On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Chuck Haines wrote:
Slackware for beginners, ugh, I'd say not. If you want a good beginners distro, go with Gentoo (though it still has a little learning curve for installation and setup) or get one of the distro's that does more for you like Fedora Core 2 (which I'm running and like a lot), Mandrake or Suse. They make much better beginner friendly distro's. Remember, you want to make the switchover easier on users, otherwise they won't make it. IMHO, Slackware would be too hard to learn for a beginner (but don't get my wrong, I love Slackware, just not for a beginner).
I consider Gentoo a good learning distribution for people who want to get to know Linux (layouts, etc), but I'm thinking that a course at public schools will probably have low end hardware to work with. I'm not sure how much learning they'll do while they wait for their packages to compile on the older hardware. Glibc itself would take at least a class. Has anyone tried installing Gentoo using pre-built packages? I know it's supposed to be possible, but I've never tried it. I'm not sure how usable it really is. -- Greg Boyce