linux confusion

Jason_Batten

Okay, trying to enter the linux world but have no idea which door to go through. The O/S of a million distributions. As having no experience with linux I'm turning to my fellow PHPers. The main reason for wanting to use linux is because of PHP*, other reasons are just of interest and being curious 🙂

Which distribution would suit my basic needs of web application development? Naturally I'm planning to dual boot. I don't even know what browsers are avalible on linux or what programs. Clearly over my head. Visited www.linux.org, started to sweat and panic so I left with my tail between my legs :o

Please guide this windows user into the light of linux :p

*I want to use it as my design & development server.

bbreslauer

There are a number of discussions here about this, search for some.

That being said, I would say a good starter distribution would be Ubuntu or Fedora. They are fairly easy to install, and I believe both will recognize previous OSs on your hard drive and allow you to dual-boot. Any distro can work for web development, as any linux program will work on any distribution, and many of the more common ones have precompiled packages ready-to-use.

Firefox is a good multi-platform browser which I would recommend using, if you don't already. It works on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and more. As for web devel programs, there are tons of them: Quanta, Bluefish, text editors such as Kate... If you go with Fedora or Ubuntu, you'll get a package manager included, which will most likely have a development or editor section, which you could browse through and see what catches your eye.

dalecosp

For getting your feet wet, Unbuntu, Kubuntu, SUSE, etc. But, and you knew this would be coming, if you really have "reasons are just of interest and being curious", why not go whole hawg and learn my fave OS. To start, all you need is the handbook, an inquisitive and fairly sharp mind, and time to read....

And, there's no "head spin" involved. There's only ONE FreeBSD. 😉

dalecosp

Incidentally, have you thought about trying a live CD? Linux's premier liveCD (general opinion, I think) is Knoppix [www.knoppix.org].

For a BSD live CD try FreesBIE [www.freesbie.org ].

I'm not sure if other distros have a live CD or not, but Knoppix and FreesBIE can give you ideas of what you may be looking at.....

Elizabeth

Heh dalecosp I was thinking the same thing when I originally read the post. There is a great list of live CD's - http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

bubblenut

Elizabeth wrote:
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

WOW! Cool link, thanks Elizabeth.
Bookmarked!

dalecosp

Elizabeth wrote:
Heh dalecosp I was thinking the same thing when I originally read the post. There is a great list of live CD's - http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

Well, it is great ... and especially, it's great big.

Kinda like Jason said at the beginning: if we're not careful, we'll make his head spin. :queasy:

Jason_Batten

FreeBSD has caught my interest :evilgrin:

thorpe

Depending how deeply you want to get involved with learning Linux I would always recommend my favourite distro gentoo. Beware though that it not exactly a beginners distro.

Probably something like Ubuntu Suse or Fedora would be a better starting place, though with Gentoo, you will have no choice but learn.

Jason_Batten

The question is, why so many distributions?

Weedpacket

Because it's free!

bubblenut

Jason Batten wrote:
The question is, why so many distributions?

I think it's the whole "scratch an itch" concept of open source. What do I mean by scratch an itch? Well, because anyone can dive in and hack on the source code, if a particular person finds they need a particular thing in a distro then they can hack away and put it in. This leads to lots of distros, each scratching a particular itch (and lots scratching the same itch but in slightly different ways). If you check out all the distros many of them are for specific areas of work, video production, education and there's even one for sadists who like to spend half a day compiling every single app they install (yea, I love Gentoo 😉).
A good site to check out the relative merits of distros is Distrowatch.com. I'd suggest you set aside a whole day and try Suse, Fedora, Debian and Kubuntu. Yes, I did say all, they all have a "Install over existing Linux partitions" option, so it won't be a problem. They've all got slightly different ways of doing things but if you install each one and then have a bit of a poke around you'll soon see what's the same between them.
If you have more than one computer and fancy it, I'm sure you could russle up a few people to hang out on IRC while you're doing the install to give you a bit of help (and moral support if things go awry😉)

Weedpacket

Weedpacket decides to get pedantic and point out that FreeBSD is not Linux. FreeBSD was spawned in 1993 (v1.0) off of 386BSD, while Linux 1.0 happened in 1994 (although Linux 0.0.1 was released in 1991). Their pedigrees diverged in 1978 - their last common ancestor was 6th Edition UNIX.

dalecosp

Pedantic is very commonplace over in BSD land. So many threads on the mailng list ... of course, you all would know, too: here it's 'Perl vs. PHP', "ASP vs. PHP", "CF vs. PHP", "Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant vs. PHP".....

Over there, it's "Linux vs. FreeBSD" .....

They aren't the same, true enough. They are similar --- both are 'Unix Like" operating systems. The two (m/l) branches of "Unix Like" systems are BSD and Sys V --- and supposedly Sys V is where Linux got a lot of his inspiration. (Of course, he really had been reading Minix source, IIRC). Incidentally, neither of them can be correctly called UNIX --- they've neither one paid their dues to the authority that licenses that name.

Their pedigrees diverged in 1978 - their last common ancestor was 6th Edition UNIX.

Peter Salus "A Quarter Century of UNIX" has "January 1979" for Seventh Edition, if you really want to be pedantic. 😉 Sixth Edition was May of 1975 (same source). Of course, you've been reading the commit logs and note that it was really before Christmas Break, eh? 😃

thorpe

A quick question for dalecosp then.

