system and the Xserver  borks out, you need to as
root run in console mode, CLI, the configuration utility or directly
edit xorg.conf,X11.conf on some distros.
If your distro, example Kbuntu or Ubuntu is forcing you to use sudo, and
you hav'nt been prompted to enter a root password during the
installation, you can not fix a simple problem by "su"ing to root and
editing the offending config file, and passing "init 1" to the boot
sequence is not always possible with certain distros.
I tried the last release of Ubuntu, and on the first boot it would not
accept the user password, so dropping to a CLI and as root was also
impossible, as in the install it doesn't as for a root password. So in
the second attempt I used their alternate install, which borked and had
a kernel panic. Instllation CDs now used as beer mats.

Ubuntu and kbuntu are OK if you want to use it just as a user, and you
dont want to be able to do clever things with it.
If you want a distro which will allow you to do what you want,
especially if its really what others consider to be a bit odd, go for
one of the major distros, Suse, Redhat, Mandriva,Debian.
A big disadvantage is they are not entirely free, gratis. An offshot of
Suse is Open suse, thats still free, Fedora is a free offshot of
Redhat, I think Debian is still free, Mandriva can be downloaded
FOC, but you need really to join their club at $60/year, it also
entitles you to become an unwary beta tester, the main realise is now
annual with the bi-annual club release, club members report the bugs
found before the next commercial release, and usually get a fast fix.

For any newbie the choice of distro boils down to, have you a friend
who lives close to you using linux for Ham applications, and is he/she
willing to spend time on the phone explaining how to do simple things.
If so you are very likely to use the same distro. Especially if that
person gives you the install DVD or CD's.

If you don't have a good fast internet connection, use a distro which
gives you everything you need on one DVD or many CDs.
If you have the latest wizz bang computer, look for a distro which has
a recent kernel, as you may need drivers that have only just been added.
The worst culprits are often DVB cards.

And sooner or later you will find a Ham Application packaged as a
Tarball, <filename>.tgz or <filename>.tar.gz,.If you have to compile it
look in the base directory for a file called "configure", if it only
has a Makefile it means that the software author has arrogantly
assumed that your computer will have exactly the same libraries as his,
so be prepared for it not to compile....A pet Hate of mine !!!.
Simply the "configure "file is an executable file which checks whether
or not you have the libraries you need to compile the program , and
then creates the Makefile.

That my two penneth


-- 

Best Wishes

Richard Bown

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Registered Linux User 365161
OS Mandriva 2007.1
HAM Callsign G8JVM : Locator IO82SP
QRV all bands 80mtrs to 3 cms ,( non WARC )
http://www.software-radio.org.uk
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