Is it possible for freeBSD and linux to share a boot and swap partition? I have Gentoo running in a 10G partition, LFS in another 10G partition. These both co-exist quite happily, sharing both boot and swap. I have grub setup as my bootloader.

I have another 10G partition spare here and wouldn't mind trying freeBSD again. Can I use grub, and can all 3 OS's co-exist happily?

Weedpacket

dalecosp wrote:
Peter Salus "A Quarter Century of UNIX" has "January 1979" for Seventh Edition, if you really want to be pedantic.

That would be for Linux (I mean, Minix), right? But 1BSD forked off v6 Unix in March '78, so that was the last ancestor OS the penguin and the daemon have in common.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree?rev=1.100&content-type=text/plain

Ah, I see now. There's a bit of inbreeding going on in there with v7 jumping back into the meme pool for a bit of slap-and-tickle. I was counting from the earliest versions of Linux and BSD, so I missed that.

vaaaska

dalecosp

thorpe wrote:
A quick question for dalecosp then.

Is it possible for freeBSD and linux to share a boot and swap partition? I have Gentoo running in a 10G partition, LFS in another 10G partition. These both co-exist quite happily, sharing both boot and swap. I have grub setup as my bootloader.

I have another 10G partition spare here and wouldn't mind trying freeBSD again. Can I use grub, and can all 3 OS's co-exist happily?

LFS as in "Linux From Scratch"? (NetBSD has "Logging File System", hence some confusion).

Truth - I've never done it but imagine it can be done. IANAE, and don't play one on TV. A few points to consider, and note that I don't discuss your hardware, per se:

Grub should work fine, provided you know how to configure it.
Can't share the rest of /boot ... it shouldn't be necessary to "share /boot", per se, anyway. FreeBSD will have its own /boot under it's root partition which will get control sometime shortly after GRUB finds it and starts the next boot phase. However, I'd not think that a big deal. Technically, the machine would have one MBR --- it's just that whatever was in it wouldn't have to (nor, really, be able to) do the whole chore. But, it would get you far enough. People use GRUB, LILO, GAG, and plenty of other boot managers, (including Win XP's) to manage multi-boot setups that include FreeBSD. I just don't know all the magic.
As for swap, I'd think that any basically unformatted block device shuld work - can't guarantee, but any dedicated swap partition Linux can use should be usable by FreeBSD.
Filesystem support:
```
ls mount*
mount*           mount_ext2fs*    mount_mfs*       mount_nfs4*      mount_nwfs*      mount_reiserfs*  mount_udf*
mount_cd9660*    mount_fdescfs*   mount_msdosfs*   mount_ntfs*      mount_portalfs*  mount_smbfs*     mount_umapfs*
mount_devfs*     mount_linprocfs* mount_nfs*       mount_nullfs*    mount_procfs*    mount_std*       mount_unionfs*
```
This is from a 6.0 box. For starters, I don't think that we're reading or writing ext3fs, but I'm not sure about the state at the cutting edge. I also note that mount_reiserfs's manpage states that it's "read only" support... what FS types do you use? Co-existing is one thing, but I don't know about shared data. I'm still using FAT32 if I have to share a disk between FBSD and most "alien" types....or Samba.... Dunno, then, what you'd do if all your mp3s are on ext3fs under Gentoo.

But, Hrm ... this guy seems to think ext3fs isn't such a big deal on FBSD. Probably my manpages are either out of date, or the FDP (FreeBSD Documentation Project) hasn't rewritten mount_ext2fs(8) just yet....

If you can configure it to work, FreeBSD "Just Works", but you've gotta figure out the magic in a lot of cases. What's the saying? "'nix is friendly, it's just picky about who those friends are?"

dalecosp

Weedpacket wrote:
Ah, I see now. There's a bit of inbreeding going on in there with v7 jumping back into the meme pool for a bit of slap-and-tickle. I was counting from the earliest versions of Linux and BSD, so I missed that.

Not being pedantic here, but BSD and AT&T were, um, bedfellows off and on for a long while back there in the Medieval Period, as 'twere ....

thorpe

Thanks for your input dalescop...

what FS types do you use?

At the moment I have a setup something like (this is of the top of my head, Im at work so...)....
/dev/hda1 extended (whole drive)
/dev/hda5 /boot (ext2) 1G
/dev/hda6 /swap (Linux/Solaris swap) 1280Mg
/dev/hda7 /home (shared - reiserfs) 40(something)G
/dev/hda8 / (gentoo root - reiserfs) 10G
/dev/hda9 / (lfs root - ext3) 10G
/dev/hda10 (unformatted) 10G

Im sure it can be done, I just need some time to read the free bsd manuals some more. I have several kernels sitting in the boot partition. 2 for gentoo (I sometimes switch between these while Im configuring new drivers and the like) and another for the LFS (linux from scratch), I assume freeBSD works in a simular fasion, and that aslong as grub is pointing to the correct kernel, theey should be able to site in the same boot partition.

Ive actually got a pretty major drama with my gentoo systems that has only just happend in the last few days, so once I get that sorted, I might come back to this idea.